The U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency (SDA) is pursuing the Transport Layer of proliferated low Earth orbit satellites to scale back satellite data transmission times to military forces.
Delays of half-hour to an hour and a half have occurred in radio frequency data exchange amongst satellites, as they have to wait until they omit a set ground station to downlink data.
SDA is moving toward intersatellite optical links, similar to those carried by SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, to create an orbital mesh network of lots of of satellites which can be in a position to transfer data amongst themselves and to antennas on Earth.
And SDA is just not alone within the LEO push. In July, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC) awarded 16 firms five-year indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts with five-year options to ascertain business communications for military use under a Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (PLEO) Satellite-Based Services program(, July 25).
The businesses 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 give you the option 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 in a position to use Hughes Network Systems’ electronically-steerable, flat panel antennas demonstrated on the SATELLITE 2022 show in March last yr. Hughes Network Systems has said that the flat panel antenna “hands off signals from one satellite beam to a different every 11 seconds, and from one satellite to the subsequent 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 corporate has said.
Industry opportunities under the PLEO IDIQ contract range “from communications, which might be the first application, but additionally imagery and distant sensing and things like that,” Rick Lober, vice chairman 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 brand new system we’re developing within the S-band, what DoD would characterize as a narrow-band system versus a wide-band system. That [S-band system] can 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 permit intersatellite communications between orbits, DoD, through the PLEO program, is making provision for business 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 the 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 greater application inside the DoD since the OneWeb system can be an enterprise-grade system only,”Lober said within the Sept. 1 interview. “OneWeb is just not gonna be sold to consumers like Starlink is. There’ll at all times 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 sort of a ‘good, higher, best.’ I imagine on the PLEO contract they’re offering some variety of service level agreements, but what we’ve found is that that could be difficult in a consumer-grade network because as your consumer usage grows with subscribers, or because it varies in the course of the day with peak times, you’re not only gonna have the bandwidth to service those consumers and the DoD on a service-level agreement.”
will add any response from SpaceX on its PLEO offering.
“I feel that [enterprise-grade] can be an enormous plus for the DoD,” Lober said.
As well as, while LEO orbits do offer rapid data transmission, geosynchronous orbit satellite services also offer benefits, similar to area focus, data security, and lower cost.
For the PLEO program, DoD “must be evaluating all of the vendors which can be on the market, and there are only two straight away–Starlink and Hughes OneWeb,” Lober said on Sept. 1. “We’ve got Amazon and Telesat coming. LEO is just not a panacea. GEO satellites put an amazing amount of capability over one fixed spot. Our latest Jupiter 3 satellite that we launched just a few weeks ago is lots of of gigabits of capability laid over the U.S. The problem with LEO satellites is that 70 percent of the bandwidth is over the oceans in order that’s great for the Navy and cruise ships, but there’s not lots of people within the oceans so the best way you get around that’s you launch loads more satellites which OneWeb has done and Starlink has much more up there. Nevertheless it’s still very difficult to get to that [capacity] level of a GEO satellite. You begin getting a pair of economic airplanes, a few DoD UAVs flying, and consumer networks, my feeling is you’re going to run into times whenever 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 might probably try this for the consumers first similar to your cellphone when the network gets crowded, you get reduce whether you recognize it or not,” Lober said. “Those sort of things are gonna occur, and the query is will there enough [LEO] bandwidth which you could guarantee a real-time streaming video type service for the DoD.”