Is SpaceX poised to shake up optical terminal sales?

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Given its dominance in the launch market and Starlink’s explosive growth in satellite communications, what impact will SpaceX have on the optical terminal business?

At the Satellite Innovation conference here, panelists discussed SpaceX’s plans, announced in March, to sell its optical or laser communications terminals to satellite manufacturers.

Optical terminal suppliers focused on government sales said they weren’t concerned because the SpaceX terminals do not comply with the standards published by the Space Development Agency.

“We don’t see the Starlink laser as a competitor,” said Gregg Burgess, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems vice president for space systems. “If a customer wants us to interoperate with the Starlink or Starshield constellations, we’ll go buy a Starlink [optical terminal] and put it on one of our spacecraft. The SpaceX design is focused on their proprietary technology.”

Shaking up Satcom

Still, industry executives expressed little doubt that the Starlink broadband constellation and the military version, Starshield, would have an impact on the satellite communications business.

“I see Starlink as more of a competitor to SDA than it is to us,” said Justin Luczyk, general manager of Tesat Government. “They are a transport layer that is serving many users with data.”

In contrast to Starlink, though, SDA’s Transport Layer seeks to enable satellites in different planes can communicate.

For SDA, “you have to look up and down for a large field of regard,” said Inuk Kang, CACI Inc. Federal director of space systems engineering. “For a particular customer, SDA, Starlink is not the direct competition.”

SDA’s mission also goes far beyond communications. SDA is creating a “highly interoperable and integrated network-oriented systems and the ability to fight in a very different way and to develop capabilities in a more integrated way,” said Robbie Robertson, Sedaro CEO and co-founder. “It’s not just integration of their Transport Layer or commercial assets in that layer, it’s integration of their capabilities across all the domains and all the systems that they’d like to support.”

Since Starlink terminals don’t fit the government standard, the government has a choice to make, said Jeff Thornburg, Portal Space Systems CEO and former SpaceX vice president. “They can either control the standards and how they want to see technology unfold and products from the market, or they can let the market duke it out.”

If the market dukes it out, “you’re setting the industry on a path to be dominated by the organization that has the best, most affordable access to launch with the most satellites on orbit,” Thornburg said, alluding to SpaceX and Starlink.