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Solar panels, electric propulsion systems, software, and increasing production of subsystems and components are core supply chain challenges for spacecraft companies, industry executives said on Monday.
The number of satellites and related hardware that industry is building for the Space Development Agency’s (SDA) Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) are beyond anything previously imagined, Melanie Preisser, executive vice president for York Space Systems [YSS] said during a panel discussion at the annual SatShow.
“And I really think across the supply chain, a key challenge is scaling,” Preisser said.
York has carried multiple suppliers for some payloads and subsystems through early design to make sure it can rely on more than one vendor if others suffer manufacturing challenges, an approach “that has enabled us to keep pace with the need to deliver,” she said.
Satellite providers for SDA’s Tranche 1 missile tracking layer of the PWSA faced schedule delays due to supply chain issues, in particular receiving optical communications terminals that send and receive data between other spacecraft outfitted with optical terminals.
Lt. Col. Alexander Rasmussen, the chief capability officer at SDA, told Defense Daily at the show that the agency’s industry partners for Tranche 1 realize they need options with suppliers to stay on schedule.
Preisser said that scaling the supply chain is an additional challenge to three described by Ian Cinnamon, co-founder and CEO of satellite bus developer and manufacturer, Apex. Solar panels have been a bottleneck in satellite production because of a short supply of gas cells used in their production, he said.
Now Apex is building its own solar panels to improve control over its production.
“It’s pretty cool to see them actually being built in our facility, but we have to vertically integrate those,” he said.
A second challenge is electric propulsion systems, which Cinnamon highlighted Apex and York have brought in house through acquisitions. This has enabled Apex to increase production, he said.
Software is the last challenge mentioned by Cinnamon, who said suppliers over the years have been “building on top of what’s been done” instead of taking a “first principles approach,” which relies on assumptions of what has always been done.
Software is the “leading cause of anomalies on orbit,” Cinnamon said. While industry typically says these problems get solved through software updates after a spacecraft is lifted into space, he said this means it takes longer for a satellite to be commissioned and delays the fielding of capability.
Rasmussen, who shared the panel with the Apex and York executives, said that flight software is one of the main reasons SDA has paused Tranche 1 launches. The agency launched two planes of Tranche 1 satellites last fall and was expected to maintain a launch cadence of once a month before the federal government shutdown and issues were encountered with testing and checkout of the spacecraft after launch, Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo said earlier Monday at SatShow.
