One of the primary goals of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is to provide its warfighters with critical communications and situational awareness capabilities when deployed globally and at home station. Considering the austere and remote locations where most military missions take place, essential connectivity often requires the use of satellite services.
When warfighting missions are executed using resilient multi-orbit, multi-band SATCOM capabilities, soldiers on the ground are better equipped to deter adversaries, protect U.S. interests, and achieve mission success. However, realizing the benefits of multi-orbit, multi-band SATCOM has been a challenge for the DoD, mostly due to the need to modernize its ground terminals to accept current and emerging commercial constellation capacity. Modernizing the DoD’s fielded ground terminals will enable the seamless, uninterrupted global satellite communications the U.S. military is currently seeking.
To learn more about the root causes of these ground terminal challenges and explore how multi-orbit, multi-band SATCOM can transform warfighting missions, we sat down with Tampa Microwave’s President, Aaron Brosnan.
Government Technology Insider (GTI): We often hear the DoD talk about leveraging commercial satellite constellations to provide operational formations with resilient global coverage. How does this movement to commercial connectivity influence the military SATCOM terminal market?
Aaron Brosnan: I think the key here is resilience and global coverage. It is a baseline need of the U.S. military. Warfighters need to be able to deploy anywhere around the world, and global coverage is key to their mission – to maintain stability provide commanders communication options appropriate to their area of operations and to tailor communications to mission needs.
In the old days of SATCOM, resilience was provided by a handful of geosynchronous orbit (GEO) satellites that were owned and operated by the U.S. government. They predominantly operated on two bands, which supported one or two different waveforms. Those waveforms were always designed to be very resilient, but not necessarily high throughput. There was a tradeoff of bandwidth to achieve a level of assured and secure connectivity. Though it met the needs at the time, it was a bit of a monolithic and static space architecture.
Fast forward to today. Adversarial threats require information superiority. It’s all about outperforming and outmaneuvering your adversary by having more assured, resilient connectivity to information than they have. This has created higher demand for bandwidth and drives a need for hybrid space networks. Commercial networks help provide that future, hybrid space architecture.
Mission success cannot rely on a single pipe of connectivity for beyond line of sight (BLOS) information access. Modern warfighting missions require a plethora of networks in the sky that can be dynamically and seamlessly accessed on the fly. This ensures that a soldier on the ground can maintain a connection to high-bandwidth services from a BLOS connectivity point of view and achieve information overmatch against a peer threat. And we can only get there by leveraging military GEO and future non-geosynchronous orbit (NGSO) satellites, while also taking advantage of the plethora of commercial satellites and networks.
GTI: What is multi-band satellite? Why is this preferred for military communications in this modern age of warfighting? And does it create opportunities or challenges for the ground terminal market?
Aaron Brosnan: Both military and commercial satellites operate on different bands within the RF spectrum – predominantly X, Ku, and Ka bands. Each band has its own pros and cons. For example, Ka band gives you broader bandwidth, high throughput, but it is more susceptible to weather conditions. On the other hand, X-band offers less bandwidth but is more resilient to operating in weather conditions.
We have this band diversity that we can leverage and operate with. Giving soldiers access to different satellites operating on different bands also gives them options based on their mission and the circumstances of the environment they’re operating in.
GTI: What is multi-orbit satellite? What benefits does this enable?
Aaron Brosnan: Similar to bands, we have different orbits that come with their own pros and cons. Satellites in GEO are static and fixed, which is great for terminal providers and users because they can easily point to a satellite and just walk away.
The problem with GEO is that it’s so far away from Earth. The round-trip delay over a GEO satellite makes it a really poor option for anything that requires low-latency transmission of near real-time data, real-time data, or voice communications.
LEO and MEO, are operating anywhere between 500 and 5,000 miles above the Earth. This enables much better latency, but the downside is it requires many more satellites and tracking terminals on the ground to achieve adequate global coverage. Tracking for MEO is pretty slow and nearly imperceptible to the eye. With LEO, tracking is very fast. You need to be able to jump between satellites quickly. In a make-before-break scenario, one terminal picks up the rising satellite before the primary terminal disconnects from the setting satellite. In a break-before-make scenario, you can do that with a single terminal. But both have their own sets of challenges.
The opportunities that the new generation of terminals will provide include giving soldiers the ability to not only bounce between bands but also bounce between orbits. That celestial path diversity in SATCOM is going to be critical in gaining and maintaining information superiority.
GTI: Historically, what has kept the military from being able to easily move between satellites using different waveforms and in different orbits? How has the ground segment impacted the ability to roll between satellites seamlessly?
Aaron Brosnan: The concept of NGSO satellites is relatively new in SATCOM, and the military wants the higher bandwidth and lower latency NGSO provides. The issue becomes one of intellectual property and proprietary rights. There are very few standards that govern how these satellites and their networks are architected, managed, and how they communicate with the ground segment.
Most of those protocols are driven by individual companies as they look to architect their own constellation. There are various consortiums and, in some cases, individual companies that see the need for open standards. The industry is moving in that direction, which is a great thing.
In part two of our conversation with Aaron Brosnan, we take a deep dive into how industry is coming together to solve the DoD’s ground terminal challenges and to advance multi-orbit, multi-band SATCOM for the military.