Testimony of Dr. Robert A. Hedinger, Loral Skynet, at House Science Committee Space Weather Hearing

Testimony of Dr. Robert A. Hedinger, Executive Vice President, Loral Skynet, Loral Space and Communications Ltd.,

Before the Subcommittee on Environment, Technology, and Standards, Committee on Science, United States House of Representatives

October 30, 2003

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, my name is Robert Hedinger, I am an Executive Vice President with Loral Skynet, a communications satellite service provider, and a division Loral Space and Communications Ltd. I am pleased to appear before your Subcommittee to discuss the effects of space weather on communications satellites and the vital role played by NOAA’s Space Environment Center.

I would like to provide the Subcommittee with some background on the economic importance of the U.S. satellite industry and then address the specific questions included in your letter of invitation. Additional supporting material has been provided in the three attachments.
Let me begin by pointing out that significant commercial investment and critical telecommunications services are at risk resulting from space weather effects. As the attached charts in Appendix A demonstrate, $49.8 billion of revenue was generated and $12.1 billion of investments were made in 2002 in this industry and these figures are expected to grow in the next ten years.

Critical Commercial Satellite Applications include;

• Direct to Home Entertainment Video and audio Services
• Broadcast and Cable TV
• Radio and Audio Distribution
• Satellite News Gathering
• Paging services
• Location and tracking Services
• Rural and Remote Access Service for telephony, data and Internet
• Critical Services for Remote Education and Telemedicine
• Data communications to hundreds of thousands of locations used by the retail industry for such applications as point of sale terminals (credit card processing) and inventory tracking

Answers To Questions Asked In The Letter Of Invitation

To address your first question, space weather can affect satellite operations in the following ways.

• Temporary and/or permanent damage to onboard equipment resulting from electrostatic discharges
• Performance degradations and services outages due to particle events
• Attitude control and pointing errors due to magnetic field variations

Additional information and examples are provided in Appendix B.

To address your second question, satellite operators use data and products from NOAA’s Space Environment Center (SEC) in the following ways.

• By being prepared, the Satellite Control Centers (SCC) operated by Loral and other service providers can reduce the amount of service outage time by focusing on the corrective action more quickly (avoiding some of the initial troubleshooting)
• By communicating these events to our customers, Loral can provide them the ability to plan around potential problems.
• By activity scheduling, Satellite Control Centers can avoid sensitive maneuvers and housekeeping functions during peak storm activity
• In some instances, SEC data is used in real-time to determine the cause of observed anomalies. Using the SEC data the SCC is able to determine if a reconfiguration of the spacecraft is warranted, or if the storm is small enough that we can maintain the current configurations.
• As part of the due diligence that is performed after every spacecraft anomaly, the SEC data is also analyzed. This is done to see if there is a link between the solar environment and the anomalous condition.
• Loral also uses the archive data from the SEC during the spacecraft design and analysis activities.

Additional information and examples are provided in the Appendix B.
To address your third question, five years ago there was less information available and the data format was difficult to work with (fax, paper copies etc). This has improved significantly over the last 5 years to allow better access to the available information. Data is now available online and viewable at an individual engineers terminal.

In the next 5 years we expect to see a more reliable early warning system, a continuing improvement in the knowledge of the space environment through improved detectors and analysis tools for better spacecraft designs, and improvements in dynamic modeling for specific orbit locations.

Additional information is provided in Appendix B

To address your fourth question, the impacts to Loral and other commercial satellite operators of not being able to access the SEC services would be severe. Without the SEC information, satellite operators would not be able to cancel maneuvers based on solar environment levels and consequently we would not be able to avoid potential damage to the spacecraft. Service outages would also occur more often and be longer in duration. Spacecraft design quality would be compromised without access to current and accurate Space Weather Data.

In summary:

• The functions that NOAA SEC performs to model, predict, and send out alerts on space weather has been and continues to be critical to Commercial Satellite Operators
• NOAA SEC has provided excellent services to Commercial Satellite Operators
• It is critical to the Commercial Satellite Industry for NOAA SEC to continue providing these services without disruption.