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Private Sector Space

November 11, 2021 By
Really Big !

The second session of the Course on “The Business and Economics of Space” was on Tuesday, Nov 9. This time the topic was the Private Sector of the Space Industry, as distinct from the government, civil or military side. You can find my earlier posts on the first session here, as well as my remarks from pre-school here and here.

The key takeaways were trying to answer three basic questions.
– How big IS the Space Economy ?
– What does the Industry Supply and Demand look like ?
– What are the current industry dynamics ?

There is no easy answer to the question of measuring the size of the Space economy. Different people and organizations come up with different estimates as there is disagreement about how it should be measured. We know that some reports, such as a very busy industry map from SpaceTech Analytics, grossly overestimate who is a space company. Estimates from reliable sources like Euroconsult and Bryce Tech would put the range from $290B to $370B

Image from Bryce Tech 2020 Sat Industry Stats

One of my personal favourite sources is the Space Foundation and their quarterly Space Report. They estimated the Global Space Economy in 2020 as $446.88 B

Image from the Space Foundation 2021 Q2 Space Report

The breakdowns are interesting for people outside of the space bubble. Roughly just over a third of the revenues are from Ground equipment and just under a third from Satellite services. Government Space Budgets (including Human Spaceflight) are about 27% of the total with the USA by far the biggest of that. Sat manufacturing (3%) and the sexy launch sector (only 1.5% or $5.3B) round it out. Launch gets a lot of attention but it is not a large amount of the total.

How fast is this growing ? Well, the average CAGR is about 4.3 % per annum but that hides a lot of variation within sub sectors. One of the biggest satellite service sectors is TV, particularly Direct-to-Home (DTH) service like Dish & DirectTV or Bell & Shaw Sat TV in Canada. Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime have caused a lot of cord cutting, not only of cable connections but also Satellite TV connections. Hence it is declining by about 8% annually.

Yet, there are industry forecasts that are regularly touted that space will grow tremendously in the next decade. Most famously there is the Morgan Stanley forecast (here) that says Space Sector will be a $1Trillion industry by 2040. Bank of America (here) expects the space economy to triple in the next decade to $1.4 trillion. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates the space economy will grow from approximately $385B in 2017 to $1.5 trillion by 2040.

Where is this forecasted explosive growth going to come from ? Especially if cash cows lie DTH TV are declining. That is the trillion dollar question. That is why we are taking this course !

Where is the demand for space economy services coming from? Historically it was governments, and specifically the U.S. government and its lettered agencies (NOAA, NRO, DOD etc). Currently the public sector still dominates the demand side outside of Satellite Communications (SatCom). The key would be to see more space services migrate to a model where the government as just an anchor tenant and then eventually to be just one customer among many to a private venture. That is the holy grail.

Who are the space sector actors trying to solve this riddle, pursuing this holy grail ? Some are household names now due to their famous billionaire founders ; Musk’s SpaceX & Starlink, Bezos’s Blue Origin & Project Kuiper and Branson’s Virgin Galactic & Virgin Orbit. But there are hosts of companies, as shown in this industry map by Seraphim Capital, the largest Space VC and now a publicly traded investment trust in London, U.K.

Image from Seraphim Capital SpaceTech Map 2020

The next session will be on Space Financing. Really looking forward to this session ! Expecting to learn more about IPO’s, SPACs and Valuations. Stay tuned for my synopsis on that session next.

Filed Under: Business of Space, Competition, International, Internet, Satellite

NewSpace

November 9, 2021 By
SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch

The first session of the course on “The Business and Economics of the Space” was last night, Monday Nov 8. The topic was the History of Space and the Contemporary Space Agency. My key takeaway from the session was the rise of the NewSpace industry.

