WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force is preparing for a demonstration next year of a satellite communications network that can smoothly integrate government-owned and commercial constellations on a single, secure military terminal.
The demonstration is a crucial milestone in the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet, or DEUCSI — a program started in 2018 to investigate enhancing military communications by using the expanding commercial satellite internet industry.
The objective is to provide forces on the ground, at sea and in the air access to the combined bandwidth of the military’s dedicated satellites as well as commercial satellite internet providers like SpaceX’s Starlink.
A demonstration flight, scheduled for 2025, will demonstrate newly developed communications terminals capable of accessing multiple commercial and military satellite constellations simultaneously — a capability the Pentagon currently lacks.
Security requirements
While the military already purchases commercial satcom services, it doesn’t have the ability today to integrate those commercial connections into the existing satellite architectures using a single terminal that meets DoD’s security and operational requirements, said Ron Fehlen, vice president of assured mission networks at L3Harris Technologies.
One of the prime contractors on the DEUCSI program, L3Harris has been awarded $170 million in contracts since 2021 to develop multi-orbit satellite terminals for aircraft, mobile ground systems and fixed ground stations.
The company says it is just over a year away from flight testing the technology on a military aircraft. Under its contract with AFRL, L3Harris is producing 23 terminals for fixed ground systems, two for mobile ground systems and five for aircraft.
A linchpin of the hybrid network is a modular radio developed by L3Harris called RASOR, short for Rapidly Adaptable Standards-compliant Open Radio. It houses modems that connect with multiple commercial satellite internet providers as well as dedicated military networks.
Integrating all those different modems into a single radio platform that meets stringent military security standards has been an enormous technical challenge, Fehlen said. “The modular radio brings together waveforms and modems in a flexible open architecture that can be routinely updated with new capabilities,” he said.
L3Harris said RASOR is operational and has been sold to customers for development activities outside the DEUCSI program but could not discuss further.
Future addition of new services
A key requirement for the DEUCSI terminals is an open architecture that allows new commercial satellite internet providers to be easily integrated as they come online in the future, Fehlen said. With satellite internet a booming industry, the military wants the flexibility to rapidly add new constellations that are expected to enter the market such as Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband network.
Adam Milner, program manager at L3Harris, said the RASOR radio can scale up from three to 12 slots. The thinking in the DEUCSI program, he said, is that military forces would buy these terminals and then get routine software updates to tap into the newest commercial satellite internet services much like consumers do with smartphones.
Besides L3Harris, the Air Force Research Laboratory picked Northrop Grumman, SES Space & Defense, and Intelsat General to create multi-constellation satcom terminals. Each company has contracts with various commercial satellite companies like Starlink, Viasat, OneWeb, and Hughes.
After the flight demonstration scheduled for late 2025, L3Harris will try to validate the ground-based RASOR terminals in 2026. The main goal is to provide a complete range of multi-orbit, multi-constellation terminals for the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Space Force in the long run.
The Air Force Research Lab stated that the aim is to eventually transfer the technologies for operational use across the different military branches within the next two to three years if the testing proceeds as planned.
“Some parts of DEUCSI have already been put into operational use,” a spokesman for AFRL said in a statement to SpaceNews. For instance, in earlier phases of DEUCSI, the lab tested terminals from either SpaceX or a Hughes/OneWeb team. “Those systems are now accessible through the U.S. Space Force Commercial Satcom Office contracts and are widely used in operations.”
