After Slump, Satellites
Get Back on the Beam

Palo Alto's Loral continues to be
among the industry's leaders

TOM ABATE / San Francisco Chronicle 18feb2007

At the south end of Palo Alto, barely visible from Highway 101, sits one of Silicon Valley's oldest, but least-known, manufacturing companies — Space Systems Loral.

For 50 years, under a succession of corporate owners, Loral's engineers and technicians have specialized in building civilian and non-defense satellites for everything from beaming television to collecting data for weather maps.

Experts say aerospace companies like Loral are bouncing back from post-Cold War defense cutbacks and the dot-com crash that crimped demand for these orbiting electronic platforms. Suddenly, orders are booming for civilian satellites that can cost $100 million to $300 million to build, driven largely by what seems to be the insatiable appetite of earthlings for television signals.

For Space Systems Loral, where employment peaked at 3,300 in the mid-1990s only to plunge to roughly half that before the recent rebound, the upturn comes at a time when the industry, including nearby competitor Lockheed Martin Corp., faces an ironic challenge: The aerospace workforce is aging and replacements are hard to come by.

"The biggest problem facing aerospace is summed up in the number 27," said Jeremiah Gertler, assistant vice president with the Aerospace Industries Association. "That's the percentage of the aerospace technical workforce, engineers and technicians, who become eligible for retirement within the next year and a half."

This brain drain is a headache for Loral, which hired about 400 people in 2006 to bring its workforce to 2,100. It plans to add 300 jobs in Palo Alto this year.

Asked why — when manufacturing jobs are fleeing the valley — Loral can still build satellites here, Senior Vice President Arnold Friedman held up his hands toward the Palo Alto campus.

"It's the people," Friedman said, ticking off the talents needed to make a satellite, including materials and structural sciences, physics, electrical engineering and communications. "We have assembled a skilled workforce that only exists in a few places in the world."

Like most every field of technology, the satellite business finds itself competing for a limited supply of engineering talent.

Marco Caceres, a senior space analyst for the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., said that in addition to Loral and Lockheed Martin, the other big U.S. satellite-makers are Boeing and Orbital Sciences. Two European firms, Alcatel Alenia and EADS Astrium, round out the top tier of manufacturers worldwide.

"Loral has always been up there in the top two or three," he said.

Figures from the Satellite Industry Association show that satellite manufacturing has had a bumpy ride, with worldwide sales ranging from $11.5 billion in 2000 to $7.8 billion in 2005, the most recent year for which data are available.

David Cavossa, executive director of the Satellite Industry Association, said television broadcasts have long been beamed up to satellites and then bounced back down around the world.

The migration to high-definition television is expected to increase this demand. Cavossa said HDTV signals can require up to six times as much satellite capacity as ordinary TV broadcasts. Broadcasters are working on ways to compress HDTV signals and squeeze more out of their existing satellites, so Cavossa isn't expecting a sixfold increase in orders. Still, he does predict "a substantial increase in demand."

At the same time, television providers like DirecTV and Dish Network and space-based radio broadcasters such as Sirius and XM are also putting satellites into orbit.

As a reporter toured Loral's factory, an XM-5 satellite moved through the production line.

Forget the rush-rush, clang-clang notions of the assembly line. At Loral, technicians in white coats and hats — to keep dust and hair from fouling the electronics — install components and then double-, triple- and quadruple-check their work. The pace is slow. Attention to detail is a must. It can take two to three years to build a satellite, and caution on the ground is time well spent, said Dan Collins, 67, who retired from Loral in 2002.

"There's a lot of discipline involved in building satellites," Collins said. "We test and test and test things before we ever launch them, because once we launch, it's beyond retrieving and rectifying."

Standing on the factory floor, wrapped in plastic and awaiting delivery, satellites do not look particularly impressive. They're designed to fit inside the nose cones of the rockets that will carry them most of the way into orbit, and cargo is limited to a package about 12 feet in diameter and 25 feet tall.

