The Space Review: May the satellite industry live in interesting times

#News(General) [ via IoTGroup ]

Headings…
May the satellite industry live in interesting times
Home

Auto extracted Text……

“If this was a temporary change, it would be one thing,” SSL’s Zamarian said, “but we believe there are some more structural challenges that the industry overall needs to figure out.” Those launch cost reductions, though, also help close the business case for constellations of satellites in low Earth orbit, offering broadband services with lower latency, and potentially higher speed and capacity, than GEO systems.
Those constellations, ranging from startups like OneWeb to established satellite companies like Telesat to even SpaceX, have effectively created a chilling effect on the GEO market: operators are less willing to buy new satellites as they wait to see how the constellations develop, lest they spend several hundred million on a satellite that could be rendered obsolete by constellations within a few years.
Some other commercial satellite manufacturers are more insulated by the lack of commercial GEO orders because of other business, like government work.
“There’s been a flying out of backlog that’s led some folks to think there’s been an explosion in this marketplace,” said Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, which secured a contract for a ViaSat-3 satellite from Viasat announced at the conference.
Despite that win, he said the overall commercial market “is certainly flat and soft, especially in the GEO segment.” “Soft” was a common term used by panelists to describe a market with few GEO satellite launch orders this year.
“I think the decrease in the GTO level, whether it resets or wherever it ends up, is not going to impact us dramatically because there are other market areas that are growing for us,” said SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell, citing the company’s government business, particularly growing work with the Defense Department.
“The DOD business is growing for us dramatically.” She also talked up commercial human spaceflight as the company develops its Crew Dragon spacecraft (and, later, the Big Falcon Rocket

Read More..
AutoTextExtraction by Working BoT using SmartNews 1.0299999999 Build 26 Aug 2019