Main Engine Cut Off - T+171: SpaceX, L3Harris Selected by SDA for Missile Warning Satellites

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

The Space Development Agency has selected L3Harris and SpaceX to produce satellites for a missile warning constellation. I break down the details of the SDA project, the technical aspects, and what it means to see SpaceX enter the world of satellite manufacturing and sales.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Nadim, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and seven anonymous—and 402 other supporters.TopicsL3Harris, SpaceX win Space Development Agency contracts to build missile-warning satellites - SpaceNewsSDA Awards Contracts for the First Generation of the Tracking Layer – Space Development AgencySDA RFP Seeks Industry Proposals for Launch Services – Space Development AgencySDA Tranche 0 Launch Services - beta.SAM.govLockheed Martin, York Space to produce 20 satellites for Space Development Agency - SpaceNewsGriffin’s departure stirs questions about the future of the Space Development Agency - SpaceNewsxkcd: StandardsThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

big news out of the space development agency that i want to break down here today on main engine cutoff i am anthony colangelo let's dive in with the headline l3 harris and spacex have been selected by the space development agency to build four satellites each for missile warning, a new missile warning constellation that SDA, Space Development Agency, has been working on. So I want to start with some background on the Space Development Agency, what this project is, and then I really want to dive into the SpaceX side of this. Because for L3Harris, this is great news. It's $193 million that they're getting for four satellites. But this is in the realm of what L3Harris does. They certainly have done this historically, and it's a market they're dedicated to.

For SpaceX, they don't yet produce satellites for customers. They produce them for their own Starlink missions, but they don't do this where they sell satellite buses to customers, either governmental or commercial. And that's a major, major announcement there for SpaceX. So I want to talk about what that means and what they might do with that, where they might go in the future and why it's important to them. But let's start with that context. The Space Development Agency was established back in March 2019. It's something that had been talked a lot about in the early days of the Trump administration as Space Force was developing, as there was a big struggle over exactly what the new organization would be. But the intent of it is to shake up acquisitions. There was a lot of talk about how the current era

of acquisitions within the Department of Defense has been overly bloated and huge budgets and everything's over budget and over schedule and it's really expensive and slow and all this. And the SDA was floated as a way to get around a lot of the existing structures. We've seen this a lot with other arms of the Air Force. There's all sorts of different acquisition offices that always intend to do this. And it kind of is one of those situations. I'll link to an XKCD comic about standards, how there was, you know, 14 standards, and I've got it one to rule them all, result 15 standards. And you kind of just added one onto

the stack. Sort of feel like that with this whole recurring talk of acquisitions that are too slow and too expensive. At first, you start out and you might actually achieve some cost savings by doing things a little differently. But eventually, you know, you become just another agency that is big budgets, very slow, etc. Kind of just the lifecycle of these things. So we might see that in the future. But right now, that's the focus. And the initial project that the SDA has been given is to create a small satellite constellation that honestly can do like everything under the sun. The initial tranche zero, as it's being talked about, includes 20 satellites as a what they're calling transport layer, which is communications, Lockheed Martin and I'm blanking on this. It was Lockheed Martin and York Space that are going to produce 10 satellites each

for that transport communications layer. And then there's eight satellites here that we're talking about that are for what they're calling the tracking layer. That is the missile warning, missile tracking that is split between L3, Harris and SpaceX. So there's 28 satellites that they're working on for this initial version of the constellation.

There has been no fewer than 30 ideas floated for what this constellation could do. Things like space situational awareness, GPS alternatives. If a satellite can do it, it's probably been theorized that the SDA could do it as part of this project. But right now, it's communications and it's missile warning. Now, a couple important things to note about the SDA. It is slated to become part of the U.S. Space Force in October 2022. It was sort of part of all of that discussion back in the day, and Mike Griffin was actually a major proponent of the Space Development Agency. He was kind of spearheading it back then when there was a fight

about the existence of the Space Force, and Heather Wilson, there was a fight about the existence of the Space Force and Heather Wilson, who was at the time the head of the Air Force, was very resistant to the SDA, very resistant to Space Force, mostly because those things threatened what she was in charge of in the Air Force. So there was definitely some, you know, intergovernmental bickering happening there. But importantly, Mike Griffin has now exited government work. As of July, he left for the private sector, and he was working in the office of the Secretary of Defense here in the US. And he was seen as the major advocate within that office. And with his departure, the SDA is seen without that advocate at the higher level. So it does leave the SDA fairly

vulnerable, as things are kind of still in motion with the formation of the Space Force, what is and is not included, obviously going through presidential and congressional elections this year. So that could shake up any of the legislation that happens between now and October 2022, two full years away that a whole nother Congress could change their mind on. So not that this money is going to be taken away from L3 and SpaceX, but the SDA itself is vulnerable. So there could be future shakeups that you might just want to keep in mind as this project comes up through headlines over the next two years on its way to launch. Now let's talk about the technical side of this tracking layer.

