By Ann Roosevelt
The Air Force this fall will select either Northrop Grumman [NOC] or Raytheon [RTN] in the competition for the Air Force’s Global Positioning System (GPS) Next Generation Control Segment (OCX) Phase B contract.
“The Air Force has set out to modernize the GPS enterprise, and OCX is at the center of this critical initiative,” said Steve Bergjans, Northrop Grumman Information Systems vice president and Northrop Grumman Team program manager for the GPS Advanced Control Segment, OCX.
“The nation achieves [position, navigation and timing] PNT excellence when we synchronize the mission capabilities of the space, control and user [GPS] segments,” he said at a program update briefing Tuesday.
OCX, able to control current and future GPS capabilities, is expected to be on line in 2014 at two Air Force sites.
The keys to OCX success, Bergjans said, are an information assured, net-centric capability and service-oriented architecture.
“It’s a new world that OCX will be playing in compared to the existing control segment,” Bergjans said.
Over the past decades, the GPS control segment has monitored satellite signals and ensured the signal information is as accurate as possible.
However, as the number of GPS users grows–military, commercial and civil–awareness also has grown that the GPS control system must become more interactively involved with the users to ensure global navigation awareness. This means the GPS control system would be aware of how effective the GPS signal is, if it’s being received accurately and reliably and if there are local effects that can degrade the signal users can be warned or mitigation steps taken.
“Phase A proved our subcontract management approach, our software development approach and that our technical integration and approach worked and they worked very well,” Bergjans said. “The Air Force examined our software processes and our system engineering approach and our ability to meet cost, schedule and performance objectives.”
The new OCX capabilities are to give military users the battlefield advantage in precision navigation and timing.
“For example, these new satellites can broadcast an additional, more secure, military signal available only to warfighters,” he said. OCX will connect GPS services with fighting forces allowing them to collaborate.
Also, OCX is being designed to meet stringent Federal Aviation Administration design requirements, he said. This will allow the increased use of GPS for civil air traffic management expected to save time and fuel. It will provide aviators assured position knowledge to improve aviation safety.
Additionally, OCX will provide the surface, rail and waterway transportation industries a safety and economic advantage, Bergjans said.
There will also be civil benefits with a second civil GPS signal, a safety of life signal in a common GPS-Galileo signal. Galileo is the European navigation satellite system. “This will come to life when GPS IIIA starts flying in 2014,” he said.
The Air Force GPS wing has taken an active role in the OCX work institutionalizing acquisition rigor, offering observations and feedback that was incorporated into the Northrop Grumman work as the program moved forward, he said.
Unique to the OCX program, Bergjans said, the Air Force called for an OCX engineering model called Modernized Capability Engineering Model. It was successfully used to command and control a GPS satellite simulator in Florida.
More accuracy for the military is a goal, providing such things as accurate current signal status and the ability to predict environmental effects that could degrade the signal. This could forecast potential effects, or in the event of interference, that could be resolved or mitigated to assure precision navigation.
To do all these things, GPS needs to be net-centric, enabling interfaces and protocols to bring information to a network from around the world. Netcentricity is necessary for communications and to close the loop between GPS operators and operations and those who rely on GPS service, he said.
A netcentric ability also means OCX must be cyber secure when it is on a government network such as the Global Information Grid (GIG).
“We have put a fair amount of effort into making sure the system is information assured so that right data is getting out and the right data is getting in unaffected by anything going on in the network,” he said. “We’re really committed to this. It’s key to making net centricity work and you’ve got to have information assurance designed into the architecture from the beginning to make sure you can operate securely.”
The control segment also must be able to incorporate new technologies, a need driven by new satellite capabilities and/or new user needs.
“We need to be able to insert new capabilities cost effectively and in a timely fashion into OCX to support that system evolution,” Bergjans said.
DoD wants the use of Service Oriented Architecture, with its standard protocols on how software applications talk to each other, more modular than the past’s tightly bound systems, so technologies can plug in and out.
The Northrop Grumman Team OCX is very “focused on assuring we’ve got the best information assurance, the best netcentric design and a very effective and robust service oriented architecture,” Bergjans said. “That’s what we’ve been driving for here for the last 19-20 months since we’ve been on contract.”
In June, both Northrop Grumman and Raytheon submitted proposals for Phase B that will include system development, deployment and operation. In November 2007, both companies received Phase A contracts and, more recently, risk reduction contract extensions.
Northrop Grumman Team OCX includes Lockheed Martin [LMT]; Harris Corp. [HRS]; and Integral Systems.
Raytheon teammates include Boeing [BA], ITT Industries [ITT], Braxton Technologies, Infinity Systems Engineering and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.