Aviationtoday.com: The Final Frontier

Aerospace activity beyond the stratosphere is often given short shrift by the media at international air shows, but according to analyst briefings at both the Berlin and Farnborough air shows this year, space will afford continued growth for aerospace companies, even as the industry’s down-to-earth activities wane in the face of economic retrenchment and stupendously high oil prices.

This prediction is borne out by the latest statistics from Teal Group. (You can purchase Teal Group’s reports at www.AviationToday.com.) Teal Group announced at both the Berlin (May 27-June 1) and Farnborough (July 14-20) events its revised figures for its Worldwide Mission Model survey of future space payloads.

Teal’s study encompasses 1,981 payloads proposed through 2008-2027. Typically, in crunching these numbers in the past, Teal has restricted its models for payload missions to only a decade into the future, but it has now stretched out the scope to include payloads that haven’t actually been proposed but that Teal determines will need to be developed and launched to replenish aging operational systems now in earth’s orbit.

"We’re applying interpretive analysis to what we think will be needed, to provide a more comprehensive picture of demand, which should make corporate planning more accurate," said Richard Aboulafia, Teal Group vice president of analysis. The upshot: the accelerating decrepitude of satellites already aloft will provide plenty of demand for years to come, in the form of replacements, regardless of whether brand new systems get initiated or not.

"The Model serves as a starting point from which to begin creating our forecasts of the market," said Marco Caceres, lead analyst for Teal Group’s World Space Systems Briefing, the 1,400-page monthly updated competitive intelligence service, which features the Model. "It is the first step in the process of coming up with numbers that reflect the payloads we project will actually materialize and go up during the next decade."

Among the payloads surveyed, Teal forecasts that roughly 830 will be built and launched during the 2008-2017 period, with commercial satellites making up 40 percent of the total.

Commercial payloads, which include traditional telecommunications and TV broadcasting, digital radio and direct TV broadcasting, broadband and mobile communications, and earth imaging satellites, account for 42 percent of the payloads in the Worldwide Mission Model, as compared to 37 percent for civil payloads, 17 percent for military and 4 percent for university and other.

In Models released during the past three years, the percentage of commercial payloads relative to other types of payloads has been steadily declining from 39 percent to 36.2 percent to 34.5 percent. But this has changed, as reflected in the higher number of commercial payloads in the current Model. Dozens of replacement satellites for the Globalstar and Orbcomm mobile communications satellite constellations are proposed for launch before 2010. Notably for the avionics sector, dozens of Iridium replacements are anticipated by the middle part of the next decade. There also has been a salient boost during the past two years in orders for new geostationary commercial communication satellites.

Fueling this trend is the fact that the North American Terrestrial System is nearing its termination, forcing avionics engineers and flight departments to search for alternatives to their companies’ airborne telephone systems. What’s worrisome for regulators and operators alike is that some aircraft communications systems may find themselves completely without airborne telephony later this year. Operator flight departments are frantically seeking replacement systems that replicate the existing cabin communications that pilots and Air Traffic Control have long taken for granted.

Stepping in to fulfill much of this need will be NextGen, FAA’s blueprint for modernizing the National Airspace System by 2025. Through its ambitious NextGen plan, FAA is developing an integrated grid of new technologies and procedures to enable higher traffic capacity and less congestion. That’s in large part where expected demand for new space payloads comes in.