Today, we use something called the Space-Based Infrared System here in the U.S. for missile warning, missile tracking. Those are a constellation of six satellites out in geostationary orbits. They are very expensive satellites. These are multi-billion dollar, depending on how you count, you could say the latest ones were about a billion dollars to acquire, but it's 20 billion over six satellites. So they're multi-billion dollar satellites. And they're kind of the old model of a few really expensive, really big investments that

do an incredibly good job, but you're left with huge risk because you've put a lot of eggs in few baskets. And that is kind of the old world mindset where uh you know launch was very expensive and satellites were very expensive now we have cheaper launch and very cheap tech so the new thinking is you could do a better job with a lot more smaller satellites uh and in the case of space development agency one of the things they were talking up was that we could build things in different architectures that are more survivable to threats from foreign nations, foreign actors, whatever it is. You consider the fact that, obviously, geo is really hard to do this at,

but you take out one of those SIBRS satellites, and you've just taken out one-sixth of your capability to track missiles. If you have a constellation of, in this case, it's eight, but the ideal would be a lot more than that. If you have a huge constellation, it's a lot harder to take out one-sixth of those satellites and harm your capability. So that's something that was talked up back then, and that's what this project is trying to do. It's trying to take this kind of technology

and break it up into a constellation, make it more survivable against threats, and really just disperse the risk among a higher number of cheaper satellites. This is very similar to a project that DARPA has going called the Blackjack Program. They're also looking at small satellite constellations for military uses. And there's actually a huge overlap. So I mentioned Spacebase Infrared System is the current generation of missile warning. The next generation of missile warning satellites that are being produced here in the U.S. use something called the Overhead Persistent Infrared Sensors, or OPIR. So those OPIR satellites are going to be

used by the Air and Space Force on a next generation missile warning constellation of their own. Lockheed Martin was awarded about $3 billion for three geostationary satellites, Northrop Grumman about $2.4 billion for two polar orbiting. So those five satellites are what the Air and Space Force are looking to as their next generation missile warning satellite. The DARPA program I just mentioned is also going to use OPIR payloads. Raytheon won about $40 million back in June to produce those payloads. And then this SDA project split between L3 and SpaceX are also going to use OPIR payloads. L3 says they're going to be producing theirs in-house, and SpaceX says they're going to get theirs from a supplier. They haven't said who. Plausibly, it could be Raytheon if they are making

just the payloads for the DARPA program for satellites of similar sizes Plausibly, it could be Raytheon if they are making just the payloads for the DARPA program for satellites of similar sizes. You know, it could be that they are looking to work with SpaceX on this. We don't know who yet, so that's just kind of a theory based on the names that are being tossed about here. But you can hear these names, right? It's kind of the old standard. It's the Military-Industrial Complex and then SpaceX, who is quickly becoming the Military-Industrial Complex. But that's a side note. So before we get into the SpaceX stuff, let's talk about the launch of these satellites and where they're headed. The same day that the announcement was made that L3 and SpaceX were selected, the launch RFP went out. And that is actually for all of the 28 satellites

that I've talked about, the 20 in that communications layer and the 8 in this missile tracking layer. These would be spread across two different planes of orbits, 950 kilometers circular, near polar. They say they could have an inclination between 80 and 100 degrees, and the two planes would be about 30 degrees separated from each other. They say that the first launch has to happen in September 2022, and the entire constellation, they want as close to that date as possible, but no later than the end of March 2023. And the RFP is open to whatever kind of launch architecture you want. Is it one, two, three, six launches? You propose it, and they'll make the selection among the things that they receive.

This seems kind of like one of those launches that is a dead ringer for SpaceX because price is the biggest factor. It is as big as the other factors combined. So, you know, given the space development agencies charge for lower prices and faster access to space. It's one of those things that sounds right up SpaceX's alley, but we'll obviously see who ends up winning the launch for these satellites. Now, interestingly, in the RFP, there's a couple of documents attached. One of them is the planning info document. They give some stats for these different satellites, and the four tracking satellites, or the eight tracking satellites split into groups of four, are listed at, you know, one set of four, 1,068 kilograms per satellite.

