Communications satellites, both government and commercially operated, are subject to an growing array of jamming and even kinetic threats from near-peer U.S. adversaries, these officials said. In this environment, diversification promotes resiliency while complicating any adversary’s service disruption plans.

“We need diversity – we need a wide range of diversity,” said Kimberly Morris, satellite communications operations division head at the U.S. Naval Network Warfare Command.

Speaking June 26 here at the 4^th annual Milsatcom USA conference sponsored by the SMi Group, Morris said that diversity includes satellites operating in medium Earth orbit (MEO) and low Earth orbit (LEO) as well as in traditional geostationary orbits. Use of different frequencies also is critical, she said.

“What I’m trying to do is put our adversaries on the horns of a dilemma,” Morris said. “You go after our [military-owned] systems, I’ve got something else that I can get to. Historically, with a lot of the weapon systems that are brought to bear in the modern age, it’s not the primary system that has been a hero, it’s the secondary system, because the enemy puts so much effort into taking out that primary system.”

Peter Hoene, president and chief executive of Reston, Va.-based SES Space and Defense, the U.S. government services arm of satellite operator SES, said that just between SES and its top competitors, there are some 150 commercial satellites in geostationary orbit. This gives the military options in case signals from the U.S. Air Force’s workhorse Wideband Global Satcom satellites are jammed, thus complicating the targeting calculus of any adversary, he said.

Another benefit of satellite diversity is that missions vary widely, both among and even within the military services. Certain bandwidths and orbits are better suited to some of these missions than others.

“We have different sized-ships that have different-sized needs and different missions; they all require assured C2 (command and control),” Morris said. “We require diversity in pathways, diversity in orbits, diversity in spectrum, and we need it with a lot of agility because our missions change so often and so quickly.”

Charles Osborn, acting director of the infrastructure directorate at the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), said his team is designing a next-generation gateway architecture that will pull signals from satellites in all three orbits, along with terrestrial systems, into the Department of Defense Information Network. “From my perspective, those all need to be integrated together for us to have that full redundancy and resiliency that we’re looking for,” he said.

While geostationary orbit – a belt of space 36,000 kilometers above the equator – has traditionally been home to most military and commercial communications satellites, a number of companies are planning large constellations in LEO to provide fiber-quality broadband services on a global scale. While these systems are in most cases years away from full deployment, SES currently operates a 20-satellite MEO constellation dubbed O3b, with a second-generation system under construction. SES also is among the world’s largest geostationary satellite operators, with 55 satellites serving commercial and government customers.

A key advantage of LEO and MEO systems is they eliminate most of the latency, or signal lag, associated with geostationary satellites. The O3b constellation, for example, reduces latency by 75 percent, while increasing throughput, compared to geostationary satellites, supporting applications including backhaul of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data gathered by forces in the field.

SES’s next-generation O3b mPOWER MEO satellites, under construction by Boeing and scheduled to launch in 2021, will offer 5,000 reconfigurable beams per satellite along with anti-jam capabilities geared toward military requirements, Hoene noted.

SES also is working with partners to integrate flat panel, electronically steered, antennas that can switch seamlessly between MEO and geostationary satellites, addressing a longstanding concern about forces having to carry many different terminal types to fully leverage all available military and commercial satellite capabilities. The military also has been investing in multiband terminals, a trend Hoene said bodes well for the future.

Hoene said industry and government are headed down a path that could one day lead to seamless roaming between the various commercial and government-satellites for military customers. “I’m very excited about this; I think these are huge breakthroughs,” he said.

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The plan also will address potential demonstrations, or pathfinders, that the Air Force has used in the past to prove out new procurement and utilization concepts for commercial satellite capacity, said Air Force Lt. Gen. John Thompson, commander of Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) in Los Angeles and program executive officer for space. Traditionally, the Department of Defense (DoD) has procured commercial bandwidth under relatively short-term contracts, often on the spot market, which industry officials have long argued is inefficient and makes it difficult to plan for future military needs.