Earlier this summer I wrote about “Space; the final telco frontier” here. Much of the subject matter of the history of space is covered there. I did get a great comment on my post from Charles Miller, the CEO of Lynk who was also co-founder of NanoRacks and founder of ProSpace, a non-profit that lobbied to space policy legislation on Capital Hill including passage of the Commercial Space Act of 1998. He went on the be Senior Advisor for Commercial Space at NASA. He told me that he was part of the movement to jump start the industry and helped coin the term “NewSpace” in the early ’00s.

Access to space used to be limited to governments, specifically those of the United States, Russia and China. The “Space Race” in the 1960’s between the Soviet Union and the Americans during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs could only be funded by national governments . Government contractors built the rockets and other equipment and they were typically subsidiaries of the defence industry. Those contracts were for cost-plus and programs were large, expensive, bureaucratic and slow.

There was a commercial space industry in SatCom after the USA passed the 1962 Communications Satellite Act that enabled private companies to own and operate satellites. We saw the launch of the Telstar satellites , Intelsat and our course Canada’s own Anik 1. The world could relay television, telephone and high speed data communications across the oceans ! It was an application of space that was private and commercial and not tied to civil, defence or the military.

NewSpace accelerated the move to privatization and commercialization of space beyond just SatCom. Through those early efforts of people like Charles, NASA and other space agencies expanded the playing field beyond Prime Contractors and Cost Plus programs. They moved to Build-to-Order and Public-Private Partnerships which was a game changer for the space industry. Contracts based on competition, performance and fixed price milestones moved more of the risk from governments and space agencies to the private sector.

With New Space we have witnessed the emergence of novel actors, primarily private and their ventures and implications for the global space sector. Some names are known widely like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin. There have been billions invested in startup ventures, not only by VC’s and private equity, but also by the public markets. A dozen NewSpace startups have gone public, or are in the process of going public, using SPACs. The space industry is ready to explode with opportunities that have been unleashed by entrepreneurs.

I am looking forward to the rest of the sessions in the course as we dive deeper now into those opportunities and ventures.

Ad Astra

Filed Under: Business of Space, Competition, Internet, Regulatory, Satellite

Back to School

November 2, 2021 By

Some of you may have noticed that I write on here about more than just international telecom. There are book reviews, conferences that I attend, the fight against telecom fraud and space. On my twitter feed and LinkedIn there is also more and more about space. Why is that ?

The NewSpace industry is one that has captured my attention and interest. There are so many parallels between what is happening in space right now and where we were in telecom back in the go-go days of liberalization and deregulation in the ’80s and ’90s. From a telecom perspective, there is over a petabyte of data coming down daily just from the Earth Observation satellites. The amount of bandwidth available for providing broadband from space is about to increase 30x ! Telecom edge computing is not just migrating from the data centre to the hyperscalers (AWS, Azure and GCS) but also 1000 km up into Low Earth Orbit (LEO )

Need less to say I am excited about the opportunities. So I am going back to school ; I am lucky enough to have been accepted into the cohort for a live course on the Business and Economics of Space.

The instructor is the brilliant Sinead O’Sullivan. Sinead is a global expert in space economics and early-stage space businesses. Currently at Harvard Business School, she works with governmental space agencies, CEOs and investors to understand space market dynamics, identify sector opportunities, create strategies for growth and execute in challenging environments within the aerospace & defense sector

Beginning her career as an aerospace engineer, she project-managed human spaceflight missions at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, designed a satellite constellation with the Brazilian Space Agency and worked on astronaut training for long-duration missions at the European Space Agency.
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Now working in the business and economics of space, she works with emerging national space agencies to develop local space economies within the private, startup sectors. She sits on the Board and Advisory Board of over $1 billion of early-stage space investment funds. She advises and invests in several startups from the earliest pre-seed stage right through to IPO. She is in space-specific leadership positions within prestigious organizations such as Sainsbury Management Fellows, Royal Aeronautical Society, the International Astronautical Federation, the US Center for Climate and Security and the Harvard Rock Center for Entrepreneurship.

