Orion Space Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Arcfield, recently announced its Rapid Revisit Optical Cloud Imager satellite, also pronounced “rocky,” has launched successfully.
The electro-optical/infrared weather system spacecraft will scan the clouds worldwide to predict weather patterns more effectively. That’s a very big deal.
“Government uses weather all the time ⏤ when they’re moving things or making big decisions on logistics ⏤ and of course, the military uses weather for moving people around and preparing for campaigns,” said Chad Fish, president and general manager of Orion Space Solutions.
RROCI takes this to the next level.
“This is a next-generation weather sensor that’s going to support military and civilian needs,” Fish said. “It’s taking advantage of the technologies that have come online over the last decade, and it’s putting those capabilities into a very small spacecraft. Because they’re small, we can launch many of them, covering the globe and providing data points everywhere for a very in-depth picture of the world.”
The recent launch of the RROCI prototype, built for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command, will demonstrate the system’s capabilities. It aligns with Orion’s overall effort to help government and industry effectively use the expanding space domain.
“We provide mission solutions to solve next-generation problems,” Fish said. “This is just one example of the areas we’re working in. These small satellites offer low-cost access to space and the ability to get a lot of information from space.”
Orion has other spacecraft making weather and non-weather measurements.
“This is just one example of our capability to do that,” Fish said. Fundamentally, “we are pathfinders. We’re the folks that go out and do things for the first time, who push it forward.”
That forward-looking view drives opportunities for growth, Fish said.
This starts with an effort to expand opportunities within the existing client base, which includes Space Force, Air Force, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NASA, among others.
“We also would like to expand even further into NOAA,” he said, referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We’re looking to continue to serve them, and to provide additional capabilities.”
Commercial groups are starting to use weather data themselves, while also providing to the government weather-related services. With the success of RROCI and other efforts, “we’ll have the ability to sell the data to those commercial groups, and to expand on that area as well,” Fish said.
How to make all that happen? Fish describes an incremental approach.
“You start with a pathfinder mission,” he said. “You go up and demonstrate that the technology you’re providing will make these measurements. Then you move to a next-generation level, which might be a mini constellation. You put up another 10 satellites and demonstrate that they’re working in tandem.”
With success at that level, “then your customer has the confidence to go and put up a hundred of them, and really implement what you’ve always envisioned from the beginning,” he said.
The biggest challenge here is the technological complexity of space missions, especially when looking to break fresh ground, Fish said.
“It’s all new technology,” he said. “As you can imagine, when you do something new — even though you feel like you’ve got all the answers ⏤ something’s always going to come along and challenge you.”
“When you’re doing something for the first time, you have to envision all the potential challenges and prepare for those. We test as best we can on the ground: We are exhaustive and comprehensive in that. We test, test, test . . . and test again, to uncover any potential situations that might occur on orbit. But there are always technical challenges.”
To overcome those hurdles, “you always have to start with people,” Fish said. “We make sure that we have the best people, those who can envision where we need to go and can actually execute on the technology.”
Those people are the best part of the job for Fish, who served as chief operating officer at Orion Space Solutions for almost seven years and took on his current role after Arcfield acquired Orion in November 2023.
“It is exciting to be around the people who make these new ideas happen,” he said. “And the field of space itself is amazing. It’s changing every day, and it just keeps growing. We’re going out to the moon. We’re going to Mars. It’s an incredibly exciting time.”