Creating an AWS in Orbit. Nothing Less.
By: Frederic Filloux
Tags: Spacex, Space, Small Satellite, Cloud

For a satellite operator, a launch is always the moment of utmost stress. Especially when its two spacecraft are put in orbit simultaneously. But this particular Wednesday, June 30 on Launchpad 40-A at Cape Canaveral, Loft Orbital is literally betting the farm. After four years of hard work, in San Francisco, Toulouse, France, and Golden, Colorado, the two satellites dubbed YAM-2 and YAM-3 (for Yet Another Mission, YAM-1 was a drawing board concept), are supposed to reach a low earth orbit, 500 km above earth, in less than two hours.

With this “Transporter-2 Mission,” SpaceX reaffirms its status as the de facto bulk carrier for the modern space age with at least three Transporter missions scheduled each year. Today, it carries no less than 88 satellites for dozens of customers of all kinds, ranging from the US military to foreign space agencies and private companies. Most of the assets are mini-sats — roughly the size of a washer — and a flurry of “CubeSats.” The previous Transporter-1 mission, on January 24, carried 143 satellites and the whole system is so flexible and commoditized that when a client is not ready, SpaceX can just substitute Starlink satellites to reach the nominal payload of 23 tons that will be released on polar, sun-synchronous orbits.

For the inaugural launch, the president and co-founder of Loft Orbital, Antoine de Chassy, has invited the Toulouse team to his home located in Hossegor, a notorious surf spot on the French Atlantic coast. Most of them have aerospace or signal analysis engineering backgrounds. They are quite young and enthusiastic. It looks like a student gathering at an American college, especially since English is widely used at Loft.

But what was supposed to be a fun evening is now turning into a nerve-racking experience.

The flight has already been postponed three times by SpaceX. Four days earlier, less than 24 hours before lift-off, an acoustic blanket inside the payload fairing needed to be readjusted; the 70-meter Falcon 9 had to be brought back to the assembly building, its 13-meter top reopened in a cleanroom. And on Tuesday, as the countdown was underway, an helicopter had entered the exclusion zone, prompting the launch director to freeze the countdown… 11 seconds before the lift-off. Given the narrow launch window of 58 minutes to reach near-polar orbit, the flight had to be scrubbed, once again.

So today is the day. Hopefully.

At 3:31 pm Florida time (9:31 pm in Europe), Falcon 9 clears the Cape Canaveral tower, bending its trajectory southward to reach the speed of 8 km/second necessary to stay in orbit. Eight minutes into the flight, the second stage of the rocket has completed its orbital injection, coasting at 28,631 kilometers per hour at an altitude of 207 km over the Gulf of Mexico. Nearly at the same moment, the first stage landed safely back to the Cape, giving a spectacular view of the booster spitting a huge plume of flame with the ocean in the background.

That was the easy part, so to speak. After all, this is the 100th consecutive successful mission in a row for Falcon 9, which, so far, had a 98% success rate, so the uncertainty lies elsewhere.

53 minutes into the flight, the deployment of the satellites begins. The rocket is now cruising at an altitude of 537 km. They are attached to the main structure horizontally, like the branches of a Christmas tree, and deployed in a precisely choreographed sequence.

Loft Orbital’s YAMs sats are in positions 3 and 26 respectively. At T+1 hour and 21 seconds, as the vehicle is passing over the southern tip of Sri Lanka, the video feed from SpaceX shows the smooth expulsion of the first sat. The deployment operator announces quietly “YAM-3, separation confirmed”.

We can see and hear everyone cheering at Loft’s San Francisco headquarters and in Toulouse, where the two mission control centers are located. Eight minutes later, right above the Himalayas, YAM-2 is also silently released from Falcon 9 (below).