Loral does not launch rockets but instead contracts with one of a handful of commercial firms such as Sea Launch, an international consortium managed by Boeing, or Arianespace, a European concern. Loral vice president for sales Tony Colucci said it costs about $25,000 per pound to put a satellite into orbit.

To reduce weight, their frames are made of strong, light materials such as titanium and carbon and graphite composites. Even so, a large bird like the radio-broadcasting XM satellite can weigh about 13,000 pounds, Colucci said. About half of that, he said, is the onboard fuel the satellite uses to maneuver into its assigned orbit once the big rocket has delivered it into space.

Once in orbit, a satellite is expected to function flawlessly for 12 to 15 years. Senior engineer Larry Johnson said some of the most critical prelaunch tests occur in a gigantic thermal vacuum chamber nicknamed the "blue pumpkin," owing to its color and shape. Cranes lift the satellite and place it inside the pumpkin, then lower a 17-ton lid to create a seal. It takes about 12 hours to suck the air out of the enclosure to simulate a vacuum. Technicians then spend about a month running tests to assess how the satellite performs, varying temperatures inside the pumpkin from blazingly hot to blisteringly cold.

Once the satellite has maneuvered into position, the rectangular form spreads its wings — two 60-foot-long solar arrays, one on either side. These arrays provide power to run the satellite. The smaller the target on Earth — think of the TV dish on the roof or the receiver inside a satellite radio — the more power needed aboard the satellite, making solar technology one of the limiting factors.

Once a large satellite like the XM has deployed its solar wings, it becomes 134 feet long — slightly longer than a 737 jet, Loral says.

Today's satellites are a far cry from the tiny objects that U.S. engineers started sending into orbit after the launch of the Russian spacecraft Sputnik in 1957 began the "space race."

Back in those days, the Palo Alto factory was owed by Philco, the now-defunct radio and television maker. In the early 1960s, Philco was acquired by Ford Motor Co. and for nearly 30 years the site operated under the name of Ford Aerospace.

In 1990, Loral Corp., then a defense contractor, acquired Ford Aerospace and gave the satellite factory its current name.

Much has changed since the Sputnik era, including the engineering ethos of Silicon Valley. Consider how "launch" is used to describe startups that, particularly in the Web 2.0 environment, rush out prototypes and fix bugs as customers find them. That's the antithesis of the satellite-making art, said Collins, the Loral retiree.

"We need a certain type of engineering personality, the engineer who's more satisfied making it right the first time," he said.

If finding workers with the right stuff is a prime concern for aerospace companies, helping them find the right customers is paramount for their trade organizations. Cavossa, the Satellite Industry Association official, said the rules governing exports that have military applications put U.S. makers at a disadvantage vis a vis European competitors.

"The U.S. export control regime is flawed," Cavossa said.

Satellite-makers have an influential friend in U.S. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, new chairwoman of the House Strategic Forces subcommittee. Tauscher, who noted in a speech last year that the U.S. share of the global satellite market has fallen from 64 percent in 1998 to 36 percent in 2002, will be among the speakers scheduled to appear at the Satellite 2007 conference that kicks off Monday in Washington.

Gary Allen, with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents some satellite workers though none at Loral, agrees that satellites remain one of the last industries in which the United States has "technological dominance." And he echoed concerns about the graying of the aerospace workforce. But Allen said the best thing the federal government could do to make U.S. companies more competitive would be to find ways to lift the health care burden off employers and workers — as European governments have already done.

Meanwhile, as managers at Loral try to staff up, their biggest challenge may be convincing engineers and technicians to hitch their wagons to the stars.

"As people today relate to Google or Yahoo, we were the hot new thing 40 years ago," recalled Chris Hoeber, a Loral manager who started building satellites in the 1970s.

