Defense Technology International - May 2008 - (Page 30)

COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE cial Satellites, a November 2007 report from consulting ﬁrm Northern Sky Research of Cambridge, Mass., says, “The military’s bandwidth needs are going up much faster than they can deploy with their own internal assets.” Consequently, “they’ve outsourced,” says Delrosario, by tapping into the commercial satellite industry for the extra capacity to support these communication and positioning systems. Moreover, to lessen reliance on commercial systems, the Defense Dept. has been working on its much-heralded Transformational Communications Satellite System (TSAT) for several years. The price tag for it has been estimated at $14-25 billion by the time the five cross-linked satellites are slated to become operational around 2015—assuming Congress doesn’t cut funding, which it has threatened to do as costs rise for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to the ﬁve satellites, TSAT will include ground operations systems and a satellite operations center, which will be tasked with providing satcoms for all branches of the military. Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor, and Northrop Grumman is handling the communications payload that is comprised of laser and radio-frequency (RF) communications and onboard processing. The system will provide laser communications as fast as 10-40 GBps. between ground units and the constellation of five satellites, which will in turn use laser cross-links to provide real-time data communications anywhere in the world. According to Lockheed Martin, the program “represents the next step toward transitioning the Defense Dept. wideband and protected communications satellite architecture into a single network comprised of multiple satellite, ground and user-segment components.” U. S. AIR FORCE TSAT will eventually replace the Milstar and Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) programs, and provide the Global Information Grid network. Slides presented last spring by Brig. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, commander of the Milsatcom Systems Wing, at the National Defense Industrial Assn. conference showed that when TSAT is operational, it will provide a 10-fold increase in RF capacity over current systems; offer increased bandwidth efficiency (up to 16ary); and feature dynamic packet-based resource allocation. The TSAT system will ﬁll a major void the Defense Dept. has been trying to address in satellite communications initiatives, and in the process decrease its dependence on commercial satellite providers to connect personnel in the ﬁeld. But until the program is up and running, the military will have to rely on commercial systems to meet its bandwidth needs. The problem in finding enough bandwidth to keep warfighters connected on the battlefield first presented itself in a signiﬁcant fashion during the early days of the Iraq war, when the military had to compete with news media for bandwidth space in theater. “We put a lot of money down to gain access to commercial satellite capabilities, because they are allocated on a ﬁrst-come, ﬁrst-served basis,” said Maj. Gen. Steven Boutelle in 2003, when he was about to become the Army’s information officer. “We beat out Fox and CNN before they could reserve the bandwidth.” Delrosario says the military learned from that experience and is now “signing longer-term contracts with commercial folks. They have a ‘portability clause’ where they buy bandwidth of capacity in advance and have it guaranteed for future use.” Until TSAT launches, one of the companies the military is relying on is Iridium. USAF Gen. (ret.) John Campbell, who works for the company, says that Iridium offers air time and data services to the Defense Dept. through the Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services contract that provides a ﬁxed price per user per month. “We just got the contract extended for a base year and four more option years,” he says. “Although voice has been our primary product from day one, we’re seeing more and more data U.S. military’s Eagle Vision-1 antenna downloads land images from commercial satellites. 30 DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL MAY 2008 AviationWeek.com/dti http://AviationWeek.com/dti

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Defense Technology International - May 2008 Contents Around the World Science Watch Tech Watch Learn and Live Think Again Vive la Difference En Route Out of the Box Package Deal On Watch Inside Job Programs Update The Net Back to the Future Busy Signal Mighty Mites Hull of an Idea Tough Enough Cutting Edge First Person In Review Insight

Defense Technology International - May 2008

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