The U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency (SDA) is pursuing the Transport Layer of proliferated low Earth orbit satellites to reduce satellite data transmission times to military forces.
Delays of 30 minutes to an hour and a half have occurred in radio frequency data exchange among satellites, as they must wait until they pass over a fixed ground station to downlink data.
SDA is moving toward intersatellite optical links, such as those carried by SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, to create an orbital mesh network of hundreds of satellites that are able to transfer data among themselves and to antennas on Earth.
And SDA is not alone in the LEO push. In July, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC) awarded 16 companies five-year indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts with five-year options to establish commercial communications for military use under a Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (PLEO) Satellite-Based Services program(Defense Daily, July 25).
The companies receiving the awards are SpaceX; Capella Space‘s Capella Federal, Inc.; BlackSky Technology Inc.’s [BKSY] BlackSky Geospatial Solutions, Inc.; SES‘ [SESG] DRS Global Enterprise Solutions, Inc.; EchoStar Corp.‘s [SATS] Hughes Network Systems, LLC; Viasat Inc.‘s [VSAT] Inmarsat Government, Inc.; Amazon‘s [AMZN] Kuiper Government Services (KGS) LLC; Intelsat‘s Intelsat General Communications LLC; OneWeb Technologies, Inc.; ARINC, Inc.; Artel, LLC; PAR Technology Corp.‘s [PAR] PAR Government; RiteNet Corp.; Satcom Direct, Inc.’s Satcom Direct Government, Inc. (SDG); Trace Systems Inc.; and UltiSat, Inc.
Hughes Network Systems said that DoD will be able to leverage Hughes’ LEO wide band communications through the 648 satellite OneWeb constellation or narrow band over the EchoStar Lyra constellation. Hughes Network Systems has said that OneWeb satellites are able to use Hughes Network Systems’ electronically-steerable, flat panel antennas demonstrated at the SATELLITE 2022 show in March last year. Hughes Network Systems has said that the flat panel antenna “hands off signals from one satellite beam to another every 11 seconds, and from one satellite to the next every three minutes.” “Over a series of tests, the antenna technology has been proven to support LEO connectivity at speeds of 190 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up; the technology also delivered average roundtrip latency of 55 ms [milliseconds],” the company has said.
Industry opportunities under the PLEO IDIQ contract range “from communications, which is probably the primary application, but also imagery and remote sensing and things like that,” Rick Lober, vice president and general manager of Hughes’ defense and government services division, said in a Sept. 1 virtual interview. “We bid the Hughes’ LEO communications, which is OneWeb based, and a new system we’re developing in the S-band, what DoD would characterize as a narrow-band system versus a wide-band system. That [S-band system] would be doing IoT [Internet of Things] applications and ultimately 5G satellite direct-to-cellphone, not-terrestrial network [NTN] applications.”
While SDA’s Transport Layer is to allow intersatellite communications between orbits, DoD, through the PLEO program, is making provision for commercial backups to military communications systems, if needed.
Starlink’s provision of rapid communications to Ukrainian military forces through its 4,000 LEO satellites is widely known, but DoD has not released the dollar amount of an arrangement with SpaceX in June to fund the continued provision of Starlink to Ukrainian forces. Starlink is an odds-on favorite to win at least some task orders under PLEO.
“Starlink did have a head start, but at this point the Hughes OneWeb offering is equivalent, and, in our mind, is a better application within the DoD because the OneWeb system will be an enterprise-grade system only,”Lober said in the Sept. 1 interview. “OneWeb is not gonna be sold to consumers like Starlink is. There will always be a service-level agreement with a committed information rate. 99 point [percent] whatever reliability–you’ll get that level of service. Starlink really was kind of a ‘good, better, best.’ I believe on the PLEO contract they are offering some type of service level agreements, but what we’ve found is that that can be difficult in a consumer-grade network because as your consumer usage grows with subscribers, or as it varies during the day with peak times, you’re not just gonna have the bandwidth to service those consumers and the DoD on a service-level agreement.”
Defense Daily will add any response from SpaceX on its PLEO offering.
“I think that [enterprise-grade] will be a big plus for the DoD,” Lober said.
In addition, while LEO orbits do offer rapid data transmission, geosynchronous orbit satellite services also offer advantages, such as area focus, data security, and lower cost.
For the PLEO program, DoD “ought to be evaluating all the vendors that are out there, and there are only two right now–Starlink and Hughes OneWeb,” Lober said on Sept. 1. “We’ve got Amazon and Telesat coming. LEO is not a panacea. GEO satellites put a tremendous amount of capacity over one fixed spot. Our latest Jupiter 3 satellite that we launched a few weeks ago is hundreds of gigabits of capacity laid over the U.S. The issue with LEO satellites is that 70 percent of the bandwidth is over the oceans so that’s great for the Navy and cruise ships, but there’s not a lot of people in the oceans so the way you get around that is you launch a lot more satellites which OneWeb has done and Starlink has even more up there. But it’s still very difficult to get to that [capacity] level of a GEO satellite. You start getting a couple of commercial airplanes, a couple of DoD UAVs flying, and consumer networks, my feeling is you’re going to run into times when you just don’t have enough [LEO] bandwidth to service all those.”
“What happens then is you go into what we call a ‘best effort service,’ and they would probably do that for the consumers first just like your cell phone when the network gets crowded, you get cut back whether you know it or not,” Lober said. “Those kind of things are gonna happen, and the question is will there enough [LEO] bandwidth that you can guarantee a real-time streaming video type service for the DoD.”