Hoeber — sensitive about the whole old-guys-in-the-aerospace-industry angle — volunteered that he would soon celebrate his 60th birthday by swimming 20 miles. Maybe, he said, "A lot of people will still find satellite-building cool because it's something you can see and touch and appreciate."

source: 23feb2007

Space Junk

ROBERT ROY BRITT / Space.com 19oct2000

Thousands of nuts, bolts, gloves and other debris from space missions form an orbiting garbage dump around Earth, presenting a hazard to spacecraft. Some of the bits and pieces scream along at 17,500 mph.

When these objects fall back into Earth's atmosphere, which they inevitably do, they behave just like any other meteor, lighting up the sky.

A 1999 study estimated there are some 4 million pounds of space junk in low-Earth orbit, just one part of a celestial sea of roughly 110,000 objects larger than 1 centimeter -- each big enough to damage a satellite or space-based telescope.

Some of the objects, baseball-sized and bigger, could threaten the lives of astronauts in a space shuttle or the International Space Station. As an example of the hazard, a tiny speck of paint from a satellite once dug a pit in a space shuttle window nearly a quarter-inch wide.

Aware of the threat, the U.S. Space Command monitors space debris and other objects, reporting directly to NASA and other agencies whenever there's threat of an orbital impact.

As of June 21 2000, the agency counted 8,927 man-made objects in the great above and beyond; some are there more or less permanently. Of the total, 2,671 are satellites (working or not), 90 are space probes that have been launched out of Earth orbit, and 6096 are mere chunks of debris zooming around the third planet from the Sun. The United States leads the former Soviet Union in the total quantity of orbital junk, but some companies and other organizations contribute significantly to the count.

But there are more objects up there.

The Space Command's electronic eyes can spot a baseball-sized object up to about 600 miles high, officials say. But at 22,300 miles up, where geostationary satellites roam -- providing weather images used by forecasters -- an object has to be as big as a volleyball to be seen. These object, moving in fixed perches with the rotating Earth, may remain in place for centuries, experts say.

And even with more than a dozen of these electronic eyes arrayed around the planet, the agency admits to not being able to see the entire sky all around the world.

Danger of getting hit on the head? The threat to satellites and Earth-orbiting deep-space telescopes from orbiting debris is clear. But how much of this junk falls back into the sky? Does this poses a risk to the species responsible for putting the stuff up there in the first place?

In the first six months of 1999, 57 of the tracked objects re-entered Earth's atmosphere, according to Major Michael Birmingham of the U.S. Space Command. Birmingham said that 91 objects fell into the atmosphere in all of 1998, and 69 in 1997.

The most spectacular re-entry in the short history of the phenomenon was Skylab. Launched in 1973 (two years after Russia put its first space station into orbit), the first and only U.S. space station stumbled home six years later, part of it splashing into the Indian Ocean and another portion ending up in Australia.

"Most objects that re-enter the Earth's atmosphere burn-up or re-enter over water," Birmingham said, noting that nearly three-quarters of the planet is wet and a great majority of what's dry is uninhabited. "Since the space surveillance mission began, almost 17,000 objects that we track re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. Catastrophic re-entries such as Skylab are rare and the exception."

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Cool space junk facts

The oldest debris still on orbit is the second US satellite, the Vanguard I, launched on 1958, March, the 17th, which worked only for 6 years.

In 1965, during the first american space walk, the Gemini 4 astronaut Edward White, lost a glove. For a month, the glove stayed on orbit with a speed of 28,000 km / h, becoming the most dangerous garment in history.

More than 200 objects, most of them rubbish bags, were released by the Mir space station during its first 10 years of operation.

The most space debris created by a spacecraft's destruction was due to the upper stage of a Pegasus rocket launched in 1994. Its explosion in 1996 generated a cloud of some 300,000 fragments bigger than 4 mm and 700 among them were big enough to be catalogued. This explosion alone doubled the Hubble Space Telescope collision risk.

SOURCE: ESA

source:  23feb2007