Patience is a virtue mostly everywhere, but in the space industry market it is a necessity, especially for space electronics designers. Waiting is part of the game, as qualifying electronic components for space is - at minimum - a 24-month period. Now designers are also seeing funding for NASA programs and some military satellite programs being pushed to the right, so their patience gets tested once again.

Patience is a virtue mostly everywhere, but in the space industry market it is a necessity, especially for space electronics designers. Waiting is part of the game, as qualifying electronic components for space is – at minimum – a 24-month period. Now designers are also seeing funding for NASA programs and some military satellite programs being pushed to the right, so their patience gets tested once again.

That has been the way of NASA programs for more than 40 years, ever since Apollo 17 in 1972 when astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt were the last two humans to walk on the moon. As Cernan says in his book, “Last Man on the Moon,” the astronauts, engineers, and scientists made going to the moon look too easy; NASA and the public lost interest and NASA lost funding. (Side note, I just finished this book and it’s a straightforward read and interesting for any Apollo fan like me.)

Fast-forward four decades: NASA still gest little funding compared to other government agencies, rarely getting more than $18 billion. Flat is the new up.

“Regarding manned spaceflight, funding will continue as everyone knows we are in a not-so-secret race with China in this area. [Yet] NASA is a challenge as the market there is flat to down and research programs are typically hit the hardest by budget cuts,” says Philip Chesley, Senior Vice President, Precision Products at Intersil in Palm Bay, Florida. “On the U.S. defense side I haven’t really seen huge growth, but that said, I really haven’t seen too much of a slowdown either.”

Chesley makes a good point about China, but the public doesn’t seem to care about the space race with China. Maybe they will if China beats us back to the moon, but for now the people spending billions on spaceflight are U.S. billionaires like Richard Branson and Paul Allen.

NASA is betting on these guys, too, and is contributing funding to their efforts as commercialization of space is probably the only way to get humans back exploring in this economic environment. So once again, patience is required for manned spaceflight, but what about unmanned space?

Small sats are not going to wait

NASA’s CubeSat initiative and other small-satellite megaconstellation efforts are showing that satellites can be a low-cost commodity with shorter design cycles and faster deployments. For more on small sats, see the Special Report on page 26.

“Small satellites require less expensive options, which helps their risk versus cost formula,” says Monty Pyle, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at VPT in Blacksburg, Virginia. “If they are buying material that’s three times more expensive to build one small sat, it is wasteful when they can just build two, launch them both, and are still fifty percent ahead if one fails. This is not an option for most Department of Defense (DoD) programs where buying commercial COTS [commercial-off-the-shelf] seems wasteful. The small sat market also differs from the DoD in terms of what is tolerated regarding development cycle times. Typically on DoD satellite programs, there is about a 24-month minimum, but for small sats that is unacceptable, as long development cycles could mean millions in lost revenue.”

It’s all about the revenue and the business model. “If you make enough small sats to make them cheap to produce, make them with the ability for load sharing, make them with enough bandwidth, and can launch them cheap enough … who really cares if they fail,” says Doug Patterson, Vice President of vice president of the Military & Aerospace Business Sector for Aitech in Chatworth, California. This mindset is quite likely creating some stress among prime contractors, who have charged hundreds of millions of dollars for small satellite systems that commercial companies are on the verge of producing at commodity pricing, he adds.

There will always be a need for strategic satellite technology and manned spaceflight programs, where redundancy is not so affordable and the parts can’t fail, but these are not high-volume markets.

A paradigm shift is coming, but not in technology; rather, it will be a paradigm shift in mindset, says Anthony Jordan, Vice President, Product Marketing and Applications Engineering at Cobham Semiconductor in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in his interview on page 20. “The market is going to have to figure how to manage COTS in the space supply chain as satellites themselves become more disposable commodities that are driven by business models out of Silicon Valley that see satellites as a means to an end.”

Jordan’s right. The use of COTS in space is happening, as the satellites themselves will soon be COTS products. Electronics designers will need to strike a balance – to still provide strategic rad-hard technology to the classified defense satellites, while preparing internally to deliver products to those commodity satellite folks or lose out.

The concern over COTS in space makes me think of another part of Cernan’s book, where he relates what astronaut Alan Shepard said he was thinking about when he was sitting in his spacecraft, Freedom 7, before it launched and made him the second man in space in 1962:

“The fact is that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.”