Dirk Wallinger leaves his espresso beverage behind and steps out of a coffeeshop on the campus of Denver’s Metropolitan State University. His coat open against the cold, he points across the way to a nearly-constructed structure---the college's metal-and-glass-fronted Aerospace and Engineering Sciences Building. When the building is finished this summer, Wallinger’s company---York Space Systems---will set up a 7,000 square-foot shop inside, creating and eventually controlling satellites (maybe even one you create) with the help of students.
Wallinger gestures toward the fourth floor. “York will be right up there,” he says.
From right up there, York plans to mass-produce a satellite platform that does for the space industry what the industrial loom did for clothing.
Most of the time, if you want to send a serious satellite into orbit, you commission a one-off instrument, built to your personal measurements. But Wallinger’s company is creating a universal platform that can carry whatever sensors, transmitters, receivers, cameras, and experiments a customer wants. That lowers cost and speeds up the design process. And it will help the burgeoning satellite industry---a $168 billion industry in 2010 that had grown to $208 billion by 2015---move from prescription to over-the-counter mode.
What York will offer is a small-but-not-tiny flyer, much more capable and bigger than a CubeSat. York's satellites cost less than other similar-sized satellites because they come in bulk. They can go into any orbit and do Earth observation, meteorology, or communication, without any modification to the platform. And the company plans to produce---with the help of those student-workers---up to 200 satellites a year, shipping orders out as soon as they’re placed. Bigger, customized satellites take months or years to get off the ground.
York isn’t the only company to have thought, "Standard satellites? I'm brilliant!" Mitsubishi has one called the DS2000, which 14 satellites will use by 2018. Russia first developed its Universal Space Platform, nicknamed Viktoria, in the 1990s. Around the same time, France made the multi-use Proteus, currently undergirding five satellites.
And plenty of companies mass-produce satellites to cut down costs. You can buy your from-the-factory CubeSat kits right here, for instance, while Lockheed Martin has used the same analogy Wallinger is fond of---“the Model-T of satellites”---to describe its LM700. They made 90 of those, nearly all of which became the Iridium communications satellites. Today, Lockheed's standard platform is the A2100, used by the likes of your favorite weather satellite, but it's vastly more expensive than York's small model. A company called OneWeb says it will outpace York's capabilities, building three satellite clones per day, but they're not for sale: They're for OneWeb's global internet service.
York, on the other hand is open for business. Right now, 33 customers---evenly split between governmental and not---have signed on to York's particular vision. One of its biggest initial deals is the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command. In a late-2017 mission called Harbinger (of what?), York will send up its base-model satellite, equipped with radar and a laser that beams back to the ground. After that, a launch company called Vector has agreed to at least six satellite liftoffs between 2019 and 2022. But the company won't just dig into the defense industry's pockets. “A healthy commercial space industry will advance science, not just the military,” Wallinger says. With the satellites' cost---$675,000 for the base model---pure scientists could come aboard.
So while York’s founding principle---standardized sats, en masse---is not a new one, the company may be the first to bring the idea to The People. They'll sell, to anyone, affordable and mass-produced satellites that weigh 143 pounds and can carry 187 more. These are small enough to stay out of Lockheed's space (and big enough to stay beyond the CubeSats'), occupying a middle ground for the person who just wants a cheap, Goldilocks-sized satellite, right now. "The world will always need Ferraris," Wallinger says, referring to whiz-bang custom sats from the world's Lockheeds. "But you don't need one to go get a loaf of bread."
Wallinger thinks Denver is the right place to make the satellites that can go get those proverbial grain products. As he says this, students stream in and out of the coffeeshop, walking past the shadow of York’s future home. As part of internships and senior design projects, they'll work there with York's engineers.
The newly-constructed building where they'll work is a $60 million bid by the university and the state of Colorado to train its own future tech workers, rather than importing them. The building's 118,000 square feet will hold classrooms, labs, industry partners like York, 3-D printers, CNC machines, and a curriculum that local aerospace companies helped design.
It's not a bad bet. Colorado's aerospace economy is second only to California's, home to legacy companies like United Launch Alliance, Lockheed Martin, and Ball Aerospace---and Sierra Nevada Corporation, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, DigitalGlobe, and Raytheon. Startups are settling in, too, like Boom Technology, which is making a supersonic aircraft, and robotics company Altius Space Machines. Somebody has to work at all these places.
Programs like the one at Metropolitan State aim to train Coloradans for those space sector jobs. And the school has both low tuition and students who actually represent Colorado’s demographics pretty well, with roughly equal numbers of men and women, around 40 percent students of color. If one of the commercial space industry's goals is to increase access to space---as York hopes its satellites will---a good way to start is to increase access to the industry itself.