“YAM-2, separation confirmed” (SpaceX video feed)

Time to celebrate a job well done…

But the suspense is far from over as the two satellites must now come to life going through a delicate process. The two birds have a slightly different design. YAM-3’s two solar arrays are attached to the sides of the body of the spacecraft, while YAM-2, has a deployable solar panel that can be oriented in different directions. So the satellites need to rotate to present their solar arrays to the sun, which will recharge their rapidly depleting batteries. To manage their position, they use various instruments such as a magnetotorquer — a coil that, when activated, interacts with earth’s magnetic field, using Lorentz force — a system of “reaction wheels”, and even a stellar camera which points to deep space and compares the stars as it sees them to onboard celestial maps.

If for some reason, the vehicles fail to catch the light, they could run out of juice and become another piece of space junk wandering in orbit for the next thirty years. So every 45 minutes — that is half of an orbit — the team is anxiously awaiting a signal of life. The faint packet radio signal will be collected by a pair of ground stations located on Svalbard near the North Pole and in Antarctica. These are the two points the satellites will have in their sight at every orbit. The stations are operated by Kongsberg Satellite Services, a Norwegian firm that manages 50,000 satellite contacts every month, another sign of the commoditization of space.

Ksat Svalbard ground station

Right now, nearly two hours into the launch, the YAMs are silent. In the San Francisco office that took the first monitoring shift, the crew remains confident. They are right. Around midnight in France, 3 pm in California, the sats send a burst of hexadecimal data, saying that both are alive, kicking, and — more importantly — oriented towards the Sun.

The two Loft satellites carry a dozen payloads, ranging from an observation camera for the United Arab Emirates government, to an IoT experimental data transmission for Eutelsat, a payload for the DARPA (The advanced projects agency of the Pentagon) part of its Blackjack constellation, to ONERA, a French aerospace lab. Real customers — and relieved ones.

Creating a Space Infrastructure-as-a-Service

This first launch is the culmination of years of hard work from the Loft Orbital team.

The company was created in 2017 by three experienced space executives: Antoine de Chassy, 57, is the most senior with both scientific and business training. He was the CEO of Astrium Geo-Information in Virginia for six years and held various managing positions in the French aerospace complex, especially in the imaging business. Pierre-Damien Vaujour is the CEO based in San Francisco. He is a top-level aerospace engineer trained in France and the United States who worked at NASA’s Ames Research Center, among other experiences. The third, Alex Greenberg (the COO), has an Aerospace business consulting background when they all met five years earlier working at a San Francisco-based space data analytics company.

“We started with a few strong ideas on the new space business”, explains de Chassy.

“One, software is eating space as it does on the ground. That’s a critical element. Until recently, the space industry was mostly hardware-based within one-ton sats taking 5 years to design and build. Now, we think of a set of missions with the software cycle in mind. We buy the bus [the infrastructure of the satellite] from a supplier [Loft has currently two, soon more], we customize it with various types of payloads, and then we will continuously improve the platform by pushing software updates. It’s like a Tesla, where the performance and the value of the car are extended through Over-the-Air (OTA) updates”.

Except that in the case of the small-sat business, OTA updates are sent to an object zapping through the sky at 28,000 km per hour, 500 km above the Earth, and with a trickle data transfer rate of less than one megabyte per second.

These incredible constraints actually led to the development of ultra-compact software packages. The part that is similar to an operating system requires no more than 20Mb of memory space (I will devote a full episode of the series to the peculiar world of space-specific software, especially Cockpit, the amazing user interface developed by Loft Orbital for its customers to translate the complexity of orbital mechanics and allow anyone to manage a satellite from an iPad).

“The second key aspect is our customer-centric approach as opposed to a top-down, supplier design process”, states de Chassy. “We start with the needs of the client: what they want, the value they will extract from our service, and how much they will accept paying. We are completely inverting the legacy economics of space, shifting from CAPEX — a huge investment in a platform — to OPEX — a lease of a module or a usage fee — which will open the field to a whole new set of customers and uses”.

Loft is even building a software platform that will automatically calculate the price to charge a customer, large or small, based on the parameters of the mission.

In some instances, the company will be able to use the clients' payload capabilities when they are idle, which happens most of the time. In doing so, Loft will be able to vastly increase its array of customers.

