The National Reconnaissance Office and the U.S. Space Force’s NROL-107 mission, also called SilentBarker, achieved geostationary Earth orbit Sunday for surveillance of U.S. adversaries in space. The mission was launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. According to NRO Director Chris Scolese, SilentBarker will […]
The Government Accountability Office says that NASA does not plan to measure production costs on the Space Launch System, the Artemis program’s launch vehicle. In a report to congressional appropriators published Sept. 7, GAO explained that the agency’s lack of production cost transparency hinders efforts to assess SLS’ affordability. So far, NASA has spent $11.8 […]
A RAND Corp. report found that the U.S. Space Force needs to overhaul the way it buys commercial satellite communications services. According to RAND, existing methods for procuring commercial SATCOM services prevent the government from maximizing commercial innovations. Specifically, the Space Force uses separate contracts with individual providers to procure capabilities, an arrangement RAND said […]
The Defense Information Systems Agency has awarded Viasat’s Inmarsat Government unit a position on a 10-year, $900 million indefinite-delivery / indefinite-quantity contract to provide proliferated low-Earth orbit satellite-based services. DISA made the award on behalf of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command. Viasat is expected to deliver space relay services and other PLEO capabilities […]
Ball Aerospace has tested the Weather System Follow-on – Microwave satellite, designed to enhance the Department of Defense’s space-based environmental monitoring capabilities. As prime contractor for the WSF-M project, Ball designed, built and integrated the spacecraft bus, ground data processing software and the Microwave Imager instrument that will collect environmental data at multiple frequencies. The […]
Teraphysics has entered into a Space Act agreement with NASA’s Glenn Research Facility to certify that the company’s microfabricated E-band helical traveling wave tube amplifier is suitable for space-to-Earth radio frequency telecommunication links. Work under the agreement includes evaluating the miniaturized product as a communication amplifier for satellite and terrestrial communications and demonstrating its performance […]
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Sept. 2 carrying 13 satellites into orbit for the Tranche 0 segment of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, the Space Development Agency’s constellation for military data communications and missile tracking. The latest batch of PWSA satellites consists of 10 data transport spacecraft from […]
The Space Development Agency is preparing an on-orbit demonstration of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture satellites carrying radio and optical communications payloads. The spacecraft make up the Transport Layer, which will work to facilitate satellite-to-satellite data transport and connectivity with military systems. The Transport Layer satellites will comprise the space portion of Link 16, an […]
The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory has awarded SES Space & Defense a multi-year contract to support the Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet program. The DEUCSI program establishes communications with military platforms through commercial internet constellations in different orbits. SES Space & Defense will demonstrate multi-orbit, multi-band solutions that can switch among commercial space […]
The Space Development Agency has awarded QinetiQ US a five-year, $224 million contract to provide acquisition, engineering, management and technical services supporting the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a low-Earth orbit satellite constellation meant to provide communications and missile-tracking capabilities to U.S. and allied warfighters. According to QinetiQ US CEO Shawn Purvis, a 4×24 member and […]
