TAMPA, Fla. — The U.S. space industry is several years away from having the capacity for continuous satellite production, according to prime contractors speaking April 8 during a Space Symposium panel in Colorado Springs.
“Some of our component suppliers that we rely on haven’t scaled up yet enough to meet the demand, but they are scaling,” said Ed Zoiss, president of space and airborne systems at L3Harris.
Robert Lightfoot, president of space at Lockheed Martin, highlighted skyrocketing demand with plans to build 650% more satellites over the next five years than were in its pipeline five years ago.
“Granted, these are mostly the small ones for [the Space Development Agency], but it’s still a big, big change in the way we think,” he said, “and on the missile systems and reentry vehicles, I’ve got a 250% increase.”
This marks a major shift for an industry that has traditionally operated on a lumpy production cycle, building large, exquisite systems on a decade-scale cadence.
“It’s not just building the same thing that we’ve always built faster,” said Michelle Parker, vice president of space mission systems at Boeing Defense, Space and Security.
“It is really looking at different ways, different approaches to building lots of automation,” she said, pointing to Boeing’s automated production of integrated payload arrays for SES O3b mPower broadband satellites.
“It completely changed what we were building, and the way we were building it and the time scale that it takes to build it,” she said.
The surge is largely driven by government demand for resilient, proliferated satellite architectures — particularly in low Earth orbit — to support missile warning, communications and other national security priorities.
Help from partners
Parker said Boeing is leveraging capabilities from its 2018 acquisition of small satellite specialist Millennium Space Systems to enable continuous production, allowing upgrades to roll out incrementally instead of waiting to be bundled into a larger spacecraft.
Founded in 2001, Millennium had about 200 employees and was delivering one satellite a year when Boeing acquired it.
“They are just about to cross 1,000 people with nearly a 100 satellite backlog,” she said, “and ramping up double-digit deliveries of satellites this year, and continuing to ramp up.”
Although Lockheed Martin recently acquired small satellite maker Terran Orbital, Lightfoot said the company is less interested in vertical integration and prefers to partner.
“I want to go horizontal because the capabilities are out there in a lot of the new entrants,” he said.
While it can be challenging, Lightfoot said that visibility into where other primes are investing helps them avoid duplicating efforts and instead form partnerships, rather than spending resources trying to catch up or keep pace.
Large primes can also team up with smaller entrants to exchange access to advanced capabilities for the scale and support an established player can provide.
“Most of my meetings this week are actually with what we would call new entrants,” he said.
Scale challenges
Zoiss warned that outdated security practices continue to inhibit the collaboration needed to scale and work more efficiently.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had some of our government customers say … industry knows more about what the government’s doing than government, because we’ve stovepiped so many of these things,” he said.
“In fact, I would venture to say that all of my peers at one point have gone up to a customer and said, hey, did you know that customer X is doing the same thing that you’re asking me to do, and you’re going to pay me for it, while the other customer has either already developed it or I’m already under contract to develop it for them?”
While Zoiss said the U.S. government is working to address the issue, he stressed: “I don’t think it could happen fast enough.”
Knowledge sharing is also becoming increasingly critical as a generation of leaders prepares to retire from the industry, said Chris Adams, sector vice president and general manager of strategic space systems at Northrop Grumman.
“The rate at which we are going to have to create leadership and create leaders of leaders is growing,” Adams said.
“I think some of us might have come up quickly, relative to our timeline in the industry. I would argue that quickness of the past is now the average of the future, and figuring out how to do that effectively and in an engaging way is a challenge, but also a tremendous opportunity for the new generation.”
