WASHINGTON — Many years-old military ground stations that track and control satellites are projected to expire of capability as more spacecraft are launched to orbit. Despite a capability crunch, industry executives say the military shouldn’t be making the most of ground stations which might be now provided as a industrial service.
Business services could help the Space Force cope with a shortage of capability at satellite control centers but face an uphill battle for acceptance, executives said last week on the MilSat Symposium in Mountain View, California.
“I’ve watched this problem for a very long time,” said John Williams, CEO of Atlas Space Operations.
Williams is a former Viasat executive and retired military officer who operated satellites for the U.S. Air Force greater than 20 years ago.
The Space Force today relies on an aging ground infrastructure generally known as the Satellite Control Network, or SCN, to trace launches and send commands to spacecraft in orbit. Despite upgrades and attempts to make use of industrial antennas, the Space Force faces a shortage of capability, the Government Accountability Office noted in a report in April. The SCN, which incorporates 19 parabolic antennas distributed across several locations all over the world, has been in operation since 1959.
‘In matches and starts’
“I even have the excellence of being a former Satellite Control Network commander,” said Williams, who noted that the Air Force, and now the Space Force, checked out industrial ground station services in “matches and starts through the years.”
The SCN illustrates the broader challenge the federal government continues to wrestle with, which is identifying what functions are “inherently military, versus what they’re willing to purchase as a service from industry.” said Williams.
Atlas Space Operations provides a network management platform that connects satellite antennas so unused capability from one ground station may be leveraged by other customers within the network.
“There are millions of antennas on the market which might be underutilized. So if the federal government needed to expand rapidly, the best way we’d approach that shouldn’t be to field one other antenna,” said Williams. “We’d take the federal government’s requirements, have a look at what size antenna, what frequency, what licensing is required. After which we’d work to seek out an answer that already exists.”
This could be faster than going through the entire procurement strategy of buying hardware, which might take years, Williams said.
The Space Force these days has reached out to the industrial industry for solutions greater than it has prior to now, he said, but on the subject of the SCN, it has been wary of economic options.
Different perspectives
“We’ve a really different perspective on deploying capability in comparison with the federal government,” said Glenn Barney, director of U.S. government programs at Kongsberg Satellite Services, generally known as KSAT.
GAO’s report on the issues within the SCN infrastructure “was really eye opening,” he said. The takeaway is that the SCN performs a significant function within the national security space architecture, but it surely’s been oversubscribed, poorly maintained and “fraught with obsolescence.”
The Space Force has handled these shortfalls by prioritizing usage to liberate capability. Within the industrial industry, “we just exit and buy more antennas,” Barney said.
To repair these problems in the long run, the Space Force has opted to take a position in a significant procurement of recent antennas. The plan is to switch as many as 12 of the SCN parabolic satellite dishes with electronic phased array antennas now in development by BlueHalo under a $1.4 billion contract.
A program to bring additional industrial capability at SCN tracking stations was launched in 2016, a project generally known as Business Augmentation Services (CAS).
However the initiative didn’t gain traction, Barney identified.
“For 4 or five years we’ve been involved with the Air Force and Space Force on what’s called the industrial augmentation services program,” he said. “This started off with the popularity that industrial services are solving a capability need.”
This system has been caught in “bureaucratic churn,” Barney said. Slightly than work out how industrial services can meet DoD needs, the discussion morphed into attempting to get industry to develop products “that we don’t provide to industrial customers,” he added. “It’s completely modified from making the most of what exists to how will we get what we would like?”
Outdated requirements
Williams said many within the military procurement bureaucracy prefer to purchase bespoke systems “because they don’t know the right way to buy services.”
Government officials indicate that they’re required by DoD regulations to “follow the necessities,” he said.
Within the case of the SCN, a few of the requirements are outdated so the Space Force is attempting to buy replacements for technologies that now not exist, Williams said.
A number of the needs identified within the Satellite Control Network’s “core requirements document usually are not needed anymore. They usually are requirements they need industrial to satisfy, regardless that there’s no industrial business case,” Williams added. “The oldsters which might be embedded within the bureaucracy are protecting their jobs and can find any reason they’ll to throw roadblocks in your path on this.”
Williams said it’s necessary for the industry to tell the federal government on what technologies can be found today and what’s on the horizon.
Lacking sufficient insight of what the market can offer “results in inaccurate or not holistic requirements documents that come out,” he said. “Once they understand that, that may help them get what they’re really in search of.”
“The most important challenge for all of us on the industry side helps the federal government understand what’s really possible,” Williams added.
While at Viasat, Williams worked with the Space Force on the CAS program. He said the project struggled to compete with the “traditional product buying mindset, and attempting to fit this round peg into this square hole that they understand.”