Announced today, seven major satellite companies have agreed to form an alliance to increase the awareness and benefits of hosted payloads on commercial satellites. Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems, Intelsat General Corporation, Iridium Communications Inc., Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Orbital Sciences Corporation, SES WORLD SKIES U.S. Government Solutions, and Space Systems/Loral form the Hosted Payload Alliance (HPA) Steering Committee.
Intelsat General's vice president of hosted payload, Don Brown said, "Hosted payloads are a powerful solution for cost savings and schedule certainty in critical space missions. The Hosted Payload Alliance is a timely effort to describe the many different approaches to hosted payload solutions from leading spacecraft operators, manufacturers and system integrators. Hosted payloads are proving their worth today in many missions."
Along with the seven companies, the HPA has expectations for other satellite operators,manufacturers and system integrators to join the alliance. Arnold Friedman, Senior Vice President of Marketing & Sales at Space Systems/Loral, said "The Hosted Payload Alliance is committed to helping the U.S. Government meet the hosted payloads goals stated in the National Space Policy."
With cuts in budgets for the government's sensor programs, the HPA expects to play an important role in offering "affordable and timely capabilities to meet those mission needs."
"The Alliance will use a broad base of industry knowledge to educate the leadership on hosted payload solutions for the future," Brown added. The vice president at SES World Skies, Tim Deaver, said, "As an industry, we boast nearly a dozen opportunities each year for this timely and affordable means of accessing space -- together we can develop ways to take advantage of these opportunities."
Jim Mitchell, Vice President of Boeing Commercial Satellite Services said, "Boeing’s goal is to augment the current government communications constellations, such as UHF Follow - on and WGS, with hosted or secondary government payloads integrated onto commercial platforms. The Hosted Payload Alliance, by encouraging a dialog between government agencies and commercial operators, can help turn this vision into a reality.
The group will be holding its first meeting during the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs on Monday, April 11.
A site dedicated to the Alliance is already up and running and can be viewed at hostedpayloadalliance.org. The HPA Charter can also be viewed on the site.
Hosted Payload Advocacy Shortfalls
Hosted payload concepts have been slow to gain acceptance with DoD space mission planners because most proposals to date have been incomplete in terms of content and inadequate in terms of approach. As former military officers who have been the decision-makers that hosted payload advocates must now persuade, we at CyberSpace Operations Consulting believe that hosted payload advocacy has fallen short in three areas:
Key issues have gone unaddressed. Proposed concepts must go well beyond high level cost, schedule, and technical performance claims. They must be presented so as to allow the government to easily evaluate them in the context of their places in overall mission architectures, their roles over their entire lifecycles, their unique CONOP attributes, and even their cultural suitability.
Advocacy has neglected key decision-makers. Much of commercial providers’ efforts have concentrated on the DoD policy level and on military Service acquisition agencies. This is useful but not sufficient; it misses the Service staffs where critical requirements, budgeting, and acquisition planning are brought together and the critical 4-star advocacy required for success is developed.
Avoiding established processes has undermined success. Technology demonstrations and declared urgent operational needs have been used as venues to bring hosted concepts forward, however these are not easily translated into ongoing Programs of Record with stable resources. Nor have hosted payload proposals proven to be a stimulus for accelerating traditional procurement bureaucracy. To be successful, advocates must expect and prepare for exhaustive vetting through DoD’s established statutory and regulatory processes.
The net effect is that the government planners most readily able to incorporate innovation have not yet seen robust enough concepts to do so. Worse, there is risk that these key players will increasingly see advocacy as aimed at securing top-down mandates for including hosted payloads in their mission architectures, rather than as concept exploration that includes them as partners.
There is some work going on in the MILSATCOM arena that points to a better way. In our view, hosted payload advocates must build on these efforts and bring forward more comprehensive concepts that address secondary and tertiary issues, are better aimed at the key decision-makers who make critical planning and programming choices, and that are suited for comparison with traditional approaches in mandatory DoD processes.