The course is aimed at Aspiring Founders, Investors and those seeking a career in space related startups or enterprises. There will be guest speakers and cohort members from all aspects of the space industry including SpaceX, NASA, LeoLabs, Virgin Galactic, Axiom Space , RocketLab, Varda, Lux and Founders Fund. The chance to work and build a network of space business leaders is invaluable.

The sessions will cover topics like
1 – The History of Space and the Contemporary Space Agency
2 – Private Sector Space
3 – Space Financing
4 – A Deep Dive into Launch and Satellites
5 – A Deep Dive in Space Tourism and Exploration
6 – Space Law and Geopolitics
7 – Case Study ; Varda Space and In-Orbit Manufacturing
8 – Case Study – Hadrian and On-Earth Manufacturing

This will be vary exciting but also a huge challenge ! I will still be operating AurorA and Amitel, doing my Movember fundraiser by doing 200 Kettlebell swings a day and taking these courses all throughout November. Plus making sure everyone in the family gets a good breakfast and that we eat together at dinner. Nothing I cant handle !

If you are interested you can find more details on this course here

If I find the time, I will try to post an occasional summary on here of what we are learning.

Filed Under: Business of Space, Competition, International, Internet, Regulatory, Satellite

Elon and Jeff are brilliant ! Surely THEY can solve our broadband issues.

July 26, 2020 By
Two dishes got married; the ceremony was meh but the reception was incredible.

Much has happened since we last visited the wacky world of low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations and their use in providing improved broadband service to Canada’s rural and remote users. This past Tuesday, July 21, all of Iqaluit, the capital of the Territory of Nunavut was without communication services ; no Internet, no landline, no cell service, no cable TV – simply because it was raining ! In a first world country like Canada this is unacceptable. We need better broadband service in Canada’s North NOW.

There is a rash of breathless newspaper stories in the mainstream media touting LEO service as arriving soon to resolve our remote and rural broadband issues. I wrote about it before here, that Elon Musk is not coming to save us any time soon. I also wrote about the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of the early leader to provide LEO service to the Arctic, OneWeb, here. So where do we stand now on July 27, 2020 ?

Well on July 10, the US bankruptcy court of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) approved a joint $1 billion bid for OneWeb by Britain and Bharti Airtel. The UK government and Bharti Global, an arm of Bharti Enterprises, which part owns India’s Airtel, will each have roughly 45 per cent of OneWeb. The existing secured creditors, including SoftBank of Japan, OneWeb’s former biggest shareholder, will own the balance.

But the landscape has changed from before OneWeb’s descent into Chapter 11 in the spring. OneWeb’s original mission was to “connect the unconnected “ ; ie it wanted to provide broadband service to the millions of people around the world that do not have access to the Internet. The UK has invested $500M into OneWeb for other strategic reasons, mainly to mitigate the effects of Brexit on British industry. I sure hope they realize that it is going to cost them more, much more and that $500M was just the table stakes to play in the LEO game.

After Brexit, the UK would have been locked out of the EU’s Galileo mission. Its aerospace industry would have lost work and technology to the EU and the USA and it would have fallen behind. Investing in OneWeb, and taking the “golden share” that lets it decide who gets access to the network will let it be a cornerstone of new industrial policy for Britain. Jolly good show.

But a $1 billion investment is just the starting point, OneWeb will need to raise at least $1B if not more to fully fund the company’s plans. So to mitigate, the mission will be changed from targeting unserved consumers to one targeting governments and commercial sectors to generate revenue quickly. These use cases are more in sync with what Telesat is proposing to do in selling wholesale connectivity to telcos and ISPs, starting with the Arctic. The UK also wants to develop other use cases such as a new navigation offering different from GPS or Galileo that it could then sell to its Five Eyes partners as an adjunct to GPS. That requires adapting and redesigning the satellites to the new missions.

