The relay satellites, which the SDA calls the transport layer, are additionally geared up with Ka-band and laser communication terminals for increased bandwidth connectivity.
“What the transport layer does is it extends past the road of sight,” Sandhoo mentioned. “Now, you are in a position to speak not solely to inside couple of miles along with your Hyperlink 16 radios, (however) we are able to use area to, as an instance, go from Hawaii out to Guam utilizing these tactical radios, utilizing an area layer.”
The House Improvement Company’s “Tranche 1” structure contains 154 operational satellites, 126 for information relay and 28 for missile monitoring. With this illustration, the SDA does its greatest to indicate how the complicated structure is meant to work.
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House Improvement Company
One other batch of SDA relay satellites will launch subsequent month, and extra will head to area in November. In all, it’ll take 10 launches to completely deploy the SDA’s Tranche 1 constellation. Six of these missions will carry information relay satellites, and 4 will carry satellites with sensors to detect and observe missile launches. The Pentagon chosen a number of contractors to construct the satellites, so the army shouldn’t be reliant on a single firm. The builders of the SDA’s operational satellites embody York, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and L3Harris.
“We’ll enhance protection as we get the remainder of these launches on orbit,” mentioned Michael Eppolito, the SDA’s appearing deputy director.
The satellites will join with each other utilizing inter-satellite laser hyperlinks, making a mesh community with adequate vary to offer regional communications, missile warning, and focusing on protection over the Western Pacific starting in 2027. US Indo-Pacific Command, which oversees army operations on this area, is slated to turn out to be the primary combatant command to take up use of the SDA’s satellite tv for pc constellation.
This isn’t incidental. US officers see China because the nation’s main strategic menace, and Indo-Pacific Command could be on the entrance traces of any future battle between Chinese language and US forces. The SDA has contracts in place for greater than 270 second-generation, or Tranche 2 satellites, to additional broaden the community’s attain. There’s additionally a 3rd era within the works, however the Pentagon has paused a part of the SDA’s Tranche 3 program to judge different architectures, together with one provided by SpaceX.
Educating tactical operators to make use of the brand new capabilities provided by the SDA’s satellite tv for pc fleet could possibly be simply as difficult as constructing the community itself. To do that, the Pentagon plans to place troopers, sailors, airmen, and marines by means of “warfighter immersion” coaching starting subsequent yr. This coaching will permit US forces to “get used to utilizing area from this assemble,” Sandhoo mentioned.
