It is the world’s largest military space infrastructure project ever imagined. In the coming years, the Pentagon is preparing to control and deploy a constellation of several hundred satellites designed to support ground warfare efforts. And the deployment has already begun.
It is a massive, multi-billion dollar project that benefits from resources that are unparalleled in the world. For information: The annual budget for military space travel in the USA is almost 30 billion dollars, which is about 8 billion more than NASA’s! With such budgets, the Pentagon intends to acquire its own network of low-orbit communications satellites, which is part of a major project to unify the networks of American armies (JADC2 project).
Connect the hunter anywhere on earth
The US Space Force has tasked its Space Development Agency (SDA) with building this large constellation, which will include several hundred satellites. Its current name is the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, also known as PSWA, and it actually has several features:
- Transportation: Communications and data relay service between the numerous military bases, field operations, and combatants wherever they are located on the planet’s surface. This is the basic service of a constellation like Starlink;
- Tracking: Service to track targets located beyond the field of view of Army infrastructures on Earth and to ensure the detection of missile launches.
The Pentagon has taken a step forward by wanting a mega-constellation of satellites instead of just a few specific satellites in geostationary orbit. The intimidation games between American and Chinese spy satellites in this orbit have shown that a single satellite is now too vulnerable and too complex to be urgently replaced in the event of a space war. It is much more difficult to neutralize a network of several hundred satellites. And the Pentagon is already looking for launch vehicles that can replace a satellite in low orbit in less than 60 hours.
An operation in installments: from the demonstration to the direct connection with the rockets
Deployment of PWSA has already begun, with an initial “chunk” of 28 satellites, requiring multiple launches. Two of the three thefts occurred, one last April and the other on September 2nd. This tranche 0 is a “demonstration generation”. The satellites were also developed by several manufacturers, including SpaceX, which built some of them based on a model derived from Starlink. Phases 1 and 2 are much more concrete and will be implemented from 2024.
Tranches 1 and 2 represent $5 billion. The first tranche will have 173 satellites, tranche 2 will have almost 300. The latter will carry new payloads, as they will be the very first to be directly linked to weapons.
Starlink? No way !
With SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation, with more than 4,000 satellites in orbit to date, the United States already has the largest space data relay structure in the world. However, for the Pentagon, using it is out of the question: “Any time you use an open network [comme Starlink, NDLR]”It’s becoming less and less safe,” says Chris Winslett, transportation program director at Lockheed Martin, a key prime contractor.
The US Space Force intends to maintain control over the availability and quality of services, which cannot be guaranteed when one is one of several users of a commercial network such as Starlink or Kuiper. In short, in addition to security, it is also about sovereignty over the program. However, the Pentagon remains a more or less indirect customer of Starlink by funding its use by the Ukrainian armed forces. With the JWCC program, the Pentagon is also a customer of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud and in particular uses the Starlink network to transmit its data.
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