While the Department of Defense (DoD) and industry have made solid progress toward that long-sought goal in recent years, there is still a ways to go, these officials said. One thing the government can do in this regard is provide a steady source of dedicated funding in annual defense budgets for commercial satellite services and integration activities, they said.

Pete Hoene, president and chief executive officer of SES Space and Defense, a subsidiary of satellite owner-operator SES, noted that Congress has established a budgetary line item that purpose but suggested the money has yet to start flowing.

“That’s going to make a huge difference, because once it’s funded it’s real,” Hoene said during a luncheon panel discussion on the topic hosted by the Washington Space Business Roundtable.

Traditionally the U.S. military has procured commercial satellite capacity using emergency wartime, or Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), funds, rather than through a dedicated account item in the regular DoD budget. As a result, the industry has had difficulty predicting funding levels for any given year, complicating satellite fleet planning and investment.

“Ultimately we have to get out of the OCO budget and into procurement” and research and development dollars, said Skot Butler, president of Intelsat General, the government services arm of satellite operator Intelsat.

Addressing the audience prior to the panel discussion, Lt. Gen. David Thompson, vice commander of Air Force Space Command, said work is nearly complete on a strategic plan for military satellite communications that takes into account government and commercial capabilities.

“While we haven’t put it out in a glossy brochure, the strategy itself is done, and the broad area announcement we put out this summer actually begins the process of an implementation plan to get after the most important elements of the strategy,” Thompson said.

A broad area announcement (BAA) is a notice from the government requesting scientific or research proposals from industry in specific areas of interest. Thompson did not elaborate in detail, but may have been referring to the recent Small Business Innovation Research announcement 19.2, which called for proposals in a number of technical areas, including satellite communications, that have commercial potential.

But Thompson conceded there remains a gap between the Air Force’s traditional military satellite communications culture, which is acquisition and platform focused, and the more service-oriented commercial satellite communications industry. “Bringing those together has been a little bit slower than we had hoped but it is still progressing greatly,” he said.

For example, Thompson said, both sides have identified integration priorities including multiband satellite terminals and an “enterprise management” command and control architecture compatible with both military and commercial satellites.  The Air Force’s Pathfinder series of commercial capability demonstrations as well as the BAA include work in those areas, he said.

Thompson also said the newly established U.S. Space Command, led by Air Force Gen. John ”Jay” Raymond, will be taking a major role in ushering in the integrated satellite communications architecture.

During the panel discussion, industry leaders noted recent promising developments in the ongoing relationship between the military and commercial sector. Prominent among these, particularly from the standpoint of an integrated architecture, was the 2018 transfer of procurement responsibility for commercial satellite bandwidth from Defense Information Systems Agency to the Air Force.

Hoene said the Air Force has a different approach, giving greater weight to the overall value of an industry bid, as opposed to favoring those that meet the minimum requirement at the lowest cost. That shift is long overdue and elevates industry to partner status in the military satellite communications enterprise, he said.

“I would hope on the commercial side it allows commercial to be part of the solution and not an afterthought,” said Rick Lober, vice president and general manager of defense and intelligence systems at Hughes Network Systems, a provider of satellite broadband services and ground equipment. “On the military side I hope it helps on the architecture side so we can think through the space segment, the ground segment, and the terminal segment in a more uniform, timely manner.”

For its part, the commercial sector is working on the technologies to help make it all happen. In addition to flexible terminals that are compatible with different satellites and bandwidths, companies are bringing new space capabilities that will benefit the military, the panelists said.

For example, SES, which already provides low-latency services from its O3b constellation in medium Earth orbit, will soon begin launching a next-generation, Boeing-built system called O3b mPOWER with electronically reconfigurable antennas, Hoene noted. This will allow SES to respond quickly to changing military requirements, he said.

The endgame, from industry’s prospective, is a single architecture in which military users can switch seamlessly between government and different commercial satellites, regardless of ownership, the panelists said.

Hoene noted that between the Air Force, with its 10-satellite Wideband Global Satcom constellation, and the world’s leading commercial operators, there are more than 160 satellites in geostationary orbit. Having all those satellites together in an integrated architecture would make life extremely difficult for adversaries intent on disrupting military operations via satellite signal jamming, he said.

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The members of this star-studded panel included:

• Warren Ferster: Editor-in-Chief of Space News (moderator)
• Winston Beauchamp: Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space, and the Director, Principal DoD Space Advisor Staff
• Peter F. Hoene: President & CEO, SES Space and Defense
• Rick Lober: VP and GM of the Defense & Intelligence Systems Division at Hughes Network Systems
• Kay Sears: President, Intelsat General
• Leonor Tomero: Professional Staff Member, House Committee on Armed Services
• Joe Vanderpoorten: Space & Missile Systems Center Pathfinder Program Office

Together, these satellite experts explored the difficult situation that the Air Force and the rest of the United States military is facing; namely, the rapidly approaching end of the Wideband Global SATCOM system (WGS) fleet program.

The WGS satellite constellation is comprised of ten disparate spacecraft that were scheduled for launch over the course of a decade. The final WGS satellite – WGS-10 – is slated to launch in FY18. The WGS system is a replacement for the aging Defense Satellite Communications System (DCSC), which had limited capacity compared to WGS and commercial satellites.

