2024 will close with more than 12 new Spanish satellites in orbit
If expectations are met, the last four months of this year will be a milestone for the Spanish space sector.
The managers of the national industry are very attentive to events within and beyond our borders because, if the schedule of orbital launch forecasts from the United States and India comes true, the year 2024 will become the year in which the largest and most sophisticated Spanish devices are positioned in orbit around the Earth.
There are already six ‘Made in Spain’ satellites that have flown into space so far this year, and at least another seven that will do so before 1 January 2025. This will be the case, provided that there are no delays due to technical incidents or due to the atmospheric situation at the launch bases.
The first Spanish platforms to take flight in the remainder of the year are a minimum of four small satellites from the company FOSSA, the first link in a constellation that will offer low-power IoT connectivity. Its two founding partners, Julian Fernandez and Vicente Gonzalez, remain tight-lipped about their total number and characteristics. What is certain is that they will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Base in California.
It will be on the Transporter-12 shared mission, which is configured every four months by the magnate Elon Musk to take a large number - around a hundred - of small, lightweight devices from institutions, research centres, companies and start-ups from different countries into space at the same time. The launch was scheduled for October, but has been delayed to an as yet unspecified date between November and 31 December.
Hisdesat and Sener finalise work on their satellites
The next planned firing is the litmus test that has Sener Aerospace's top executives, Jose Julián Echavarría and Diego Rodríguez, on tenterhooks. It is the Proba-3 mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), which consists of two satellites and whose prime contractor is the aforementioned company. It is a very complex mission, which aims to demonstrate that a pair of satellites are capable of flying in formation with very high precision between them, while studying the Sun's faint inner corona in great detail.
The Agency confirmed on 28 August that the simultaneous launch of the two spacecraft is planned ‘for the end of November’. Specifically, the launch window opens on 29 November, when they will take off in the most powerful configuration of the Indian PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) rocket. ESA is confident that the satellites will arrive at the Indian Space Research Agency's (ISRO) Dhawan Space Centre in the second half of October.
But the launch campaign that is most anxiously awaited is that of the Spainsat NG-1 secure communications satellite, about which Atalayar has written rivers of ink. Its owner and operator, Hisdesat, claimed in June 2023 that take-off on a Falcon 9 would be ‘in 2024’. Months later, that it would be ‘late 2024’, which has become ‘late 2024 or early 2025’.
The Spainsat NG-1 is the first of a pair developed to provide encrypted communications to the Spanish Ministry of Defence and friendly or allied countries. With next-generation technologies, both are protected against attempts to spoof their transmissions, have geolocation and jamming capabilities, and are shielded to prevent electromagnetic pulses from high-altitude nuclear explosions from neutralising their operation. The second, Spainsat NG-2, will be launched a year later.
The above are expectations, but what is already a reality are the six new Spanish satellites that have been placed in space during the first eight months of the year, and which are already in service or about to be operational. The last five were carried on SpaceX's Falcon 9 Transporter-11 mission, which took off on 16 August from the Vandenberg base. Four are 6U cubesats from Barcelona-based Sateliot. Another, LUR-1, belongs to AVS, a Spanish company located in the Álava Technology Park.
Weighing 57 kilos at take-off, with a deployable solar panel and an estimated useful life of five years, LUR-1 - which in Basque means earth - is a microsatellite equipped with Mice, the instrument that the company and GMV have developed to de-orbit satellites of the European Union and ESA's Copernicus constellation and their ‘Zero Debris 2030’ programme.
Five sent into orbit in August
LUR-1 incorporates on board a quantum satellite telecommunications or QKD experiment. ‘This is a photon detector capable of checking whether the photons it receives have the same polarisation as those sent by a laser emitter installed on the ground,’ explains AVS Space Director Cristina Ortega.
LUR-1 is also equipped with a camera with seven spectral bands in the visible and near-infrared. Cristina Ortega explains that its function is to ‘provide high-definition images of 1.5-metre resolution to institutions and research centres in the Basque Country, such as HAZI and AZTI, to study the natural resources in the territory and the coastline’. We also want to ‘validate the processing system to be able to market the images’.
Sateliot's four satellites are very different in design, structure and mission from the LUR-1, whose function in orbit at an altitude of 500 kilometres is to begin to shape the 5G Internet of Things (IoT) communications constellation that the company founded and directed by Jaume Sanpera wants to ‘try to start commercialising before the end of 2025’. Each of those launched on 16 August is a 6U cubesat measuring 20 x 10 x 35 centimetres, weighing 10 kilos and with a single-beam emitter.
The final constellation will consist of around 64 such spacecraft, initially planned to be deployed in orbit by 2025. But ‘we are now designing another, much larger, multi-beam model,’ says Jaume Sanpera, ‘so it would not be necessary to put so many in space’. But whether they are larger or smaller, Sanpera says that Sateliot has already signed ‘around half a thousand contracts with clients in many different countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, the United States, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico and South Africa’.
Sanpera stresses that, although ‘there are 4 million IoT devices connected to operators such as Iridium, Orbcomm, Viasat, Inmarsat, we have signed up to provide service to 8 million devices’. This is double the current number, because ‘the price trend is downwards and there are more and more people who need connectivity like the one we offer’.
It should not be forgotten that, in Spain, the space year 2024 began with the Horacio satellite, from Satlantis, dedicated to observing and measuring greenhouse gas emissions with an iSIM-90 camera with high resolution in the visible and infrared spectra and a resolution of up to 2 metres. It was launched in early March on SpaceX's Transporter-10 mission. So, barring unforeseen circumstances, at least a dozen more ‘Made in Spain’ satellites will be in orbit by the end of the year, and there will be many more by 2025.