The UK also wants to use this transaction bring more aerospace manufacturing back to Britain. The current OneWeb satellites were made in Florida in a joint venture with Airbus. Some or all of this manufacturing is expected to move to the UK.

The transaction to close the deal to buy OneWeb from Chapter 11 is expected to close in Q4 2020. Thus the former timeline of providing service in the Arctic by late 2020 is out of reach, 2021 will be too aggressive and 2022 is more realistic. All of the changes wrought by the new ownership and new mandates have created issues and decisions that need to be navigated; technical, financial as well as political which all bring delays to actually launching services.

Meanwhile, the other proposed LEO constellations have not been idle.

Amazon’s Project Kuiper has won the backing of Ajit Pai, the Chairman of the FCC who is backing approval of the venture.

SpaceX’s StarLink venture has just begun to raise more funding to continue launching service. CNBC has reported that it is in talks to raise $500M to $1B funding at a valuation of $44B (July 23) . SpaceX has also been not so quietly signing up beta customers in Canada and the USA to test trial service of its direct-to-consumer internet service late this year.

That leaves Canada’s Telesat. Telesat was also a bidder for OneWeb during its Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That bid came out of the blue, and we still don’t know what motivated Telesat to launch the bid, nor who financed the deposit. Telesat has yet to choose a manufacturer for its satellites with apparently an announcement due any moment, perhaps at their Q2 results conference call on July 30. The biggest question mark remains around the financing of the project.

In July 2019, Telesat received $85M CDN from the Federal Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund. Once the constellation is in service, they have a commitment from the Feds to purchase $600M CDN in services over 10 years. That still leaves a huge question of how Telesat plans to finance the enormous capex to launch the LEO constellation before it sees any revenue. As we saw with OneWeb, there are not many investors around that are willing to sign the large cheques needed to finance such risky ventures. Even Softbank (funders of Uber and WeWork) balked at additional funding for OneWeb while they were the largest shareholder and creditor. Such investors need to be able to keep signing large cheques to keep funding capex. (are you paying attention Boris?)

Telesat’s current shareholders are Loral Space & Communications, a NY based holding company and Canada’s Public Sector Pension investment Boards (PSP). I am not sure either are up to the task of financing such a risky venture. Loral recently paid a special dividend of $5.50/share on May 28, 2020 distributing to shareholders funds it had received from Telesat. Not the kind of action you would expect to see from a party planning to underwrite billions of capex expenditures. The PSP is a pension fund that historically prefers ventures that provide stable cash flows at predictable rates, which is what Telesat’s legacy business provided. LEO constellations are highly speculative and very risky, the exact opposite of what the pension plan for Canada’s public sector workers want to see done with their retirement funds.

From my personal perspective (ie I am guessing) I can see a strategic buyer taking control of Telesat from its current owners and funding the LEO constellation. That buyer would be Amazon and its Project Kuiper.

Amazon’s strengths are its financial muscle and long term vision. Amazon can raise funds cheaper than most nation states. Amazon may covet some of Telesat’s strategic assets such as its protected spectrum rights from the ITU and its substantial base of satellite technology and experience. Both of those would give them a significant advantage over Starlink. Telesat and Amazon have a relationship already as Telesat signed a launch contract with Blue Origin, another of Jeff Bezos’s companies for multiple launch missions in January, 2019.

Amazon could also introduce another use case for the LEO sats that no other strategic buyer could. They could use the service internally to connect their global network of AWS data centres. In essence, it could be a part of the connectivity portion of their AWS cloud. Potentially at a lower latency than some sub-sea fiber cables. That use case may be appealing on its own.

It would give Loral and PSP gracious exits and Jeff Bezos a competitive advantage against OneWeb who will be be busy sorting out their new ownership and new mandates over the next two quarters and let Project Kuiper keep pace with Elon Musk’s Starlink as it beta trials consumer service this winter.

Never underestimate the power of bragging rights between billionaires.