In a typical scenario, the same orbital path will, for instance, involve a seven-minute fly-by over Norway to monitor fishing activities, then a border surveillance mission above central Europe, maritime monitoring of the Bosphorus, then various observations above Egypt, Kenya, and Mozambique. During that time, as much data as possible — visible spectrum and hyperspectral imagery — are processed onboard to minimize the downlink that will occur during a six to nine-minute transfer above the Antarctic ground station. Ksat will then beam the data to a geosynchronous platform as there is no fiber optic cable in the area. After that, the satellite will continue its course, this time towards North for a series of observations above Western Australia.

“We are building a distributed architecture of space sensors. This incredibly flexible system allows us to accommodate any type of client both before and during the course of the mission as we can reconfigure our payloads and use residual capabilities at will. In some cases, we will become clients of our own customers. We will have the infrastructure, we can flash software as needed for any kind of mission”, sums up the company’s president..

These operations are extremely complex, as they involve constant switching between clients, payloads, and a delicate power optimization for spacecraft that usually deliver only 50 watts on average (peaking at 150 watts), with each payload consuming less than a smartphone.

Loft Orbital has in fact a dual model of rideshare and timeshare. For the first one, clients have paid for their own task-specific payloads on which they have full control, as Loft does not see the data they are collecting. For the latter, the client pays on a usage basis, usually a combination of onboard resources (electrical power, processing power, time, data transfer) and available pre-existing payloads.

Some clients will even acquire capabilities to be activated at will. That’s the case for DARPA, which wants to be able to activate images and listening sensors on short notice in case of a strategic emergency — if an asset is suddenly blinded by a laser for instance. Having prepositioned flexible assets will then become critical.

Business-wise, Loft’s missions are meant to be profitable at launch. The company is aiming at operating margins consistent with the service sector and eventually with the software sector.

One of the consequences will be genuine democratization of space with some clients paying millions of dollars for a multi-year mission or a fraction of it for a small one. Loft is even willing to work out a business model that will make space affordable for NGOs or research.

The number of countries accessing space resources will increase drastically — a critical evolution in the context of climate change-related weather disruptions across the globe.

The analogy with cloud providers such as AWS will involve a customer able not only to access the available resources on a satellite but to run applications with the same simplicity it opens an instance on Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. A group of Earth sciences students will for example be able to upload software operating a hyperspectral camera to test an algorithm designed for a specific type of observation.

What’s next

With this win, Loft Orbital is now facing a string of rich people’s problems. The first one is the change of scale of the company that plans to double in size in the next year to about 120 people spread between San Francisco, Toulouse, and Golden, Colorado. Large recruitment of engineers is already underway.

Then a new round of financing will occur this year as investors were waiting for the outcome of the June 30th launch. Since its inception, Loft has raised $16 million in capital, which is quite modest compared to some of its competitors that raised several hundreds of millions. With proven technologies, real customers, and multiple bookings for its next flights, Loft won’t have any problem securing a comfy Series B.

The ability to ramp up the pace of missions is now what keeps the team up at night. While signing up new customers should not be much of a problem, everything will have to scale accordingly: payload design, software developments, day-to-day mission control, customer service, etc.

Next year, Loft expects to launch several missions. The YAM-4 flight is already booked by the Canadian Space Agency, which will send a payload beaming quantum communication keys from space, and discussions are well underway to fill the seats for YAM-5. In 2023, Loft expects to launch one mission every quarter. In the next few months, it will also announce the sign-up of other prominent partners eager to use the company’s assets circling the globe.

The sky is no longer the limit.

— frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

In upcoming episodes of the series, we will cover the economics and the geopolitics of New Space, the funding ecosystem of this risky business, the amazing software that powers these spacecraft, the Big Tech strategies, and some technical considerations such as sustainability. I will also focus on companies I find particularly daring in the field. These articles will be published roughly once every two weeks — providing I can resume traveling in the United States in the fall. In between, I will produce some media stories and some episodes of the Future of Cars series in between. So stay tuned and susbcribe!