The U.S. Space Force Space Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) in Albuquerque, N.M., is hoping to get a budget commitment in fiscal 2026 for 12 Satellite Communications Augmentation Resource (SCAR) antennas.
In 2022, Space Force awarded BlueHalo, acquired last month by AeroVironment [AVAV], a $1.4 billion Other Transaction Authority rapid prototyping contract for SCAR (Defense Daily, May 24, 2022).
“If we’re given a bunch more money, and we’ve gotta go build these [SCARs] at scope and scale, we might go out and hire other companies that can do this,” Kelly Hammett, the director of the Space RCO, said on Tuesday during a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies’ virtual forum. “They don’t have to all be identical. We will place these around the world. The reason we put the contract out for 12 is we had analysis that said 12 can handle the worldwide capacity.”
“I think when the budget settles, we’ll be somewhere between three and 12,” he said. “That’s what’s envisioned to be needed for the next five to 10 years.”
SCAR’s provision of non-fixed, electronically steerable phased array antennas is to increase geosynchronous orbit communications’ capacity 10 times over the DoD Satellite Control Network’s (SCN) 19 parabolic antennas–three at Vandenberg Tracking Station at Vandenberg Space Force Station, Calif.; two at Kaena Point Space Force Station, Hawaii; three each at Diego Garcia Station on Diego Garcia and Guam Tracking Station at Andersen AFB, Guam; three at the Telemetry and Command Squadron in Oakhanger, England; three at the New Hampshire Tracking Station at New Boston Space Force Station in New Hampshire; and two at the Thule Tracking Station at Pituffik Space Base, Greenland, formerly known as Thule Air Base–DoD’s northernmost installation.
Begun in 1958 to support the National Reconnaissance Office’s CORONA imagery satellites, SCN aids telemetry, tracking of space objects, and command for U.S. defense satellites and space programs run by NASA and foreign allies.
“Some level of modernization is required for the current SCN,” Hammett said on Tuesday. “The oldest weapon system in the Department of the Air Force is the B-52. The second oldest is the Satellite Control Network. A lot of these are analog electronics, and they are not identical. I talked to Shannon Pallone [Space Force Space Systems Command’s program executive officer for battle management command, control and communications], and she said it’s just a nightmare because they’re analog electronics that you have to go try to find on eBay when something breaks and goes out.”
“There is no supply of these spare parts any more,” Hammett said. “I think, eventually, either we’ll have to do a major refurb of the back-end electronics on these, or we’ll have to replace them with SCARs. We’ll see how SCAR proves out, look at the price point, and make those decisions on down the road.”
Congress provided for the establishment of the Space RCO in the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act to field space systems within one to five years.
BlueHalo teamed with Kratos [KTOS] on SCAR, which is to include Blue Halo’s Broad Area Deployable Ground terminal enabling Resilient communication (BADGER) to allow multi-band ground communications based on Blue Halo’s a Multi-band Software Defined Antenna (MSDA) technology. MSDA is to include re-configurable beamforming tiles.
The $1.4 billion award to Blue Halo for SCAR in 2022 included an engineering development unit, “a first operational system, and then it [the contract] had options for up to 12 [SCARs],” Hammett said on Tuesday. “We have not funded that because we don’t have the money for all 12…yet. They [Blue Halo] have gone over the last couple of years through three generations of design iterations on the RF [radio frequency] sub elements that go on the BADGER.”
“We think we are at production level with the tile design now,” he said. “They are integrating those systems, and we expect the first full-up operational BADGER later this summer and the first unit we can take out into the field by the end of the year. We are getting to the point where we expect to take these out to the field and test them to verify that we’ve met the performance requirements we established.”