All the sudden, you have these new visions for space exploration, and there's renewed excitement. |
For the past five years, the market has been stagnant. Everybody has been looking around and saying, is this what the industry is becoming? Or is it just part of a cycle, a temporary lull before a boom? |
The Model is a kind of gauge that we use to help us detect trends in the market. Either we are seeing a real increase in the number of space systems being proposed or we are simply getting better at finding information on programs that are out there ... It's probably a little of both. |
We've been launching an average of just over 15 large commercial satellites annually during the past three years, and we expect this level to remain about the same in 2006. |