By Jen DiMascio
The president is asking for approximately $8.6 billion to fund research, development and purchasing of Air Force space platforms for fiscal year 2009, including a 21 percent increase in funding for programs that respond to the threat seen after the Chinese launched weapons against their own satellite last year.
In addition, the service will fully confront software fixes on the Space Based Infrared System early warning satellite. The service has added $400 million in its future years defense plan beginning in FY ’09 to address software problems, an Air Force official told reporters in a background briefing last week.
“We’ve got some tough things in our space future in our space program, but I like to remind people we’re doing pretty good, actually,” the Air Force official said.
Although the service was moving toward space situational awareness before the Chinese anti-satellite test last year, funding experienced a significant uptick this year over what the service predicted one year ago.
Last year’s FY ’09 projection sought $190 million for space situational awareness. This year, the service is actually requesting $240 million, the official said.
“Our response has been most evident in space situational awareness. That’s where the warfighter wants to get better there quickly,” he said.
That includes an effort to see what other material is in space, whether something is close to U.S. satellites and whether those items are moving in concert with U.S. spacecraft–moving “provocatively,” the official said.
“We have to improve space situational awareness to where it is more than just a catalog of 17,000 items,” he said. “We have to try to understand what is up there in space, keep a handle on it as it moves around, try to determine its intentions as it moves around. That is where we have increased a lot of work in the space situational awareness arena.
More specifically, it includes upgrades to ground-based systems like the Space Fence.
According to service officials, the current fence works well for finding things, but operating in the S-band frequency would provide more accuracy. Currently, the service is conducting an architecture analysis of Space Fence sensors, and that analysis is driving the Air Force’s outyear budget plan this spring, he said. An initial capability is planned for 2015; last year, the schedule was extended by two years, he said.
Another challenge for Air Force space this year will be repairing SBIRS, a program for which it is requesting $2.3 billion in FY ’09. That amount funds for assembly, integration and testing of the first to geosynchronous earth orbit satellites, operational testing of the first highly elliptical orbit payload and development of the ground segment, according to budget documents.
The service has projected a launch by late in 2009, according to the service official. To get to that point, the service will have to make fixes to the flight software system.
The Air Force began to see small problems in early 2007.
“We didn’t recognize it as a terrible problem, because it was only a few discrepancy reports,” the official said. “Then the number grew, and it was harder and harder to work it off. You had a divergent system. You were discovering more problems than you were solving each day.”
The problem rested in two processors that were slow because they were radiation hardened and created in the 1990s. A timing loop was slowing down the link between the two processors. The redesign puts a lot more of the software on one of the processors, so it doesn’t have to rely as much on a “handshake” between the processors that was contributing to the slowdown, the official said.
The service has not finished re-coding and re-hosting the software. That’s a lot of work yet to finish, he said, adding that the good news is it doesn’t have to hold up work on the spacecraft itself.
In addition to reworking SBIRS, another area of focus for the space program is to protect its constellations.
The Air Force is seeking $1.2 billion for the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle. That line item helps the department buy four launch vehicles, launch services and support activities, budget documents state.
The request includes $35 million for the Wideband Global Satellite to provide launch for the third satellite and continues production of the fourth and fifth satellites and full production of the sixth. The request seeks $17 million for additional funding for the Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite and $388 million for research and development of the ground control system, budget documents said.
The service is seeking $843 million in research funding for the Transformational Satellite Communications as it seeks to work through a block approach, officials said, adding the program has taken a significant hit.
Development of the Global Positioning System III also increased over last year–rising from a $482 million appropriation to $728 million request, according to a briefing chart.
Operationally Responsive Space (ORS), a recent darling on Capitol Hill, increased its budget over last year’s appropriation to $110 million. Among the things that ORS can do is to rebuild systems on short notice–something that helps the service’s space-protection mentality, the official said.