Commercial Satcom Industry Sees DOD Market Opening Up

The long-sought goal of the commercial communications satellite industry to get more Defense Department traffic on its satellites is closer than ever due to the increased commercialization of space, growing space-based national security threats, and federal budget sequestration meaning "no more open checkbook," Intelsat General President Kay Sears said Tuesday during a Washington Space Business Roundtable panel discussion on the possibility of DOD and the Air Force using more commercial satellites for communications.

Congress is particularly supportive of more use of commercial capacity, said Leonor Tomero, counsel with the House Armed Services Committee. The fiscal 2016 National Defense Authorization Act pushes that effort by asking for planned consolidation of satellite communications by the DOD and an analysis of alternatives for the Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) satellite communications system, she said. The seventh WGS satellite was launched in July, United Launch Alliance said.

The Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Directorate issued a request for information in 2013 about using commercial satellite capacity to support Ku-band communications in Africa -- the first of five planned Pathfinder demonstrations employing commercial satcom, panelists said. The government's buying commercial capacity with SES "opened a lot of new doors," said Peter Hoene, SES Government Solutions CEO. The second Pathfinder will involve satellite capacity in the U.S. and be used for such operations as training missions, said Joe Vanderpoorten, a technical director with the Air Force Space Command's Space and Missiles System Center. The third still is being formulated, he said.

Despite concerns about commercial satcom systems being more vulnerable to jamming or intercepts, its diversity in number of satellites -- as well as some technical capabilities like beam forming -- can add to resiliency, said Winston Beauchamp, Air Force deputy undersecretary-space. Depending on some variables like antennas used, a high-capacity system could be competitive with WGS, Vanderpoorten said. Commercial satcom also provides a much quicker turnaround time for introducing new technology than a major government procurement effort, panelists said. "We're inserting new technology with every single spacecraft," Sears said. The narrow beams of Intelsat's high-throughput satellite (HTS) Epic constellation -- the first of which is scheduled to go up in January (see 1512110038) -- automatically make jamming more difficult, she said. "We might be adding features for different reasons, but they accomplish the same goals," Sears said.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks is military/commercial system interoperability, particularly at the terrestrial level, panelists said. The level of interoperability depends greatly on both the satellite and terrestrial equipment used, said Rick Lober, general manager-defense and intelligence systems division, Hughes Network Systems. Pricing also has been a huge barrier, panelists said. In a per-megabit cost, Epic and WGS "come out about the same," Sears said. "The key is changing the mentality of looking at megahertz [costs] to looking at megabits." As HTS becomes more prevalent, the cost to government of getting the throughput it wants will be more competitive "and start to converge" with military-operated satellites, Hoene said.