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The Fort Wayne operations of Raytheon Network Centric Systems and ITT Geospatial Systems are among the Indiana businesses likely to benefit from a new direction NASA is taking.
The agency’s decision to focus on scientific research and turn most space transportation and logistics work over to the private sector could make more funding available for projects involving locally developed ITT satellite payloads and Raytheon situational awareness technology.
The new direction “is going to mean millions for Indiana,” said Brian Tanner, president of Space Port Indiana, a Columbus company he founded in 2008 to perform lower cost but demanding operational evaluation of equipment that must work perfectly in space. The cancellation of a program that would have developed a space shuttle replacement will redirect up to $25 billion to the private sector, Tanner said, and “we’re right there in the midst of it because we’ve been preparing for it because we knew it was going to happen.”
Space program plans announced by the Obama administration last month will add $6 billion to NASA’s budget and beef up its earth observation work while extending the life of the International Space Station and encouraging development of a commercial space transportation and logistics business.
Buying seats on U.S. commercial spacecraft to help accelerate their development will reduce the length of time the United States has to rely on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get back to the space station after the space shuttle program ends later this year, NASA officials said.
Space Port Indiana is developing reusable rocket platforms, “and will start working on that system in earnest here in the next few months,” Tanner said.
This month, its attention is focused largely on an airspace management system engineers at Raytheon in Fort Wayne are developing for it.
The joint project has been under way for about a year, and Tanner said he expects to be able to announce test sites for the system about the same time Space Port Indiana starts to get busier with the reusable rocket development.
Last month, NASA officials were briefed on the system by Tanner and Tim Morris, a technology acquisition manager for Raytheon and a Space Port Indiana advisory board chairman.
The Federal Aviation Administration also received a robust demonstration of the system, which is compatible with a next generation air traffic control system under development for the FAA.
Tanner and Morris met last month with Lori Garver, deputy administrator at NASA, during the annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, D.C
The conference is among the more important events for commercial space ports around the country, and “we have been given approval by the Space Ports Council to take the lead on the airspace management system for the group,” Tanner said. “NASA is planning a visit in the next few weeks.”
Morris said some of the system’s development involves leveraging situational awareness technology for which Raytheon is well-known. The U.S. military has been using it in Iraq.
To explain the difference the system could make for astronauts in the simplest terms, he compared flying a space flight today to taking a long trip in a car without windows. Every turn or steering adjustment the driver makes must be based on information received over a radio or wireless phone.
Giving the astronaut a laptop with airspace management system access is like putting windows in the car.
The system tracks everything flying around in low earth orbit and U.S. airspace and calculates where it will be, to provide “understanding of what’s out there, where it is and what you can do about it,” he said.
All that information is shared in real time in order to prevent collisions and help manage wireless signals so they don’t interfere with each other. “Every satellite is a transmitter,” Morris said.
Space Port Indiana has used high-altitude balloon launches to provide near-space evaluation of equipment such as the commercial telemetry and global positioning platform it tested for Raytheon about a year ago.
And Morris said Space Port Indiana has used a version of its airspace management system successfully for balloon launches of that type.
Engineers developing the system have access to all commercial flight and satellite position information it requires, but are still working with a number of agencies to obtain access to additional useful information, he said.
Tanner said testing the system at other space ports will provide an opportunity to add improvements to it, which will suit the needs of people who will be using it on a regular basis.
The system could be ready for broader use within 12 to 16 months, he said. Making the system available will contribute to the growth of commercial space ports, and their use of it will help fund its future improvement.
For ITT, the new direction of the U.S. space program increases the funding of climate-change research involving development of satellite technologies with new environmental measurement capability.
Eric Webster, vice president for government and industry partnerships at ITT Geospatial Systems, said the space program’s earth science budget will grow by $2.54 billion over the next five years.
The business and no doubt some of its competitors are in the early stages of work on programs that could benefit from the funding increase.
Two of the programs that stand out are the climate absolute radiance and refractivity observatory (CLARIO) and the active sensing of CO2 emissions over nights, days and seasons (ASCENDS).
The ASCENDS mission would invest about $100 million in its satellite instrument, and CLARIO would invest $100 million to $150 million in its instrument, Webster said.
The opportunity to bid on contracts for the instruments is at least a year or two away, he said. CLARIO’s earliest launch date comes a few years sooner than the earliest for ASCENDS.
“ITT has been doing most of the weather instruments, and now we’re getting into the climate instruments,” Webster said.
The CLARIO instrument “will measure temperature and other climate variables with much higher specificity than we’ve ever done with a weather satellite,” he said.
“Forecast models don’t need to be that precise, but need to be timely,” Webster said. “Those instruments have to run 24/7. They collect some of the information you see on TV.”
“The climate models need to be extremely accurate; they need to be able to discern a minute difference over a longer period.”
The ASCENDS mission, as the name indicates, will put up a satellite that can measure carbon-dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions on earth from space.
Its instrument will be much more robust and will have broader capabilities than any existing satellite technology, and will be accurate enough to be useful “for treaty verification purposes,” Webster said.
The treaties would be intended to reduce or slow the increase around the world of greenhouse gas emissions believed to cause global warming.
The new direction of the space program “helps to make sure the programs we’re going after are fully funded and potentially accelerated, which really helps us,” Webster said.
“Last year, we were worried there wouldn’t be enough money for those, given the competition of going to the moon and Mars and all that.”
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