The clean room at Airbus Defence & Space in Stevenage, UK, is a busy place. When Flightglobal visited in mid-March, engineers were making their final adjustments to the structure and thermal model of the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, while others were busy building the Sentinel-5 Precursor Earth observation satellite and Aeolus, which will study Earth’s wind from space.
A visit just a couple weeks earlier would also have found them working on LISA Pathfinder – now in Germany for pre-launch testing en route to deep space, where it will search for Einstein’s elusive gravitational waves.
Well-documented difficulties in AD&S's A400M military transport programme and the ongoing weakness in military spending in Europe may have left the division lagging behind the group’s civil airliner and helicopter businesses, with 2014 revenue dipping 1% to just over €13 billion ($14 billion) as EBIT slumped 38% to €409 million. But all this activity in Stevenage – and at sites in Germany and France – supports remarks made by chief executive Tom Enders during his2014 results presentationin Munich last month, when he said that the space part of the business had produced its best year ever.
This top performance included activity with the division's launchers: the Ariane 5 rocket flew nine times in 2014, and should repeat that achievement this year. These are also bullish times for the satellites unit, which designs and builds spacecraft for the telecommunications and Earth observation markets, along with scientific spacecraft such as Solar Orbiter. This unit also is responsible for ESA stars including comet-chaser Rosetta and Gaia, launched in December 2013 and now mapping the Milky Way in unprecedented detail. As unit chief executive Eric Beranger tells Flightglobal, 14 sales in 2014 included four telecoms satellites, nine Earth observation satellites and one scientific satellite, giving the business nearly a quarter of the world telecoms market by value (a sector led, for launches, by Ariane 5), putting it at number two behind Space Systems/Loral.
Beranger likes to point to quality as well as quantity. Once separated from their boosters, two of those telecoms satellites – for STS and Eutelsat – will be the first to use fully-electric propulsion to lift them into their geostationary orbits nearly 36,000km above the Earth. That innovation, Beranger says, will allow the Eutelsat unit to be “shrunk” to less than 5t, allowing it to fit in the lower seat of an Ariane 5 dual payload. STS opted to use the volume that would have been given over to fuel tanks to expand the mission.
And, Beranger notes, one 2014 customer was EchoStar, which serves the world’s seven largest satellite communications operators. “It was a very good year in commercial terms,” he says.
Given the obvious global hunger for communications services it is no surprise that times are good for a leading maker of enabling orbiting hardware. But Airbus is also feeling market momentum in the Earth observation and scientific markets. Of the nine Earth observation spacecraft sold in 2014, three will go to customers outside Europe, making Airbus the world’s number one exporter. That is a position it has held for “many years”, and which Beranger regards as “extremely important” to retain by maintaining sales to institutions like ESA, and national programmes.
Solar Orbiter: it gets hotter, much hotter
Airbus Defence & Space
Earth observation is becoming a big business – and not just for military and security purposes. Airbus is good at that – its in-development GO-3S platform will be capable ofstreaming real-time video from geostationary orbitwith 2.5-3m resolution, so two spacecraft could cover unfolding military or disaster scenes on half the planet – and, for sure, success breeds success. The GO-3S capability is built on optics technology Airbus developed for Gaia.
This kind of cross-innovation is a key strength at Airbus, exemplified by theSentinel series, the space-based components in the EU’s ambitious Copernicus Earth-monitoring programme. Where super-precise optical performance in extreme temperatures is a priority Airbus relies on silicon carbide, as it has done on projects going back 20 years to Rosetta’s origins. The compound is one of the company’s technology trump cards, and possibly the best material for structures that absolutely must retain their shape and dimensions. The Stevenage site is a key producer.
Speaking in February at IABG in Ottobrunn, near Munich – where the Sentinel-2A multi-spectrum ground-mapping satellite had finished testing and was being readied for shipping to a 12 June launch in French Guiana – AD&S head of Earth observation, navigation and science Michael Menking stressed that silicon carbide is a good example of how a “standardised” technology can be reused. This provides some certainty to performance, and also helps keeps costs under control.
But the best way to keep costs under control is ultimately what amounts to series production. As Menking observes, Sentinel-2A cost €240m – but the identical -2B unit will cost just €100m.
Sentinel-2A, the -1A radar unit launched in 2015 – and B units for both – are the first of a series of complementary missions that will end with Sentinel-6, to be launched in about 2020. Back in Stevenage, Airbus Earth-observation business manager Ralph Cordey, who used to handle scientific projects including Solar Orbiter, says the continuity represented by the Sentinels – including the -5 Precursor unit in the clean room alongside Solar Orbiter – is an indication of how the space age has reached maturity.
The trend now, he says, is to “operationality”, which means a shift from “one-offs” that prove a concept to long-term programmes such as Sentinel, which are ongoing business. Cordey says he is talking with scientists and agencies about spacecraft that will be launched in the mid-2020s, and even the 2030s. “There is a continuity in the business that we haven’t seen before.”
The line-up of spacecraft in the clean room is proof enough of that continuity, which applies to scientific missions as much as to long-running programmes such as Sentinel, says Cordey. “We’re starting to ask: ‘What would happen if we switched them off?’”
The answer is that switching off would spell trouble for scientists and service providers like weather forecasters. As a result, he says, Airbus is enjoying good business in building long-term components of our “scientific infrastructure”.
Source: FlightGlobal.com