The strategy initiative follows the congressionally mandated transfer of responsibility for procuring commercial satellite capacity for military users from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to the Air Force. That transfer, which formally took effect in December 2018, responds to longstanding concerns about a lack of coordination between DISA and the Air Force, which buys and operates its own communications satellites.

In an April 9 keynote address at the 35^th annual Space Symposium, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said the transfer will enable the service to take a holistic approach to the military satellite communications enterprise. “That [transfer] will be a tremendous help, as there is very clear synergy between commercial communications satellite capabilities and those of the Defense Department,” she said.

Thompson, in an April 11 media briefing along with other Air Force space procurement leaders at the Symposium, said the strategy now in development breaks down the stovepipes that have long existed between commercial and government-owned systems.

“We are working very closely with commercial satellite providers and our traditional military satellite communication providers to make that strategy happen,” Thompson said. “I would expect a formal rollout of that strategy later this year.”

The strategy review also follows the Air Force’s long anticipated Analysis of Alternatives for wideband satellite communications, which was completed last summer. According to Air Force officials, that study concluded that the DoD will continue to rely on a mix of government and commercial assets for wideband services, which comprise the biggest chunk of the military’s satellite communications requirements.

Commercial satellite operators have long pushed for a larger piece of the overall DoD market pie, and have been deploying new capacity in different orbits to match those ambitions. Satellite operator SES, for example, on April 4 completed deployment of its first-generation O3b MEO broadband constellation with the launch of four new spacecraft aboard a Soyuz rocket operated by Europe’s Arianespace consortium.

Now consisting 20 satellites in medium Earth orbit (MEO) covering 70 percent of the world’s population, O3b provides fiber-like services with minimal latency, or lag, between signal transmission and reception, compared to geostationary orbiting satellites.  Reston, Va.-based SES Space and Defense, which provides SES satellite capacity to the U.S. government, last June signed a blanket purchase agreement with DoD for up to $516.7 million worth of high-throughput services from O3b through April 2023.

“O3b’s low-latency, high-throughput services support time-critical enterprise applications that are becoming integral to modern military operations,” said Peter Hoene, president and chief executive of SES-Government Services. “This capability is unique in the marketplace, providing a strong complement to our geostationary satellite services.”

SES will begin deploying its second-generation MEO constellation, dubbed O3b mPOWER, in 2021-2022. Those seven satellites, under construction by Boeing, will dramatically increase the capacity, flexibility and coverage of the O3b constellation, allowing for higher throughput at fiber-like latency SES also operates more than 50 satellites in higher geostationary orbit, and counts the government as a major customer for services from those spacecraft.

Thompson said the next series of pathfinder experiments are still being debated but that there is a lot of interest in terminals that are interoperable with multiple satellite systems, both military and commercial. “Right now within the Department of Defense, the numbers I’ve heard is between 130 to 160 different kinds of unique satellite communications terminals,” he said. “I think that’s an area where having a multi-capable terminal and reducing the number of different configurations is something that industry is very excited about.”

A number of companies have such equipment in development and testing.  Antenna maker ThinKom Solutions of Hawthorne, Calif., for example, is testing a phased-array antenna that the company says can switch seamlessly between individual satellite beams and from constellation-to-constellation, including MEO and geostationary systems. Some of the testing has been carried out on the O3b constellation in cooperation with SES, ThinKom has said.

Thompson said the Air Force is looking at how to take advantage of where the commercial market appears headed. As an example, he cited satellite systems with a large number of individual “soda straw-sized” beams – as opposed to beams covering much larger areas – as beneficial because transmissions over these systems are more difficult for potential adversaries to detect or disrupt.

The planned O3b mPOWER satellites dramatically increase the number of spot beams available, according to SES Space and Defense. The current O3b satellites feature 10 individual beams apiece, whereas the Future O3b mPOWER satellites will each have more than 4,000 beams, a 400% increase according to company literature.

The Air Force is reviewing a number of pathfinder proposals as part of the overarching strategy review, Thompson said.

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