Airbus and Northrop Grumman [NOC] have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to develop the United Kingdom’s future SKYNET 6 military satellite wideband communications system, Airbus said on Oct. 22.
Airbus’ SKYNET 6A satellite is to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in 2025. In July last year, Airbus said that the company and the U.K. Ministry of Defense had completed a Critical Design Review of SKYNET 6A.
Airbus and Northrop Grumman said that undertaking the MOU on SKYNET 6 development “is vitally important as military forces increasingly use space-based assets to fulfill their missions and require specialized technology to transmit information via space.”
The companies said that they will “offer customers the very latest military satellite communication technologies for users and ensure they are always connected and able to process the increasing amount of data collected and disseminated on the ground, in the air, at sea and in orbit.”
Troy Brashear, vice president of national security systems for Northrop Grumman’s space systems sector, said that the Airbus-Northrop Grumman team “will provide our customers with innovative, reliable, and affordable military satellite communications technology to meet the rapidly evolving requirements of today’s environment.”
The first SKYNET satellites launched in 1969, and the latest four SKYNET 5 X-band satellites launched in 2007, 2008, and 2012.
To augment communications bandwidth and military satellite communication functioning in jamming environments, the United States and the U.K. have looked into
data sharing and hosted payloads for the Advanced Extremely High Frequency [AEHF] strategic satellites and the Skynet and Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) systems (Defense Daily, July 16, 2020).
Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Northrop Grumman built the AEHF satellites. Since 2007, the U.S. military has deployed 10 Boeing [BA] WGS satellites that use the Ka-band frequency.