The other four are 308 kilograms per satellite. So if we use our mental model of what we've got going with Starlink, you know, there was a source in Space News that said this is based on Starlink, what SpaceX proposed for this. And that's the obvious thing there is that SpaceX has all this experience making satellites for Starlink. They're going to take that production line and build satellites for customers.

But if you dive into the details in these documents, there's another one called Planning Info Document that lists those lower mass satellites, actually showed them around 249 kilograms. That's right in line with what we know Starlink is at today. It's about 260 kilograms. But in that, they say those lower mass satellites use LMP-103S for propellant. That is the green alternative to hydrazine. It is not what Starlink uses, which is krypton gas. They have Hall effect thrusters. So there's two possibilities here.

One is they've created a slightly higher mass version of the Starlink bus with, you know, with this LMP-103S propellant. Doesn't seem that likely to me. That sounds significantly outside of what SpaceX would do. The other option is they have a much bigger bus that they're selling, about one ton, to customers. That sounds more plausible given a couple things that I've heard over the past couple of months. It does sound like something that if you consider, you know, Starlink satellites, the idea there is they can launch so many of them that a couple of failures is not a big deal.

If they need to have military level of reliability for these satellites, they're probably going to need to add on a lot more systems that they have on the Starlink payloads. Obviously, there's going to be different requirements that the military needs. That's going to bring with it different power requirements, different thermal requirements, all sorts of different constraints that they need. And maybe with all of that combined, they're going to push their payload sizes up a bit, be a little bit more flexible with what they can put on there, what kind of payloads they can actually host on the bus, and they end up with a bus that's about one ton. So I'm not exactly sure which of those options it is. Some of the things that I've heard make me lean towards the fact that SpaceX is producing

a bigger bus. But either way, this is not a straight off the production line Starlink bus that they are selling to the Space Development Agency right here. This is something that is maybe leveraging things that they've done for Starlink, hardware, software, production line, etc., but is definitely built for the purposes of this contract. Now, I want to talk more about SpaceX and where they're going with this kind of thing. But before I do that, let me say a huge thank you to everyone out there who's supporting Main Engine Cutoff every single month over at mainenginecutoff.com support. Thank you

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All right, so speculation about exactly what this satellite bus looks like aside, SpaceX is now a satellite producer. They are now selling satellite buses to customers. Right now, they've got this military contract, but it's not entirely unlikely that they are also going to be selling these to commercial companies or others out there in the industry. They have a serious production line right now with Starlink. They're making about 120 satellites a month for Starlink, so they've got a lot of experience. They've built multiple different versions. They've obviously iterated very quickly, so they can react to changes very quickly. And if, you know, based on those differences that I was just reading

off in the RFP, if that stuff is true, they can obviously produce satellites that are outside of their standard bus size pretty easily. Even if they are that lower mass thing, but they're using a green propellant rather than Krypton, obviously shows that they can reconfigure a satellite bus as needed pretty easily on their production line. So either way, it's showing that they are ready to kind of build to order, which is interesting for SpaceX. Much in the same way that I felt about Dragon XL, which is their cargo vehicle that's going to go out to the Lunar Gateway, this is somewhat surprising that SpaceX is doing these things that is a little outside of their primary mission. You know, their primary mission has been the guiding light for so long, and if it doesn't fit into their kind of tech tree that leads them to Mars,

it was something they're not necessarily interested in. In this case, in Dragon XL's case, those are things that are very closely related to what they're working on already, but are a little bit of a divergence. And the common thread there is that there's a ton of money in those kind of services. The Dragon XL stuff is probably a couple billion all told. These satellites right here is already 150 million, and you could keep selling these things for tens or twenties of millions at a time, and make a pretty mint off of your

