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Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
    The Aerojet Rocketdyne operation in Redmond brags about the fact that it has built thrusters for every single U.S. interplanetary mission. This includes creating the propulsion systems for landing NASA probes on Mars. Ken Young is the general manager for Aerojet Rocketdyne in Redmond. He said “This week we’ll celebrate 20,000 engines produced at our facility. If you think about it, that’s a pretty remarkable number. The path to Mars goes through Redmond.”
    The rocket business has changes significantly since the early days when most space activities were carried out by national governments. Young estimates that the proportion of Aerojet Rocketdyne business that is devoted to missions by private space companies has gone from twenty percent to sixty percent in just the last twenty years.
    Most activity in the private space sector is dedicated to telecommunications and observation of the Earth. Both of these applications will be expanding rapidly in the near future. Multispectral imaging for Earth observation will facilitate new approaches in fields ranging from firefighting to crop and forest management.
    Curt Blake is the CEO and president of Spaceflight, a company based in Seattle. Spaceflight manages launch logistics for operators of small satellites. He said, “Today, you can get an image once a day, basically. What we’re seeing with a lot of our customers are very close to 60- to 90-minute lead times, coming down to 30 or 40 minutes. So if there’s a place over the Earth you need a picture of, you can get it very fast commercially.”
     With respect to telecommunications, SpaceX, Amazon and OneWeb are creating mega-constellations of satellites. The demands for populating these constellations of communication satellites will provide business for small-satellite builder for many years.
     There are potential problems with the proliferation of satellites in Earth orbit. One big problem that is already the subject of heated debates is the fact that hundred to thousands of new satellites in orbit will interfere with astronomical observations. There is also the possibility of space traffic jams. A Starlink satellite and a European satellite for wind measurement almost collided last September. There is an increasing risk of satellite collisions. Blake said, “There’s no space traffic management system. We just need to have a really good space traffic management system.”
    U.S. and European officials are working on the problem of overcrowding in orbit. There may be limited time to develop a global satellite tracking system. Meyers said, “There are going to be collisions, and there will be a lot of debris created … Once orbits have those kinds of problems, we will have to stay out of them, and they won’t be available for operational spacecraft for potentially decades. That’s a really big deal. There are people who feel that the mid-orbit ranges will be unavailable … starting about 10 or 15 years from now. So the problem’s got to be solved.”
    Will proliferation of satellites and space junk interfere with our exploration and exploitation of space or will orbital activity come to dominate the twenty first Century? The major players in the Greater Seattle’s satellite industry may play a crucial role in determining the answer.