Next year, the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC) plans 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.
“The United States is going to buy the SATCOM service from Luxembourg,” Barbara Baker, SSC’s deputy program executive officer for military communications and Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT), told a Space Force Association virtual audience on Sept. 21. “That’s an amazing opportunity that’s going to open up for us next year.”
Luxembourg’s Directorate of Defence has said that O3b mPOWER will have 11 satellites at an altitude of nearly 5,000 miles in MEO. O3b mPOWER satellites are to feature “a unique cutting-edge technology, with high throughput and low latency in the equatorial plane, enabling a secure sovereign network to be set up,” the directorate has said.
Last summer, SES said that it had completed a $450 million acquisition of DRS Global Enterprise Solutions (GES) in a deal to double the size of SES’ business with the U.S. government (Defense Daily, Aug. 1, 2022). DRS GES was a business unit of U.S.-based Leonardo DRS, which divested the operation to focus on its core capabilities.
SES said that the DRS GES buy is to help SES scale up the building of “multi-orbit geostationary and medium Earth orbit services as well as multi-operator network solutions.”
SSC is “putting a huge emphasis on partnership,” Baker said on Sept. 21. “We are going to get to a more resilient [communications] architecture, if we partner, and we’ll get there faster.”
Baker, who manages 1,800 personnel, including contractors at SSC, and a budget of $13 billion, cited GPS as an example of international military cooperation on PNT. SSC collaborates with 59 allies to provide them the user equipment to allow them to use the GPS constellation, “especially our military code [M-code].”
Deanna Ryals, SSC’s director of international affairs, is in charge of spearheading such allied collaboration.
While PNT is GPS’ primary mission, GPS, like Defense Support Program satellites, also carries the Nuclear Detonation (NUDET) Detection System (NDS) as a secondary payload.
On Sept. 21, Baker also spoke of SSC’s collaboration with Norway on the Enhanced Polar System-Recapitalization (EPS-R) program.
Space Force plans to launch two Northrop Grumman [NOC] EPS-R payloads next year to improve military communications over the North Pole (Defense Daily, Aug. 7).
The EPS-R payloads are to launch aboard two Norwegian Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission (ASBM) satellites–launches that Space Force has said will save the service more than $900 million and field advanced polar satellite communications three years ahead of a traditional acquisition program.
“I got this opportunity to go out to Norway as the representative from military satellite communications but also as the Space Force representative to go work hand in hand with them late last year,” Baker said on Sept. 22. “We had just finished delivering the two payloads–working through [with Norway] the integration steps, but also that partnership we got to see was not only us being able to exploit capability where we shared costs and didn’t have to separately buy the space vehicle ourselves–Norway did that–but the lessons and learning that was shared.”
“We are not new to space operations, but it is a different and a new world for Norway and them getting to listen to how we do space operations and take those lessons learned into how they’re building up their ops center,” she said. “That was a great partnership and a great opportunity to be able to interface with them and leverage that capability of joining our two forces together to get more capability out there sooner.”
In December 2021 SSC said that it expected a dual EPS-R launch early this year.
“Delivery of the [ASBM] satellites is delayed due to a number of factors, including supply chain disruption from COVID, design complexities changing our GEOStar platform to perform in a HEO (Highly Elliptical Orbit), and the complexities of integrating three separate customer payloads,” Northrop Grumman said last month.
In addition to EPS-R, the ASBM satellites are to carry an X-band payload for the Norwegian Ministry of Defense, a Ka-band payload for Inmarsat, and the Norwegian Radiation Monitor payload for the European Commission, Northrop Grumman has said.