The U.S. Space Force’s fiscal 2025 budget includes nearly $130 million for an Enterprise Management and Control (EM&C) system to enable military forces to switch rapidly from one satellite band, orbit, or communications network to another.
Satellites for U.S. and coalition military forces will likely be in a variety of orbits, including those in proliferated low Earth orbit (PLEO) and what has been the military’s main communications belt–geosynchronous Equatorial orbit (GEO)–such as the 10 Boeing [BA] Wideband Global Satcom satellites. While DoD has said that the fewer numbers in the GEO belt are easier for adversaries to target, PLEO is to provide strength in numbers, as satellites are to function as ready replacements for those lost to adversary disabling.
In fiscal 2024, the service requested about $74 million for EM&C, including almost $60 million to buy military satellite communications (SATCOM) data from Luxembourg’s Medium Earth Orbit Global Services (MGS) program, which has thus far deployed four O3b mPOWER satellites by Luxembourg-based SES S.A. (Defense Daily, Oct. 3, 2023).
EM&C is to lessen the number of DoD “data silos” and manual management and control procedures. Automation of the process to search and find the best available communications band, data management integration, cloud transition, and electromagnetic interference alleviation are parts of the effort, yet challenges loom.
“This idea of the multi-orbit demonstration–EM&C-we’ve seen very little emphasis or funding on that over the last 10 years where we’ve seen a lot of satellites…plenty of satellites, but not a lot of thought to how we’re gonna manage them all,” Rick Lober, vice president of the government and defense division of EchoStar Corp.‘s [SATS] Hughes Network Systems, LLC, said on March 18. “I see that as a big risk going forward.”
Lober was speaking at an Alternatives to Starlink panel at the SATELLITE 2024 conference in Washington, D.C.
“If you look at physical layer interoperability, in some ways we have gone backwards,” he said. “In GEO, you would buy bandwidth and could run an EMEM wave form with a Viasat [VSAT] contract modem. They were compatible. That was a military waveform. It was interoperable. As we’ve gone to LEO, those are clearly closed systems…My guess right now is that Starlink is not gonna talk to OneWeb, is not gonna talk to Kuiper, is not gonna talk to Lightspeed.”
SpaceX is the contractor for Starlink, France’s Eutelsat S.A. for OneWeb, Amazon [AMZN] for Kuiper, and Canada’s Telesat for Lightspeed.
Fielding a PLEO constellation of hundreds of optically linked communications and missile tracking satellites has been a priority for the Space Force’s Space Development Agency (SDA), which had its fifth birthday on March 12.
In addition, last summer the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC) awarded 16 companies five-year indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts with five-year options to establish commercial PLEO communications for military use (Defense Daily, July 25, 2023).
Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton, the Space Force’s director of plans, programs, and requirements, told the SATELLITE 2024 conference in a keynote address on March 18 that SDA’s rapid prototyping, under $20 million satellite costs, and PLEO efforts under SDA Director Derek Tournear have helped mollify critics of the agency who have seen it as an upstart rival to the Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center, now SSC.
“Five years in, SDA is overcoming, or has overcome, the skeptics,” Bratton said. “I don’t think there was complete buy-in on Day One when SDA showed up on the scene. You can’t argue with what they’ve accomplished–rapid development of capability and fielding with on-orbit, still in the test phase, but delivering on their testing plan and proving out the capability. That’s successful–Derek and his team and sheer force of will, in some cases, to get it done.”
At the same time, however, “I don’t think that means everything goes to proliferated LEO or to the SDA,” Bratton said. “I think it’s another option in the force design on how to do things.”
EM&C fielding estimates have varied. Last fall, a DoD official said that the target for first operational use of EM&C was the end of 2027 (Defense Daily, Oct. 3, 2023). The fiscal 2024 budget request estimated the completion of transition to EM&C operations by the end of fiscal 2028, yet the fiscal 2025 budget pushes that date to the end of fiscal 2029.
“The user on the ground with a backpack who might be under fire and needs to get comms up quickly and needs to figure out the best path, they’re not sitting there, going, ‘Let me pull out this receiver. Let me pull out this terminal. Let me set up this antenna’ to get connectivity,'” said Barbara Baker, the Space Force’s deputy program executive officer for military communications and positioning, navigation, and timing. “Where we’re trying to go is Enterprise Management & Control–how do we take all the services that are out there and figure out how to give the user an operating picture that says, ‘Here’s your selection. Here’s where you can get the best comm,’ based off of their needs whatever they are, boots on the ground, ships; etc.”
Fielding hybrid, multi-orbit, multi-waveform, multi-system terminals for EM&C needs to be a priority, said Lt. Col. Christopher Cox, the chief of the Space Force’s PNT/SATCOM/Software-Defined Networking Architecture branch.
“Right now, the general process is, I need to pass this data, make this call, and you get on this specific platform’s terminal system to do that,” he said during the Alternatives to Starlink panel on March 18. “If something’s not working, you have to go to your other terminal for a different system; etc. We want a user to be able to sit down, make the call, pass the data, and not care how that data is flowing, where it’s going, especially when we’re talking resiliency of the system, that data can flow through different networks, different systems and constellations and not be tied to one system that can potentially be taken down and disrupted by an adversary’s actions.”