Space Development Agency eyes laser link between different contractors’ birds

AFA 2024 — As of this weekend, York Space Systems has gotten the laser communications system working on their recently launched satellites for the Space Force’s nascent Low Earth Orbit network, the director of the Space Development Agency said this morning. The next step, Derek Tournear told reporters, is to get York’s satellites linked by laser to SpaceX’s birds.

The two contractors have gotten their tech to connect successfully in extensive, rigorous tests on the ground, he said, which gives him confidence that they can now make it work in space. But it really had better work, because the stakes are make-or-break for SDA’s ambitious Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA).

“I’m excited to report that, over the weekend, York was able to get optical communication networking working on their satellites,” Tournear told reporters. “Now we have both a set of transport satellites and a set of tracking satellites with the optical connectivity.”

“The next step on that, obviously, is to have the York and SpaceX satellites talk to one another and form a complete mesh network,” he said. “It’s critical that it works.”

Why so serious? “The whole idea” of PWSA, he said, is to move away from traditional Pentagon “stovepipes,” where different government agencies and armed services hire different contractors to build different systems using different protocols that can’t share data without elaborate kludges or painstaking manual re-entry. Instead, PWSA is meant to use what’s known as open architecture, where everything can talk to everything else and any company can plug-and-play its products as long as they meet certain common standards.

This kind of seamless machine-to-machine exchange of data is critical to the Pentagon’s emerging global battle network, known as CJADC2. In more civilian terms, PWSA’s open architecture is meant to function a lot like the app store on a smart phone – except it (a) includes hardware, not just software, and (b) has to work in wartime while hurtling through space at just under five miles per second.

“I describe PWSA, the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, as the Android model, right?” Tournear explained. As the government, he said, “we endorse interfaces and standards between them, we set up a test bed, [specifically] our optical test bed that’s at Naval Research Laboratory, [where] vendors have to bring their equipment, plug it into NRL, and show that they can talk to the gold standard – the government gold standard – as well as the other vendors to make sure all that works.”

As long as a company’s tech meets the compatibility standards so it works when plugged in to the wider network, Tournear emphasized, the government doesn’t care how it works or need to know any sensitive trade secrets, a perennial sticking point in Pentagon IT contracts.

“We don’t care what’s in the black box behind that interface,” he said. “The whole point of this PSWA [approach] is to build up a market, where we have multiple vendors to keep the price low [and] keep the innovation pushing forward. So if we get vendor lock, if only one works, or if they can’t talk to each others, that falls apart pretty quickly.”

Tournear said he is confident the tech will work on orbit, because it’s been tested so thoroughly on the ground. “I deem this pretty low risk is because that has been where the focus of most of our systems engineering has been day to day,” he said. “That’s why we have forced them to go to NRL, to demonstrate this interoperability, to make sure it all works.”

“Obviously you want to make sure,” he said. “But I think that the risk that it actually fails is pretty low.”

Spokespeople for York and SpaceX did not immediately respond to Breaking Defense’s request for comment, but assuming the laser link does work as planned, Tournear has an ambitious schedule to build out the network of numerous (aka “proliferated”) Low Earth Orbit satellites for a wide range of missions. The initial set of PWSA satellites now on orbit is called Tranche 0, and while relatively few, he said, they’re demonstrating the core capabilities all work.

On the communications side, those capabilities include not only laser links — both satellite to satellite and space to ground — but also the traditional and internationally ubiquitous Link-16 protocol, which uses radio waves. “One hundred percent of our links work” for Link-16, Tournear said. “We’ve demonstrated that a lot of different platforms, including aircraft [in flight] and down to aircraft carriers at sea. All that works.”

Tranche 0 surveillance satellites have also successfully tracked an array of real-world events, from missile launches to the SpaceX Starship’s reentry. “We demonstrated that with our first set of launches, the SpaceX birds with the Leidos sensors,” Tournear said. “We expect the L3Harris birds with the L3Harris sensors to be online and collecting data later, probably in early October.”

Overall, “Tranche 0 is an unmitigated success,” Tournear exulted. “We’ve been able to check out all the boxes that we needed to prove the concept works, and then Tranche One with approximately 160 satellites — that will all be launched next year — will actually make this operational.”

After that, “Tranche 2, obviously, is in build,” he went on. “[For] Tranche 3, we passed the Warfighter Council, which is the body we use to vet all requirements. … We expect the solicitation for the integrator portion of that later this year, with the satellite solicitations to go out early next year, so we can get Tranche 3 ready to launch by the end of calendar year ’28.”