Charles Baker is currently the Acting Director for the Office of Space Commercialization. Also, Baker is the deputy assistant administrator for Satellite & Information Services, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where he serves as chief operating officer for NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS). Baker will be speaking at Satellite 2011 on March 16 at the “Hosted Payloads: Thinking Outside the Box” session. He will also be speaking at the National Space Symposium in April.

How does your job relate to hosted payloads?

I have two jobs. In the space commercialization job our organization there is a very strong proponent of hosted payloads as potential solution to a lot of the problems fielding capabilities in space because by definition it’s a low cost solution that takes advantage of money that other people are going to spend anyways. We advocated the inclusion of the hosted payload concept in the President’s Space Policy and continue to advocate for it around the industry and government space community. My other job, focusing on NOAA’s own internal needs for space capabilities we are hopeful that hosted payloads might be a way to field some new capabilities that we’ve been unable to afford in standalone mission capabilities.

Probably the most noteworthy of those is GPS radio occultation, which is small receivers in space that would receive signals from the existing GPS satellites and measure the distortion that those radio waves get when they pass through the atmosphere and that would in turn allow us to determine characteristics of the atmosphere that could be very useful in weather forecasting. One option for fielding GPS occultation sensors is field them as hosted payloads on other satellites.

Why have hosted payloads taken awhile to “catch on”?

There are some inherent difficulties because you have to put together two unlike things on to a single satellite. So let’s say, I’m going to launch a communications satellite, and I’m a private company, and somebody else says a US government agency and says they want to put a hosted payload on that satellite that perhaps observes weather, I’ve got to be able to build my payload on a quick enough time frame before it launches. People may say well if you miss that timeframe you can always get on another satellite, but that satellite may not go to the same orbital slot. If you’re talking geostationary satellites, hosted payload users care about where they are in terms of the earth’s longitude. You got to do that synchronization band and having our funding done in time. Then you got the interesting dilemma of once you’re in orbit and there is a conflict, which payload governs? Of course this is figured out contractually before it’s placed in orbit.

There are a lot of things that need to be worked out and practiced. You can’t assume that the interests of both parties are identical from day one. There is also other problem of what happens when a sensor dies. Hosted payloads, almost by definition, are never the primary instrument, if it fails before the primary fails, we have to wait awhile before the next satellite in that orbital slot is going to launch. Those difficulties aren’t insurmountable. We would like to foster future success stories.

What will you be discussing at Satellite 2011?

One thing I will be focusing on is the opportunities and challenges associated with hosted payloads-- and there are some challenges. One, that is sort of unique to NOAA, compared to the Defense Department. At the DoD, the hosted payload solution works extremely well because programs that have a hard time getting funded when they require a dedicated satellite often get often get funded as hosted payloads because of the difference in cost.

The civil side of the government, even at the reduced cost, is still above the threshold that budgeters take notice. There is a lot of pressure to not start new programs.Even a hosted payload is considered a large expense on the civil side of the government – that’s probably one of the single biggest problems facing NOAA.

What are some projects that NOAA is working with when it comes to hosted payloads?

NOAA is looking at hosted payloads as a means of adding new capabilities to its portfolio. Our core capabilities are imaging and sounding, which have been the two primary space based tools for weather forecasting for thirty or forty years. So, we’re not looking to host those capabilities as payloads on someone else’s satellites. Those are so central to our mission that we have satellites dedicated to those purposes. We have no problem getting those funded.

The problem is when we want to start a new capability that isn’t currently funded, the budgeters’ say well let’s wait a few years because we can’t afford new capabilities at this time. Doing that as a hosted payload is still too expensive. If you’re flat broke, not only can you not afford the Cadillac, you can’t afford the Chevrolet. That’s the situation we find ourselves in. We’re currently testing out the GPS radio occultation capability on Taiwanese satellites that are carrying NASA instruments. But, NOAA is interested in acquiring that capability directly in a NOAA Taiwanese partnership.