Building on initial successes with an experimentation effort aimed at developing common hardware—radios and antennas—that would be installed on aircraft to communicate with different satellite communications (SATCOM) constellations in multiple orbits, the Air Force is expanding the work to new satellite clusters.
Northrop Grumman [NOC], one of four companies developing the common user terminals, on June 28 received a $79.3 million contract modification from the Air Force Research Laboratory to add work under Call 3 of the Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI) program. Northrop Grumman a year ago received an initial $90.2 million Call 3 award from AFRL to begin work on the common user terminal and hardware elements.
In March, L3Harris Technologies [LHX] also received an $89.4 million follow-on contract to build on the company’s $80.8 million Call 3 DEUCSI contract it won last May. Intelsat [INTEQ] this year received a $9 million contract and SES Space and Defense also has a DEUCSI award under Call 3.
The Call 3 announcement was issued in January 2022 to showcase that user terminals and related hardware can “switch between space internet providers as operational and business needs change.” The use cases outlined in the solicitation include fixed and mobile communications in the Arctic and airborne communications.
The vendors are “developing the radios and the control systems that host multiple modems within a single radio and allow systems to switch between those constellations,” Brian Beal, AFRL’s program manager for DEUCSI, told Defense Daily on July 3. “And then they’ll also be pairing that up with capable phased array antennas that either themselves or some subcontractors build for them.”
Northrop Grumman has gone through its preliminary design and its initial “over-the-air tests with a subset of the constellations we plan to talk to” have gone well and their follow-on contract will “expand the number and the diversity of the satellite constellation we can talk to,” Beal said. Those additional constellations include the Space Development Agency’s emerging Transport Layer of satellites in low-Earth orbit and commercial constellations, he said.
The constellations used in the initial testing include SpaceX’s Starlink—low Earth orbit–and ViaSat’s [VSAT]—geosynchronous orbit—satellites, Beal said.
L3Harris has completed its critical design review, he said, and like Northrop Grumman will be expanding the diversity of the constellations their hardware communicates with.
The critical design review validated the company’s Rapidly Adaptable Standards-compliant Radio modular open system approach to “effectively connect service-specified waveforms from Earth to commercial satellite internet constellations,” an L3Harris spokesman told Defense Daily.
SES and Intelsat are not as far along in their DEUCSI work under Call 3 but they are “doing fine,” assembling hardware to get ready for over-the-air testing, Beal said.
For airborne communications, Beal said that until four or five years ago aircraft that were “lucky enough to have SATCOM” used a parabolic dish that steered toward a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Since then, some aircraft have a single phase array antenna that can communicate directly with a single constellation like Starlink or its military equivalent Starshield, also developed by SpaceX, he said.
“But what we’re talking about [with DEUCSI] is sort of the next step where with common hardware, I can have highly agile phased array antennas and the corresponding radios and that same hardware can switch between, say five different constellations,” Beal said.