We shall continue to watch this sector closely. My core message remains, do not expect LEO satellite constellations to be the saviour of Canada’s remote and rural broadband issues any time soon. We must continue to expand our network of fiber optic cables, including Arctic sub-sea cables.

Filed Under: Arctic, Cloud, Internet, Satellite

Elon is not coming to rescue Canada’s remote broadband

June 25, 2020 By
Elon Musk and StarLink
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and the StarLink constellation

The telecom press in Canada has been gushing over the news that Elon Musk and his company SpaceX has visions of coming to Canada to provide super-fast Internet service to rural and remote Canadians via their StarLink LEO (low Earth orbit) satellite constellation.

Please take a step back. Pause. Take a deep breath. Just stop it.

This is not imminent, it may never happen. In fact it probably will never happen.

First off, SpaceX only applied for a BITS licence. BITS is Basic International Telecom Service. AurorA has a BITS licence (in fact I believe AurorA had the first BITS licence provided to a non-facilities based carrier). This does not provide StarLink the spectrum required to operate in Canada. OneWeb had licensed Canadian spectrum (through 1021823 B.C. Ltd.) and so does Telesat for their proposed LEO constellation. SpaceX hasn’t yet applied for a Canadian spectrum licence (as far as I know).

The model of “connecting the unconnected”, providing broadband Internet service to the 3.5 billion people in the world that don’t have it has been around for decades. I remember the old Teledesic and Skybridge proposals, ICO, Iridium and GlobalStar who all went bankrupt. Iridium emerged from Chapter 11 eventually after a huge amount of drama (see my review of a great book on Iridium). More recently OneWeb who had already launched 74 satellites went bankrupt in March (read here) and before that LEOSat last November. As an aside, even Intelsat went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May.

Elon’s SpaceX has 362 satellites in orbit, but to actually provide service their plans call for 4,000 satellites just in the first phase deployment. To do this takes money; SpaceX need billions, and soon, to satisfy its high cash burn rate. It’s not making near enough revenue launching satellites (and astronauts) from others to cover the costs of it unpaid Starlink launches. This is also why they are desperately trying to be included in the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund auction to get a piece of up to $16B in funding, even though they cant demonstrate that they can actually provide service (and may be fudging the latency numbers, hard to prove since you cant actually test it) !

There are very few investors that can write the cheques big enough to fund an LEO sat constellation. Even large investors like Softbank balked at committing additional risk capital to a single investment like OneWeb. The history of bankrupt constellations would bear that out. COVID-19 has made raising money for risky ventures even harder. Building the business case is difficult; it costs too much money to make money, even for a SpaceX that has re-invented rockets and dropped the price of launching satellites.

LEO satellite constellations, especially using small nano satellites can provide great services for many use cases; Earth observation, low data rate iOT or M2M, remote asset tracking, weather data and even imaging. GEO sats can provide great high throughput required for TV and telecommunications, but they provide poor connectivity at Northern latitudes like Canada’s Arctic. The use case of providing broadband Internet for the unconnected is just not suited for LEO.

To connect those 3.5 billion people to the Internet requires not only the huge investment in satellites and ground infrastructure (plus legal/regulatory, and non-trivial insurance costs) but also an inexpensive antenna/receiver for the consumer to be able to plug in themselves to access the service. Given that the terminals will be in remote areas they will need to be low power usage. By definition those places are off the grid. Since the LEO sats move quickly across the sky, the tracking antenna must be sophisticated, like a electronic phased array. No one has yet to produce such a low-cost, low power terminal device.

When the constellation is finally setup, the satellites would cover the entirety of the Earth’s surface. Ninety percent of the time this would be over open water, frozen tundra, wilderness and deserts devoid of people. So a business case dependent on a use case like consumer broadband would not generate revenue 90% of the time ! In areas like Africa or the Amazon, the surface is covered by jungle. The signal won’t penetrate through thick vegetation, limiting its usefulness. Finally, how much would people actually pay to use the service ? Has Elon gone out and talked to the people in emerging markets and asked them what they need and what they can afford ? What about when that area finally gets served via a cable or fixed wireless that can provide service for an order of magnitude less ? Eventually even Nunavut will get service by one or more sub-sea fiber optic cables.

