AFRL moves toward flight testing satellite internet radios under Global Lightning

WASHINGTON — The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is planning flight tests in late 2025 and early 2026 of prototype antennas and radio receivers capable switching between multiple commercial satellite internet constellations — a capability that would both make them more difficult to jam and serve as an enabler of the Pentagon’s planned Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) network.

Under the program nicknamed Global Lightning, AFRL researchers hope to see this kit eventually make its way not only into airborne systems used by the Air Force, but also to platforms used by the other services, said Brian Beal, principal aerospace engineer at AFRL’s Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation Office.

“I’ve talked the most about aircraft, because in a lot of ways, that’s the most technically challenging, and also, as an Air Force employee it’s my primary focus. But we do also work with Navy, Coast Guard and Army for tests on ground vehicles and ships, as well as stationary [ground systems]. Although you don’t need anything as complex as what we’re doing for stationary applications; you kind of get that as a bonus,” he told Breaking Defense.

“The end game is, if we’re wildly successful … I would expect different program offices to start adopting this and and fielding it,” he added.

This could include having the Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office serve as a middleman for contracting out services from commercial providers, as Beal explained already has happened with two of the vendors AFRL worked with under its initial Global Lightning contracts.

Beal noted that AFRL further is working closely with the Space Development Agency (SDA), which is developing its own version of a space-based internet in low Earth orbit (LEO) under its Transport Layer program.

“One of the guiding principles of what we’re trying to do is that these radios should be able to talk to many different constellations, and they should be able to add waveforms and control for new constellations as they become available. So, one of the constellations that that the radios will be able to talk to is the SDA Transport Layer.”

AFRL launched the Global Lightning program with contracts in 2018, somewhat confusingly under the formal title “Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI).” Up to now, the lab has spent almost $500 million in experimental contracts to 11 different vendors.

“There’s about seven key contracts between the antenna vendors and the multiband radio vendors,” Beal said. “So the the multiband radios are L3Harris, Northrop Grumman SES Space and Defense, and Intelsat General. Whereas the antennas are Northrop Grumman, RTX and Viasat. Those are the primes. And then there are also relevant subcontracts to additional antenna providers.”

AFRL currently has an annual budget of about $160 million for Global Lightning, he said, but that the sum varies somewhat year-to-year as new contracts are signed and others are phased out.

The most recent contracts were issued under what is known as DEUSCI Call 4, aimed at prototyping multiband antennas that can link to Ku-band and Ka-band satellites in LEO, medium Earth orbit (MEO) and geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO). RTX in August was awarded $51.7 million; Viasat in September was awarded $33 million.

The goal is for these antennas to be able to interface with modems and transceivers developed in the previous contract stage, called DEUCSI Call 3. Under that solicitation, AFRL in 2023 contracted with Intelsat General, SES Space and Defense (the American arm of Luxembourg-based SES), Northrop Grumman, L3Harris and RTX for a total of some $250 million according to government contracting documents. 

Beal explained that “at the highest level, there’s sort of been two stages of Global Lightning.” The earliest awards were experimenting with linkages to individual satellite constellations, such as SpaceX’s Starlink. AFRL has moved on from “single vendor testing” to “multi-vendor, multi-constellation SATCOM,” he said.

“What I mean by that is we are developing with our commercial partners, and then flight testing and tech transitioning, systems that can communicate with multiple constellations using the same hardware,” Beal said. “In particular, we care a lot about being able to be multi-orbit. So, we’re in the process of making systems that will communicate with LEO, GEO and MEO orbits, both commercial and military, and across multiple frequency bands.”

In other words, the idea is to create what sometimes is known in Pentagon circles as a “hybrid SATCOM” network.

The “real impetus” of the Global Lightning program is that “one of the biggest barriers to entry on using a new SATCOM system is actually getting the hardware, in particular the antenna, installed and integrated into an aircraft,” Beal explained. “So, the thought process here is put on very capable hardware that can communicate with multiple systems, and then we can move from constellation to constellation as business needs dictate. ”

Beal said the goals for the upcoming flight tests will gradually increase in complexity, starting with ensuring the antennas and radio receivers can keep “reliable, stable connections to any particular constellation.”

Then tests will be run that stress those connections with aircraft maneuvers to find out, for example, how far a plane can bank before dropping connectivity.

“We’ll measure some basic technical parameters like that, and then we move into the real heart of it, which is the multi-constellation piece. So, we’ll measure things like when we switch from Spacecraft A to Spacecraft B, how long does that transition take? What are any wrinkles that we run into when making that switch?” Beal said.

“The expectation is that we will bounce between those constellations in the same flight, so we’ll move between them. Now, I don’t think anybody should be guaranteeing that on flight one,” he stressed. “We’re going to improve as we go and get to that, but that is the goal of the program.”