Starlink production line when it's not necessarily needed for Starlink satellites themselves. To compare to OneWeb, who is the other mega-constellation working on satellite internet, for a while they were really hyping their production facility down in Florida, they've built that in partnership with Airbus, that they were going to turn that into a production line for other small satellite providers when they're not using it for their own satellites. OneWeb is only going to produce a couple hundred satellites for their constellation. They orbit much higher at 1,200 kilometers than Starlink's 550, so they are much longer-lived satellites. They already were going to have fewer satellites on orbit, whereas Starlink's going to have, you know, thousands that they're going to need to replenish much more frequently at that lower orbit. So Starlink requires a much more ongoing

production line than OneWeb does. And OneWeb, you know, beyond the first couple hundred would have relied on these commercial orders of satellites, whereas, you know, SpaceX is going to have theirs open and operating. And if they can make a little extra cash on the side, if they can pay off some of the Starlink running and operating costs by producing things off that same line for other customers, that's a win-win for all involved. And then you start considering the fact that they could bundle this with launch services, they could bundle it with the rideshare program that they've rolled out, and they could have this sort of all-in-one price, much in the same way we've talked about with Rocket Lab and Photon. You come to them, you say,

I need a satellite to this orbit. They say, great, give us your payload. We'll put it on our bus. We'll put it on our rocket. We'll launch it to space. All in one price, covered, you know, very easy. You can minimize the paperwork, just have a single point of contact. That's pretty attractive for a lot of people out there. And SpaceX could start offering that now alongside all of those rideshare missions, assuming you're going to an orbit that fits that sort of thing. And you've created a pretty compelling self-licking ice cream cone, as some people like to say. Now, I've heard some pretty crazy cost figures on Starlink buses, internal cost to SpaceX. I've heard figures so crazy, I don't necessarily believe it. I've heard

figures on the order of a nice car, not like a Ferrari, but more like a little bit more than a Cybertruck. And that is insanely low. But then you consider the fact that SpaceX is launching 60 of these at a time, making 120 a month. It can't be that pricey. SpaceX is burning a ton of cash right now. You see this constant stream of money being invested and put into SpaceX for both Starlink and Starship. So maybe that figure is accurate. And if it is, and even if you consider the fact that they're making a much bigger bus for commercial companies and government agencies to buy, if they're able to do it at that same low cost, they can make a ton of money this way.

So I'd really love to hear more about that side of things. No one's going to announce it publicly. I assume that it's going to have to be, hypothetically, somebody out there listening that sends me an email or text or whatever says this is not accurate. Hypothetically, if you're that person, let me know. But yeah, this is just another business line here for SpaceX, and they need money. They are cash hungry right now. So if they can open up these different lines of business, that's a really good thing for the future of SpaceX. Now, one last thing I wanted to mention that I just kind of find humorous. I was thinking about this the other day when I saw this news. Whenever there's Starship news, and traditionally this has happened around

when SpaceX had incidents like the explosion on the Dragon 2 capsule and the static fire, people look at Starship stuff and say, what a distraction from the things that NASA's paying them money for. We've heard that less and less recently, but this is another example of the fact that SpaceX is a huge company. They are a giant company with several different business lines, and no one ever accuses, you know, Starlink's side of being a distraction from the Dragon line. And I just wanted to mention this as a thing that it's a storyline that I was hoping would die, and it seems to have died, or else maybe I'm just not reading the right or wrong spots.

But this is a really good example, again, of how much SpaceX is involved in. They're in launch services, they're in satellite production, satellite operation, they're doing crewed flights up to the ISS, they're doing cargo missions to the ISS, cargo missions to the moon, and then there's everything that happens with Starship, including a human lunar landing system that is in development right now. They are doing so much. They are so expansive. That's a good thing if they're able to keep all those plates spinning at the same time. It does introduce some risk if one of those is significantly drawing more cash and attention

than another and putting the others at risk. Doesn't seem like we're there yet, but certainly when you get into this many things at once, it is something to be cognizant of. The other thing to consider is if they're making these satellite buses that are for uses that aren't Starlink, that's going to extend not only to the military, not only the commercial companies, not only to government agencies like NASA, that could extend all the way out to Mars. And it's something we've talked off and on about. I remember talking about the original Falcon Heavy launch, hoping that SpaceX would shoot something to Mars on their own right, maybe some sort of relay satellite. This could be a thing that works all the way out at Mars as well,

with those modifications necessary to operate in that different environment. If it is that bigger payload size, it would make a lot more sense while they're pushing up into that territory. So let's see what else they do with this satellite bus in the future. And really, all of the things I can come up with are really exciting. So I'm hoping at least a fraction of those pan out in the near future. But that's about all I've got here today on Main Engine Cutoff. Thank you all so much for listening. Thanks again for your support over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. And it's good to be back. Good to be doing a couple shows this week. And I'm hoping that there's more news coming so we can keep talking about it. But for now, thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.