At a time of budget uncertainty and cost-cutting within the federal government, the exorbitant price tag on each of the WGS satellites seems unsustainable in both the near and distant future. This has the military looking at less expensive alternatives for satellite communications requirements following the launch of WGS-10. One of the alternatives being discussed across the space segment is the deliberate integration of commercial satellite communications (COMSATCOM) services into the National Security Space architecture.

The reasons to look to COMSATCOM as a key national security enabler were presented by Leonor Tomero, who identified, “new threats, fiscal constraints, [and a] need for resilience,” as drivers for this renewed interest in COMSATCOM services. Ultimately, Ms. Tomero noted that, “Relying more on commercial capability…may be more advantageous for the tax payer…“

Can COMSATCOM answer the call for satellite bandwidth following WGS-10? According to Pete Hoene of SES Space and Defense, “I think the answer to that is, “Yes,” and we are encouraged by…how the industry brings innovative solutions to the table.”

Despite assurances from the COMSTCOM industry that they can handle the bandwidth demands from the military, there are some concerns from the government about using COMSATCOM in this capacity. Many of these concerns circle around the Extremely High Frequency (EHF) wavelength, which has been utilized exclusively in the government satellites due to a lack of business cases to embrace it within the COMSATCOM industry.

This sentiment was echoed by Winston Beauchamp when he stated that the Department of Defense, “Historically [has] not seen a business case for commercial bandwidth in the EHF band.” Despite the DoD being, “committed to close partnerships and collaborations in the industry as we plan our next generation satellite architecture,” Mr. Beauchamp reiterated that, “While DoD is looking for services available commercially, that band is not commercially available.”

Discussion around the EHF and security of satellite communications is at a fever pitch thanks in large part to something that we heard extensively at this year’s SATCON Conference in New York, NY – space is an increasingly contested environment. Our adversaries know the military’s reliance on SATCOM for information sharing, intelligence gathering and remotely piloted aircraft operations, and have made significant strides towards intercepting, jamming, disabling and destruction of satellites and satellite communications.

The lack of EHF capacity on existing COMSATCOM spacecraft doesn’t mean that industry can’t support the military when it comes to providing secure communications.

First, there’s the opportunity to launch EHF payloads as hosted payloads aboard COMSATCOM satellites. In this situation, the military would place their mission-critical EHF payloads on commercial satellites that are slated to be launched in space. The COMSATCOM provider and military would then share the cost of launch and satellite operation, effectively slashing the total cost of launching the payload.

Mr. Beauchamp validated the potential to launch EHF payloads and systems as hosted payloads when he said, “Certainly for protected tactical systems you would want to see options that include hosted payloads.”

But launching EHF systems as hosted payloads is just one way that COMSATCOM services can help protect military satellites and communications. As Mr. Beauchamp explained, “I wouldn’t say that just because COMSATCOM systems don’t have the protections that MILSATCOM has that they are in any way less contributing to a resiliency. In fact, the diversity of these systems in itself contribute to resiliency.”

This increase in resiliency is an end result of deception and distribution. Distributing military communications through COMSATCOM satellites makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint exactly which satellite is carrying mission-critical communications for the U.S. military, making it harder for our adversaries to target a particular spacecraft. Mr. Beauchamp illustrated this point when he explained how COMSATCOM, “provide[s a] very complex environment to adversaries [and]… make[s] it as difficult as possible for them to really understand what it would take to hold our capabilities at risk.”

But deception is just one resiliency benefit of COMSATCOM. The distribution of military communications across multiple satellites – including COMSATCOM satellites – ensures that there is no one single point of failure, and that the compromise of one satellite doesn’t impact communications as a whole.

Despite the promise of secure military communications across COMSATCOM, and the ability to drastically reduce the cost of satellite bandwidth and capabilities across the military, there are still questions about how best to acquire and pay for satellite services. To gauge the effectiveness of different COMSATCOM services and their cost benefits, the Air Force launched a series of programs called, “Pathfinders.” These Pathfinder programs utilize acquisition dollars to purchase transponders that are then turned over to COMSATCOM providers to operate and service for a multiyear period.

When discussing the first Pathfinder program, panelist Peter Hoene of SES Space and Defense said, “[Pathfinder One] is a really key initiative and…broke a lot new ground. The idea of the government buying…a transponder and allowing the COMSATCOM owner/operator to operate that for their needs is really a breakthrough.”

The benefits of the Pathfinder program were extolled by Joe Vanderpoorten of the Air Force Space & Missile Systems Center, who claimed that the Pathfinder One program has been successful in delivering bandwidth to the customer, while also being, “successful economically.”

With the WGS program coming to a quick and abrupt end, the DoD and Congress need to identify how they’re going to bring new satellite capabilities on line following the launch of WGS-10. The panel discussion showed that COMSATCOM can provide the new technologies, increased flexibility and cost savings that are essential to the military today. By continuing to aggregate COMSATCOM purchasing under the authority of a single entity, finding new and innovative ways to purchase COMSATCOM services and working to integrate COMSATCOM services into a single network with military satellite capabilities, the DoD can be sure that they have a secure, resilient satellite network capable of delivering information when and where needed, in all situations and theaters.

Additional Resources:

• Sign up for upcoming WSBR events here
• Overview: SES Space and Defense Support for Pathfinder I
• U.S. Air Force Signs trailblazing Lease for SES Satellite Capacity – Space News

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