It was a great idea for its time, a network of NASA communications satellites high in geostationary orbit, providing near-continuous radio communications between controllers on Earth and some of the agency’s most important missions: the space shuttles, the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope, and dozens of others.

The satellites were called TDRS – short for Tracking and Data Relay Satellite – and the first was launched in 1983 during the first flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Twelve more followed, quietly providing the basis for NASA’s orbital operations. But they have become obsolete, expensive, and in the 40 years since their inception they have been overtaken by commercial satellite networks.

What will happen next? It’s a $278 million question, but importantly, it’s not a multi-billion dollar question.

“Now it will be just plug and play. They can focus on the mission and don’t have to worry about communications because we provide them.”
— Craig Miller, Viasat

NASA, following its mantra to forgo routine space operations, has awarded $278.5 million worth of contracts to six companies: Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Inmarsat Government, SES Government Solutions, SpaceX, Telesat and Viasat. The agency is asking them to offer services that are reliable, adaptable to all kinds of missions, easy to use for NASA, and ideally orders of magnitude cheaper than TDRS.

“It’s an ambitious wish list,” says Eli Nuffah, communications services project manager at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “We want industry people to tell us, based on their capabilities and their business interests, what they would like to provide us with as a service they could provide to others in general.”

Satellite and Earth.
Inmarsat currently operates several geostationary satellites in its GX fleet. The proposed GX7 satellite pictured here is expected to launch in 2023.Inmarsat Government

Satellite communications is one area that has become a business proposition independent of NASA’s efforts in space. The Internet and television, GPS, telephone communications have all become gigantic enterprises that are ubiquitous in people’s lives. Economies of scale and competition have driven prices down sharply. (This is very different from, say, space tourism, which attracts a lot of attention, but so far only the very rich can afford it.)

In the case of communications, NASA benefits from being a relatively small player, especially if it can avoid the cost of running something like a TDRS system. The commercial satellite companies take care of these costs, which they say is fine as they are spending the money anyway.

“We love having customers like NASA,” says Craig Miller, president of government systems for Viasat. “They are a pleasure to work with, their mission is in line with many of our core values, but we make billions of dollars a year selling the Internet to other sources.”

Each of the six companies under the new NASA contract is taking a different approach. Inmarsat, SES and Viasat, for example, would use large relay satellites such as TDRS, each of which would seem to hover over a fixed point on the Earth’s equator, because at an altitude of 35,786 km one orbit takes exactly 24 hours. Amazon and SpaceX, by contrast, will use constellations of smaller satellites in low Earth orbit as low as 3-700 km (at last count, SpaceX has launched more than 2,200 of its Starlink satellites). SES and Telesat will offer two-for-one packages with service from both high and low orbits. In terms of radio frequencies, companies can use C-band, Ka-band, L-band, optical band, whatever their existing customers need. Etc.

Two rows of objects stacked on top of each other are visible against the background of the Earth.
In this 2019 photo, sixty SpaceX Starlink satellites are waiting to be deployed from a launch vehicle in low Earth orbit.SpaceX

This may sound like a set of ways to solve one of the main problems – communication with its satellites – but engineers say that this is a minor compromise for NASA if it can use other people’s communication networks. “This allows NASA and our other government users to carry out their missions without the upfront capital and full life cycle costs” of launching a TDRS system, Britt Lewis, senior vice president of Inmarsat Government, said in an email to IEEE Spectrum. .

One of the major advantages of the space agency will be the sheer volume of services available to it. In past years, the TDRS system could only handle a certain number of transmissions at a time; if a particular mission needed to send a large amount of data, it had to reserve time in advance.

“Now everything will be just plug and play,” says Viasat’s Miller. “They can focus on the mission and don’t have to worry about communications because we provide for them.”

NASA says it expects each company to complete technology development and demonstration in space by 2025, with the most successful launching agency operations by 2030. There probably won’t be a single winner: “We’re not really aiming for any particular company to be able to provide all the services on our list,” NASA’s Naffa says.

photo of a satellite in earth orbit
NASA’s TDRS-M communications satellite launched in 2017. NASA

TDRS satellites have proven to be reliable; TDRS-3, launched by Space Shuttle Discovery in 1988, can still be used as a spare if the new satellites fail. NASA says it will likely continue to use the system into the 2030s, but no longer plans to launch it after the last one (TDRS-13, also known as TDRS-M) in 2017.

If all goes well, Amazon writes in an email, “This model will allow organizations like NASA to rely on commercial near-Earth communications operators while shifting their focus to more ambitious operations such as solving technical problems for deep space exploration and science missions. ”

At this moment, the sky is the limit. NASA is focusing on the Moon, Mars and other explorations, while buying conventional services from the private sector.

“We can deliver the same broadband experience you’re used to on Earth,” says Viasat’s Miller. He smiles at the thought. “We can provide Netflix to the ISS.”

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