BOEING FRONTIERS / AUGUST 2013 25 Before leaving home every morning for work at the Boeing site in Seal Beach, Calif., the one thing Bryan Welsch makes sure he has is his Boeing badge, which must be faithfully worn by all employees inside the company’s buildings and is required to log on to the Boeing network. So when he arrived at work for a Monday morning strategy meeting back in the summer of 2010 and was told to replace his Boeing badge with a mock Phoenix Space Systems badge, he knew something was up. “We were told to pretend we were in a completely different company because we were starting something completely new,” recalled Welsch, a product line architect with Boeing Phantom Works. “We had folks representing engineering, assembly integration and testing, new business development, market assessment—all coming together to address a problem.” The problem? Boeing didn’t have an offering for a growing segment of the market: smaller, more affordable satellites. The Phantom Works team met the challenge head on and rapidly prototyped two lines of satellites in three short years. The all-electric propulsion 702SP (small platform) was launched in 2012 and the Phantom Phoenix line of satellite prototypes was formally announced in April 2013—a significant feat in such a short time. “Budgets increasingly demand that customers look for satellites that are affordable, can perform a wider variety of missions, and can be brought to market quicker,” explained Erik Daehler, Phantom Phoenix program manager. “We had to think like a small, nimble company to figure out how to enter this market quickly and more affordably—we needed to be there.” The Phantom Phoenix prototypes range in size from a side-by-side refrigerator to a loaf of bread and are designed to be easily configured for mission flexibility. Potential missions range from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to planetary science and weather observation. The prototypes share a common architecture, flight software and simplified payload integration, and are designed for all major launch vehicles. “There is a hunger for smaller, simpler, “There is a hunger for smaller, simpler, faster, affordable and more agile satellites—that’s why we’re after this share of the market.” – Alex Lopez, vice president for Advanced Network & Space Systems PHOTO: (Far left) Shown is a model of the Phantom Phoenix satellite prototype, the largest in the Phantom Phoenix family. Paul Pinner/Boeing PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: (Above) With solar array deployed, a Phantom Phoenix orbits Earth in this artist’s concept. brandon luong/Boeing; Satellite graphic: Boeing; Earth photo: Shutterstock
Frontiers August 2013 Issue
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