Billions of dollars worth of new investment have poured in for a clutch of new projects with old roots, providing high-speed satellite Internet connections that will blanket the globe.

ISRO and Antrix are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this because the nature of the project involves placing thousands of small satellites in a so-called Low Earth Orbit, or LEO. The very thing that ISRO’s most successful rocket, PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle), does so well (the 104-satellite launch was all about small satellites being put into LEO).

Antrix, says Sasibhushan, is looking at “an unprecedented transition period because of the growing global market”.

“The 104 launch by the PSLV has been a big boost for us as far as marketing is concerned,” he says. “In business terms, we are looking at a major milestone in the next one year.”

The new space race needs a lot of rockets.

Internet On Satellite

Most of the world’s Internet works through terrestrial connections. One of the major reasons why communication satellites that are in geosynchronous orbits (at around 35,000km from earth), are not used for the internet is “latency”—the time lag that is introduced when signals have to travel back and forth from the satellites. It takes a radio wave at least 230 milliseconds to get to geosynchronous orbit and back; a signal through a fibre optic cable can travel between New Delhi and London around eight times in that time

But the terrestrial network has its own limitations; despite the galloping demand for connectivity, Internet users across the world are still clustered mainly in urban areas, because those are the areas the cables reach. Forget India or African countries, even large swathes of the US do not have access to fast broadband connections.

Yet, the global demand for broadband services continues to grow at light speed; according to a report by Cisco Systems Inc. last year, over 1,000 billion gigabytes of data was exchanged in 2016. By 2020, that figure is expected to double, and the number of “connected” devices is projected to become around thrice the global population.

Enter SpaceX founder Elon Musk

To meet these needs, and to overcome the problem of time lag, SpaceX plans to instal a “constellation” of small satellites in LEO (between 1,150-1,350km above earth). The idea is that this constellation—4,425 satellites according to SpaceX—will be able to provide coverage to every part of the planet. The satellites will deliver broadband using Ka- and Ku-band radio frequencies and move data between each other using laser links in a mesh network. The latency will drop to nothing because of the small distance between the satellites and the ground systems.

SpaceX plans to begin testing prototypes this year, and launch its first satellites in 2019, with full capacity service expected to begin by 2024. In May, the US regulatory body Federal Communications Commission held a hearing for SpaceX’s application.

Musk is not alone in betting on broadband satellites, an idea that first took shape in the 1990s with American companies Teledesic and Iridium, and ended in spectacular failures. This time, the results may be very different. For one, the technology for both satellite manufacturing and launch vehicles has undergone cosmic changes. And, as Carolyn Belle, satellite and launch industry analyst at Northern Sky Research (NSR), a space market research and consulting services firm, says, “The times have changed.”

“In the 1990s, the idea was a bit too early,” she says. “But now connectivity and mobile internet network are in every part of our lives.”

Musk’s opponents in this race include OneWeb, a London-based consortium backed by Sunil Bharti Mittal and Richard Branson, among others, that raised 500 million dollars from investors in 2015 when it announced the plans, and received a further 1.7 billion dollars this year from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. after it merged with satellite telecom firm Intelsat (SpaceX raised 1 billion dollars, with backing from Google).

Boeing Co. is also in the fray, and Bloomberg reported in April that Apple Inc. might be funding its efforts. There are smaller firms such as US-based LeoSat as well. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd too, has outlined similar plans. The International Telecommunication Union, which designates orbital slots for communication satellites, says it has received 35 filings since 2015 for broadband constellations, most of them involving “mega constellations”. The target is a share of the 30 billion dollars in revenue from satellite Internet by 2025, according to a forecast by SpaceX.

All of this is just to say that if things go according to plan, thousands of new satellites will have to be launched in the next five years, at a frequency that is unheard of.

“This is now a separate market (small satellites),” says Belle of NSR. “Right now, commercial operators are restrained most by launch availability—they have satellites, but no way to put them into orbit.”

While SpaceX will use its own launch services for its constellation, OneWeb has already secured services for its proposed 648-satellite constellation through a deal between European Space Agency’s Arianespace, Russia’s Roscosmos and Virgin Galactic; valued at over 1 billion dollars, it’s the largest commercial launch purchase in history.

That leaves all the other Internet broadband firms scrambling to secure launches.

“So when you have something like 104 satellites launched in one go, it opens up intriguing possibilities; it adds a lot of value for whatever company can secure such a deal,” says Belle.

Sasibhushan says that Antrix is already in discussions with some of the companies in the broadband space race, though he did not disclose names.

“Currently, we have on hand orders of around Rs 600 crore, for PSLV launches up to 2020,” he says, “We are expecting many more orders to come in.”

The Business Of Space

So far, India has been an insignificant entity in the space business, where roughly 80 per cent of the revenue has historically come from the launch of heavy satellites in geosynchronous orbits. Despite the success of the GSLV Mark III, India still does not have a rocket powerful enough to do that. It relies almost entirely on Arianespace to launch its own heavy satellites.

PSLV, a smaller vehicle, has been in use since 1994, and slowly built a reputation for reliability over the next decade, launching a handful of small satellites for other countries. Since 2008, PSLV’s “order book” began to show a spike in interest, and in 2013, when it successfully launched India’s Mars Orbiter, the cheapest ever mission to Mars, there was a further boost to orders.

Biography

Recent Posts