Capitalism in space The Swedish subsidiary of the European aerospace company OHB yesterday announced it has won a $285 million contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to build and maintain a six satellite weather satellite constellation.

The company had already successfully launched and tested a single demo satellite, proving a small satellite could do the job.

The foundation for this is the Arctic Weather Satellite (AWS), which OHB Sweden successfully placed in orbit as a demonstrator more than a year ago. The OHB SE subsidiary developed the small satellite on behalf of the European Space Agency ESA in record time, using a deliberately chosen New Space approach. Only three years passed between contract award and launch.

This new constellation is dubbed EUMETSAT Polar System – Sterna (EPS-Sterna), and will supplement and eventually replace the expensive government-built Eumetsat weather constellation presently in orbit.

OHB Sweden is the prime contractor for the delivery of the satellites for the EPS Sterna constellation. The consortium also includes Omnisys in Sweden as the supplier of the microwave instruments, which constitute the primary meteorological payload. A total of 20 satellites will be delivered under the contract. The industrial team includes approximately 30 companies. Germany is also strongly represented by SMEs that will contribute key hardware for the instrument and the satellite platform. The satellites will be procured by EUMETSAT through ESA. EUMETSAT itself will develop the ground segment, procure and provide the launch services, operate the satellites, manage the constellation and distribute the data through its data distribution mechanisms, which has a planned operational lifetime of 13 years.

This contract is another example of Europe’s fast shift in the past three years from the government model to the capitalism model. It took ESA almost a decade to finally decide to make that shift, but once it did it seems to be moving far faster than NASA did to implement it.