cargo lens
by various major nations’ governments on the upswing, but, as costs decline and the high-in-the-sky notion of space tourism moves closer to reality, the private sector is increasingly involved. Government entities such as NASA are being augmented in the space realm by private-sector enterprises, with those at the forefront including PayPal founder Elon Musk’s Hawthorne, Californiabased Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known for short as SpaceX; and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ Kent, Washington-based Blue Origin. While executives of such companies are tight-lipped – particularly in the wake of such incidents as the Sept. 1 explosion of an unmanned SpaceX rocket on a Cape Canaveral launchpad – a spokesman for the Aerospace Industries Association, a U.S. trade group, did offer tempered optimism for space components as project cargo. “With the size of the components and systems that are involved, yes, I could see the space systems industry requiring project cargo transport services,” said Daniel N. Stohr, the trade association’s director of communications. “Commercial space launches could potentially grow substantially if the commercial cargo and crew programs expand to their full potential,” Stohr said. “More launches equal lower costs and higher demand, so you could see some growth 34 BREAKBULK MAGAZINE www.breakbulk.com
In a Uranus container, a satellite for an SSL project is offloaded from a Ruslan International AN-124 at Cayenne-Félix Eboué Airport in French Guiana, near the Guiana Space Center. Credit: Ruslan International
there, but predicting where, when and how that will occur is difficult. It seems likely that most of the growth in demand for project cargo services to serve the commercial launch market would be domestic rather than international.” Still, Stohr concluded: “International sales are dependent on export licensing, and the commercial satellite market is not very large, so the potential for space systems to become a growth market for project cargo transport services does not seem very likely.”
MAKING AIR MOVES
That said, international transport of space components is already taking place, and among those with a proverbial front seat is Michael Goodisman, business development manager for London-based Ruslan International, which is responsible for sales and marketing of a joint fleet of 17 AN-124 freighter aircraft of Ukraine-based Antonov Airlines and Russia-based Volga-Dnepr Airlines. The commodious AN-124s are particularly well-suited for carrying major
space systems, and, in 2015, Ruslan handled 176 flights of cargo it classified in its aerospace sector, which also includes helicopters and major aircraft components. According to Goodisman, about 20 percent of those “aerospace” cargo flights actually involved space satellites. “Every third satellite launched into space has been delivered by us to its launch site,” Goodisman said, adding that, in addition to satellites, Ruslan-marketed AN-124s have carried boosters, rocket engines, fairings and other components and ground support equipment. One flight route the AN-124s have flown numerous times with space-related cargo is from Northern California’s Moffett Federal Airfield – home to NASA’s Ames Research Center and with 1,000 acres under a 60-year NASA lease to Google – to French Guiana’s Cayenne-Félix Eboué Airport. The latter airport is a direct haul by specialized flatbed truck from Guiana Space Center, which, due in part to its proximity to the equator, is a favored launch site for the European Space Agency, France’s National Center for Space Studies, the Azerbaijan National Aerospace Agency and French commercial company Arianespace. When AN-124s have delivered satellites to French Michael Guiana for Palo Alto, Goodisman California-based Ruslan International SSL (formerly Space Systems/Loral LLC), they have been carefully encased in a container dubbed Uranus that provides a controlled environment for transit. Goodisman said Ruslan International often works with satellite manufacturers at an early stage to ensure such containers will fit into the AN-124 cargo cabin, ISSUE 5 / 2016