By David Bullock
Ten years ago, the SmallSat Revolution took place and the space industry focused on decreasing the size of satellites while increasing their potential. At that time, a Washington state company, Spaceflight, provided ride share services to small satellites who would piggy back on the launches of larger payloads. By providing launch opportunities as well as satellite deployment technology, the company was able to become the leading provider launch services for ride share opportunities. Now, in addition to its current in-space transportation offerings, Spaceflight hopes to continue its space industry success by expanding its orbital transfer vehicles’ (OTV) offerings to include in-space services.
Spaceflight offers OTV services at a time when many other companies, such as Moog and Starfish Space, are offering similar services as well.
Adam Hadaller, Vice President of Engineering at Spaceflight is confident his company’s OTV technology, SHERPA, will be able to capture a good portion of the OTV market share. He said, “[Spaceflight is] really trying to get to those core elements that you need to get that in servicing aspect that is developing [in the industry] over the next few years.”
These “core elements” include having the OTV technology provide services such as refueling, docking, or providing for satellites either already in orbit or just launched, a taxing service in which those satellites need to go to a more ideal orbit.
He said, the main piece Spaceflight has focused largely on is getting to customers quickly and then taking an iterative approach, with interface flexibility. He wants to see Spaceflight try to shape its technology for the customer market at is it going forward in an iterative process. Hadaller said, “Spaceflight is constantly involved in iterative development.”
By being iterative, Spaceflight’s OTVs are designed for future use. One way Spaceflight has been doing this is by trying to maximize payload space for a launch. Maximizing space is another reason why the company has to be customer focused.
Spaceflight has started with five OTV offerings. These five offerings are derived from the SHERPA family, which include, SHERPA-FX, SHERPA-AC, SHERPA-LTE, SHERPA-ES and SHERPA-LTC. The FX is the demonstration model and is in orbit now. The AC provides more computing and navigation power. The LTE is powered by electric propulsion. The ES is a high energy, chemical bipropellant, which can navigate cislunar space. The LTC is has a faster working propellant and is also more cost effective.
“Right now, the focus is on getting our vehicles some flight heritage. We’ve flown five Sherpa variations and we’re particularly excited about Sherpa-LTE, which is in orbit right now and proceeding well with its mission. We also have two Sherpas in the works-an ES and LTC,“ Hadaller continued.
“What I want to see SHERPA do in the next couple of years is demonstrating some refueling or at least incorporating refueling equipment on each vehicle as they fly and doing some rendezvous proximity operations…” explained Hadaller.
Hadaller was one of the first hired employees at Spaceflight. He started as a mission manager and held several other positions before becoming Vice President earlier this year. He leads Spaceflight’s engineering team to develop the technical road map to find what technologies it is going to bring on.