So where exactly are the customers going to come from to justify the immense capital cost of building the constellation ?

The other problem that LEO sat constellations have to solve before we actually see this service launched is the one that they create themselves by launching thousands of satellites to do so. Space debris. Low Earth orbit is already crowded with dysfunctional satellites and space debris. What happens if, no when, a StarLink satellite malfunctions or becomes derelict or collides with other satellites or space debris. The attraction of low cost sats is that they are made with commercial off-the shelf components for a fraction of what traditional GEO sats cost. But given their disposability we are going to have a huge increase in space junk.

Without strict regulatory oversight (and who would be responsible for this in space ?) and the non-zero chance of failures and malfunctions, we could see a runaway feedback loop creating tons of space debris, called the Kessler syndrome. These concerns and liabilities have still not been fully addressed for the large volume LEO constellations.

Until StarLink (or any other LEO Sat constellation) actually builds and operates a constellation without going bankrupt, solves the physics of providing low cost-low power consumer terminal equipment and can guarantee they won’t destroy low Earth orbit with space debris for succeeding generations don’t hold your breath for cheap sat based broadband service in Canada’s rural and remote areas.

Instead of waiting for Elon, Canadians should take control of their own future and build more Arctic fiber optic cables.

Filed Under: Arctic, Internet, Regulatory, Satellite

Because we all Internet !

June 1, 2020 By
The logo of the Internet Society

In February, I took the step of joining the Internet Society – Canada Chapter. It seemed like a great opportunity to meet and learn from some fellow Canadians about this wonderful thing we call the Internet that we all (well not all, and that is one issue) use every day. If it wasn’t for the Internet you wouldn’t be reading this blog post !

The Internet Society globally works for an open, globally-connected, secure, and trustworthy Internet for everyone. The Canadian chapter advocates on behalf of Canadians for an affordable, accessible, fair, open internet. Bridging the digital divide to ensure all Canadians can reap the economic and social benefits the internet can provide.

AurorA has been operating since 1994, and I’ve seen the Internet evolve dramatically over that time. My initial Internet experiences involved dial up modems, a Netscape Navigator browser and an actual written book of interesting websites ! Now it seems that all of the services that AurorA offers are related to or use the Internet in some fashion. For example, the premium voice services we offer are carried over SIP trunks on the Internet.

One of my pet peeves is the mis-conception amongst the general public that the Internet is a service from their Big Telco service provider. Big Telco is fond of claiming that it is “their” network especially when others want to inter-connect. The Internet is far from that. The global Internet consists of tens of thousands of interconnected networks run by service providers, yes, but also individual companies, universities, governments, and others. Big Telco is, at best, just a minor access ramp to the glory of the Internet.

There is no central authority that governs the Internet. This makes it possible for anyone to create content, offer services, and sell products online without requiring permission. Extending this network to rural and remote regions on Canada is also a subject that I care deeply about, as all Canadians deserve the benefits that fast and reliable Internet access can provide. The pandemic has clearly shown this as even many of our own parlimentarians were unable to connect as their Internet service was not reliable or fast enough.

The Canadian Chapter of the Internet Society has a lot of resources that I am looking forward to exploring and learning from. They also sponsor Committees, Roundtable Discussions, Conferences and Meet-ups. The meet ups are in the Ottawa area so as much as I would like to go to one, it would involve a special trip from Waterloo. Once the COVID-19 isolation restrictions are lifted, I will make the effort to get to one so that I can meet people in person in a more informal setting.

To learn more about the Internet Society you can go here, and about the Internet Society – Canadian Chapter here.

Filed Under: Arctic, Internet