Satellite industry dissatisfied with hosted payloads program.

AuthorMachi, Vivienne
PositionIndustry Viewpoint

* A contract vehicle designed two years ago to help the Air Force piggyback communications and sensor packages on commercial satellites has yet to get off the ground, and is frustrating industry leaders.

Once viewed by commercial satellite operators as an opportunity to share the cost of spacecraft and launch, while offering a budget-friendly and more flexible option for military and government payloads, the Hosted Payload Solutions (HoPS) program has thus far failed to live up to its promise, several executives told National Defense.

"We were extremely excited to be part of the program," said Richard Larson, executive director of business development for Merging Excellence and Innovation Technologies, a Houston, Texas-based payload integrator company. "A lot of us are kind of in a 'wait and see' mode; there are some payloads going up, but they're not going through this program."

In 2014, the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center [SMC] at Los Angeles Air Force Base awarded 14 companies the opportunity to compete for piggybacked government payloads on indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts. The companies ranged from small payload integrators, to mid-sized commercial satellite operators, to major defense contractors including Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The contract vehicle's objective was to "create a streamlined and reproducible acquisition structure to secure affordable and resilient access to space," said Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, SMC commander and program executive office for space. "In a fiscally constrained environment, the HoPS program attempts to maximize hosting opportunities to provide competitive pricing and flexibility to meet a wide spectrum of user requirements."

The contract would be worth up to $495 million over the next 15 years and scheduled to run through 2029, according to a 2014 statement.

Two years later, not a single military contract has run through the HoPS program, and two government programs committed to using the program--NASA's tropospheric emissions monitoring of pollution payload, and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program called the Cooperative Data and Rescue Services mission--remain in the early stages of drafting requests for proposals, according to the SMC's Hosted Payload Office.

Commercial satellite operators have been in talks with the Defense Department to use hosted payloads for over a decade, said Philip Harlow, president and chief operating officer for XTAR LLC, an...

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