BETHESDA, MD — Ball Aerospace and General Dynamics Missions Systems are collaborating separately with Telesat to demonstrate cloud processing and data operations with Telesat’s low earth orbit satellite constellation for the U.S. Air Force, the companies announced Tuesday.
Telesat’s Phase 1 LEO satellite and network emulations will be used in live demos with Ball Aerospace and General Dynamics for the U.S. Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center’s Commercially Augmented Space Inter Networked Operations (CASINO) program. CASINO is focused on operationalizing Blackjack, a project of DARPA. Blackjack is demonstrating how the U.S. military can increase the resilience of its networks by using commercially derived LEO satellite constellations to disaggregate space-based communications that support U.S. Department of Defense missions, explains Telesat’s news release.
The CASINO program office approached the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) for help to solve the challenges with processing government data that originates on a commercial space bus. DIU facilitated pairing this commercial-defense relationship to solve the problem of data processing and exploitation, the news release says.
Demonstrations with Ball Aerospace and General Dynamics will consist of:
- Ball Aerospace: Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination Demonstration — Telesat’s Phase 1 LEO satellite will communicate with Ball’s electronically steered, phased array antenna located at a Microsoft data centre, as part of Ball Aerospace’s collaboration with Microsoft. Live testing of low-latency, high-speed links downloaded into the Microsoft Azure cloud and processed using Ball algorithms will demonstrate how data streams from an operational LEO can be processed quickly, thereby providing information superiority.
- General Dynamics Mission Systems: Data Operations — Department of Defense data emulations will be combined with Telesat LEO emulations to demonstrate the volume, traffic management and efficiency of handoffs between military satellites and the Telesat LEO constellation.
The U.S. military has shown growing interest in advanced commercial space systems, such as Telesat’s LEO constellation, that can deliver highly secure and reliable broadband anywhere in the world with added benefits of global persistence, ultra-low latency and rapid technology refresh, Telesat says. Having access to a proliferated commercial LEO satellite system that can be far more robust and resilient in the event of attack versus the military’s large, unprotected GEO satellites was the rationale for the U.S. DoD’s DARPA awarding a contract to Telesat that could lead to the DoD using Telesat’s LEO system for its global broadband connectivity needs, Telesat says.
“The U.S. Air Force’s CASINO program recognizes that a proliferated commercial LEO satellite constellation can be a core component in the military’s future comms infrastructure,” said Don Brown, general manager of government services at Telesat, in the news release. “By teaming with technology leaders Ball Aerospace and General Dynamics Mission Systems, Telesat will demonstrate key advantages of its LEO system that DoD requires in its 21st century networks — faster transport of information with increased resiliency and security.”
