Italy is renewing its strategy for space systems and its industry is likely to benefit even further from a Franco-Italian merger well-timed for ESA security activities
Whether it is cosmic coincidence or deliberate planning, its proponents argue that the investment swap between Alcatel-Lucent and Thales involving French and Italian satellite manufacturing and service operations is well timed in relation to new European Space Agency security activities, the first ever all-European space policy and a renewed Italian strategy for space systems.
This realignment of Alcatel and Finmeccanica’s interests has created the new Franco-Italian joint venture Thales Alenia Space, also known as the Space Alliance. The venture now boasts a 7,000-strong workforce across the four European countries of France, Italy, Spain and Belgium.
In Italy, Thales Alenia Space has 2,300 employees spread over five industrial sites in Rome, its headquarters, as well as Turin, Milan, L’Aquila and Florence.
SMOOTH INTEGRATION
“We are the sixth division of Thales,” says Thales Alenia Space Italy deputy vice-president for strategy and business development Paolo Salvato, adding that he has seen a smooth integration of operations under the new arrangement. And this is despite the fact that satellite manufacturer Alenia and services company Telespazio have had to comply with the processes and policies of the Thales group in short order.
But Salvato is confident the new relationship is stronger because of the similarities between Alenia’s parent company Finmeccanica and Thales.
“Thales acts and thinks like Finmeccanica as they are an aerospace and defence company. With Thales, we speak the same business language,” he says.
Thales is a company with 70% of its market in the institutional and military world and the remaining third on the commercial side. It is Thales’s heavy involvement in government activities that encourages its new Italian partners with, as Salvato describes it, “an understanding of these long-term markets” and a belief that space is strategic to the business.
For all the advantages Salvato would identify for Finmeccania’s previous 21-month tie-up with Alcatel (see box), there is an admission that the French company is a network system provider, focused on telecommunications infrastructure. It was not as closely aligned with the core manufacturing business of Alenia, however well it may have fitted with Telespazio and its space-based services.
Because of the business heritage of Thales, Salvato says he is already seeing the French-headquartered company help its Italian counterparts “penetrate new markets and support current bids”.
There has been some speculation that an outcome of the new joint venture could be a consolidation of the product line-up for the Space Alliance.
Alenia still expects its Prisma satellite platform to continue to be offered alongside Thales’ Proteus spacecraft bus, but Salvato does not discount the possibility of a new third platform that could be the basis for French space agency Cnes and Italian space agency ASI programmes.
The qualities the two businesses bring to the new joint venture are reflected in the products and contracts they bring to the table. Mirroring the market split of 70% institutional and 30% commercial there is the construction of the International Space Station’s Node 2; a role in the ESA Aurora exploration programme’s Mars surface rover mission ExoMars; French and Italian military telecommunication spacecraft; and the building of Globalstar’s next-generation constellation of 48 communications satellites.
NEW STRATEGY
European Commission approval of the Alcatel-Lucent/Thales deal in April coincided with the appointment of Giovanni Fabrizi Bignami as the new president of Italian space agency ASI.
The following month saw the approval of the first European space programme policy between ESA and the European Union. That policy is focused on satellite-based services to aid EU policies such as agriculture and transport, but includes dual-use systems for security. For example the Galileo satellite navigation system is a civilian asset under civil control, but its signals will be used by EU member states’ military forces.
The Space Alliance sees these two events as opportunities for the newly formed company to use its combined institutional heritage to maximise the return from Italian and European space programmes.
Speaking to Flight International at a workshop on international co-operation on space exploration held in Italy in May, Bignami outlined his intentions for an ASI strategy that includes regular small satellite missions, saying: “We are now aiming for a small-satellite mission every two years. Small means 300-400kg [660-880lb] spacecraft and a cost of 50-100 million [$72-144 million].”
This new focus reflects the growing interest across the space community in constellations and formations of satellites smaller than traditional Earth observation and telecommunication behemoths. ASI has since called for proposals for such technology development opportunity missions and small spacecraft, worth about 200 million. But while the policy is welcome Alenia does not want ASI “to be too small-satellite focused”, says Salvato.
Before Bignami arrived Alenia was already the prime contractor for Cosmo-SkyMed, the civil and military Earth-observation constellation of four satellites using X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for day, night and all-weather observation. The first of the satellites was launched by a Boeing Delta II in June.
There is now talk of a second-generation Cosmo-SkyMed. That radar technology experience also has seen Thales Alenia Space provide control electronics for Germany’s SAR-Lupe reconnaissance satellites, the third of five of which was launched by Russia’s Cosmos-3M rocket on 1 November.
With the French government holding a 20% stake in Thales it is no surprise that space agency Cnes’ projects are a strong institutional source of revenue for the Franco-Italian creation. And now, with France’s Syracuse and Italy’s Sicral military telecommunications programmes behind them, it is Franco-Italian projects – such as the Symbol X satellite formation-flying technology development mission planned for 2012 – that the alliance can look forward to.
COMPETITIVE EUROPE
The Thales Alenia Space-built Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element-B spacecraft is scheduled to be launched by Russian Soyuz from Baikonur in March.
While the troubled Galileo programme’s future hangs in the balance awaiting an EU ministerial decision on funding by year-end, the other major project in the European space programme, Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES), has already seen a Space Alliance win.
Thales is to build the first of the GMES programme’s Sentinel spacecraft, “and we want the prime contract for Sentinel-3 and a role in Sentinel-2 – we want a leading role in all of them”, says Salvato.
The EU/ESA space programme’s plans for exploration have seen the Alliance take another prime role, in the Phase A design work for ESA’s ExoMars mission. Contracts for subsequent phases are now the goal.
To ensure a leading role in these and future contracts Thales, Alenia and Telespazio are seeking a new partnership to alleviate the cost pressures from having all production accounted for in euros, which continue to rise in value against the US dollar.
To relieve that cost pressure and to access new markets the Space Alliance’s aim is to find a partner located in a third country that wants space-based capabilities and has a cost and technology base that can deliver a competitive advantage.
Thales Alenia Space’s European competitor EADS Astrium has already made headway by forging a relationship with the Indian Space Research Organisation’s commercial arm Antrix. Salvato is expecting developments in the future and, rather like the drawn-out history of Space Alliance, its implications are not immediately clear.
“I can’t discuss [it], but we have something in the works,” Salvato says.
Source: Flight International
