After the previous articles about Hemeria and Promethee, let us finish this series on 2023 French newspace, albeit a bit late. This article will touch upon the small satellites services the armed forces are procuring, namely the FLORE SIGINT satellite, the Hyp4U hyperspectral one, and the policy behind these choices.
FLORE
FLORE is a signal intelligence (SIGINT) satellite from Unseen Labs, in partnership with the ministry of armed forces. Contrary to the usual business from Unseen Labs, which is maritime surveillance through monitoring ships radars and radios, FLORE was the result of a call for projects from the state for a generic dual-use SIGINT small satellite that can be used also for terrestrial applications. FLORE stands for Flight Demonstration of RoEm, ROEM meaning SIGINT in French.
The pictures released of FLORE show it is different from the usual BRO satellites launched by Unseen Labs, although contrary to other SIGINT constellations it keeps the single-satellite architecture that made the success of the firm. First, the bus is not built by Danish GOM space, but by U-Space, which is understandably a French company. U-Space also built the bus for the NESS spectrum monitoring smallsat, which can also perform SIGINT. Second, the architecture of the payload seems different. The BRO has 4 antennas at the back, each around 30cm long. Since the company advertises it can track “dark ships” which have their AIS cut off, it must be able to track a combination of navigation radars and radio communications. Standard shipborne VHF radios operate around 150MHz, meaning around 2m of wavelength, which is coherent with the back antennas on the BRO, since from tip to tip a pair must be around 1m, forming a good dipole antenna matched for VHF.
Ship navigation radars are usually in X or S band, so with wavelength around 3cm and 10cm respectively. That’s short for the 4 back antennas, but the unusual deployable disk on the Earth-facing side might be antennas for that. There’s also something at the center, which might just be an Earth-sensor camera though, or the downlink antenna.
If we are to believe the images, there is nothing of the VHF antennas and the deployable disk on FLORE. Instead, there are three small patch antennas. One of them is probably for downlink, but the other two must be for collecting short-wavelength signals. X-band collection is very likely as that’s what most military fire control radars use. There seems to be no coverage at medium or long wavelength, but that can be explained by the fact FLORE is just a demonstrator, probably to collect short-wavelength data, and if the armed forces are interested in what can be collected in VHF or UHF, they can contract Unseen labs to experimentally collect that with a BRO while it is over land. In fact, for coastal regions, BRO must already collect both ground and naval signals, so they must already have a database of relevant terrestrial signals. They might even start launching a terrestrial SIGINT service in the future, like their competitors, because the press release indicates FLORE will be dual-use.
A final point of comparison with the BRO is that there are two deployable solar panels on FLORE, while the BRO use a smaller surface of fixed panels. That indicates the payload will use more power, or the duty cycle of the satellite will be higher.
FLORE is an interesting development in French SIGINT, as the previous constellations where triplets of much larger formation-flying satellites built by Airbus (the Unseen Labs founders are former Airbus employees), namely ESSAIM, ELISA and the current CERES. The successor of CERES, called CELESTE, is being designed, and documents from the ministry state that care will be taken to see what can be done with small satellites instead of the traditional approach.
To close the Unseen Labs topic, they have also been contracted by the ministry to test an optical data downlink on one of their BRO (The RF data to be downlinked is quite sizeable). That’s the Keraunos program, which will use the ground station and 1U optical onboard terminal from Cailabs, another French firm located in Rennes, like Unseen Labs. The aim of the 5M€ project is to test the technology for cheaper ground terminals that compensate atmospheric turbulence without using adaptive optics, which is the future could be deployed aboard ships for instance.
Hyp4U
Hyp4U, short for Hyperspectral for Uses, is another dual-use Earth observation small satellite, but this time in optical band and built by the Sophia Engineering company. The firm is a newcomer in the space sector, but has a background in consulting for optical systems design. The satellite itself is larger than the BRO, with an aperture around 20cm, giving it a moderate resolution of a couple meters from low earth orbit. Sophia builds the payload and procures a bus for an established actor.
It will be launched in 2026 and if things go well and it meets a market, it could be the first of a constellation with 4 or 5 satellites. In general, hyperspectral allows for precise material classification, with civilian applications in agriculture and mining for instance, or even in general mapping for automatic classification, and in defense for anti-camouflage and decoy defeat applications among others. For instance, just using the red edge of chlorophyll allows to detect objects that have the colour of plants in visible bands, but are actually not since they do not show this edge in near infrared.
State Policy
As the cases of FLORE, HYP4U and Promethee show, the rise of dual-use small satellite is no accident. During the 2023 French Newspace days, General Engineer Portier, the head of space programs at DGA, the French defense procurement agency, explained this conscious choice. First, the rise of smallsats reduces the capital needed to get a capability on orbit, speeds up the development, and thus allows new players to enter the market. The ministry could chose to order military satellites directly from them, but instead chooses to focus on building partnerships for dual-use capabilities and buy services, as that allows to leverage private capital, thus reducing the financial burden on the state, and allowing for more experimentation and development. Consequently, before they commit to a project, they pay close attention to the possible commercial outcome to see if they will be able to get private customers to also pay for the service. Having private investors do due diligence on the new space firms and being able to compare notes on the commercial market with them is especially interesting to DGA, as it increases their confidence that they will be indeed be able to find other people to pay for part of the service.
SatelliteObservation.net 