The U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency (SDA) is planning a test this summer of space-based Link 16 tactical messages to Norwegian military forces.
Last November, SDA said that it had debuted the provision of Link 16 data from space with three Tranche 0 Transport Layer York Space Systems satellites that demonstrated network entry through space to ground connection from Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) to a series of receivers using terrestrial radios (Defense Daily, Nov. 29, 2023).
Those tests involved passive and active network entry, synchronization, and transmission of multiple tactical messages from satellites using L-band radios aboard the three Tranche 0 Transport Layer satellites to a ground test site in a Five Eyes nation, SDA said.
The agency has lacked Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approval to broadcast Link 16 from space into U.S. airspace, so SDA sought and received a waiver last year from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to transmit to another nation in the Five Eyes alliance.
SDA has not identified whether that country was Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, or Australia, but it is likely that the participating country was Australia or New Zealand, due to the U.S. focus on potential conflict with China.
The test this summer is to help proliferate space-based Link 16.
The Norwegians “allowed us to put a ground entry point in their country for our Tranche 1 satellites so we’ll be able to do our command and control through Norway so we have a good geographic distribution around the globe so we can have frequent contacts with our constellation,” SDA Director Derek Tournear said at the Space Foundation’s Space Symposium in Colorado Springs on Apr. 10.
In addition to that collaboration with the Norwegians, “NATO is using Link 16– what we will use in any fight over the next 10 years–and so they’re [the Norwegians] partnered with us to test later this summer Link 16 from the SDA constellation directly into their country’s forces using their existing Link 16 connectivity using the NATO cryptography,” Tournear said.
Last month, he said that SDA had resolved spotty Link 16 delivery from space to military forces over existing radios–contacts that sometimes lasted just 30 seconds and worked half of the time (Defense Daily, March 18).
“What I’ll say now is we started testing again with that Five Eyes partner, made some software modifications to fix some problems we had on orbit that was causing those challenges,” Tournear said last month. “Link 16 from space is now working.”
SDA said last month that recent Link 16 tests from space have had a 90 percent success rate, and network connections lasted about nine minutes.
Fielded since the 1970s, Link 16 is a tactical datalink communication system used by the U.S., NATO, and coalition forces to transmit and exchange real-time situational awareness data.
Link 16 is part of the DoD Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort, and SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture is the space linchpin of CJADC2.