Meadowlands is a mobile, ground-based offensive counterspace system that uses radio signals to jam adversary satellite communications. Developed by prime contractor L3Harris, the capability provides a significant upgrade to the Space Force’s current platform — the Counter Communications System (CCS) — by adding a software-defined architecture, drastically reducing weapon size and integrating automation.

L3Harris formally passed system verification review for Meadowlands in April. The Space Force then announced that Meadowlands received fielding approval on May 2 to begin training guardians on the system, with next steps being “upgrading the operating system to fulfill remote operations capabilities and multi-system management in the near future,” according to Space Operations Command.

The contractor has already delivered the first two Meadowlands units to the Space Force and the system is now going through government testing, Erik Ballard, L3Harris’s general manager for space antennas, surveillance systems, space and airborne systems, told DefenseScoop in a recent interview. The milestone was completed about six months ahead of schedule, and the company is now on track to deliver even more units through 2025, he added.

“It is more than just a block upgrade, it’s a step-change in capability,” Ballard said.

The first iteration of CCS became operational in 2004 and has received incremental upgrades over the years. L3Harris completed the final upgrade, known as 10.2, in March 2020 after the company received a development contract in 2019 to deliver five Meadowlands systems to the Space Force by December 2025.

L3Harris also received a production contract for Meadowlands in 2021 that includes over 20 additional units, the first of which is expected to be delivered this year, Ballard noted.

“The software-defined architecture … allows us to upgrade it quickly with the changing threat environment much more affordably and much faster,” he said. “I also think that the footprint size — the analogy I like to use … is, for [CCS 10.2], all your equipment fit in a bus and you hooked up an antenna behind it. Now, all that equipment fits in your SUV.”

Meadowlands also adds a significant amount of automation and remote command-and-control capabilities, meaning that a single guardian can do tasks that would have previously required multiple people. 

Col. Bryon McClain, program executive for space domain awareness and combat power at Space System Command, told reporters in April that the automation capabilities of Meadowlands will give the service a significant amount of flexibility.

“Having a system that we can reduce the number of people that are physically sitting by the antenna — turning knobs and pushing buttons — the farther we can separate that,” McClain said during a media roundtable at Space Symposium. “It gives us the ability to centralize how we do business.”

After years of keeping its offensive and defensive counterspace capabilities behind closed doors, the Space Force has recently entered a new era of openly talking about its plans to weaponize the domain against adversaries. In April, the service published a new warfighting framework that outlines three mission areas — orbital, electromagnetic and cyberspace warfare — for counterspace operations.

As the Space Force has conducted operational training on Meadowlands with guardians, Ballard said the process has been “night and day” compared to previous CCS platforms. L3Harris partnered with the Space Force early in the system’s development to ensure military personnel could easily and quickly train on the new Meadowlands platforms, he said.

“Over the last couple of months as we’ve went through government testing, [the training aspect] has really resonated with the users,” Ballard said. “That’s something that’s been in the process for a number of years. And now to hear it in feedback from users — we did the right thing there by starting that earlier.”

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Under development by L3Harris, ATLAS is the Pentagon’s latest attempt to modernize antiquated systems used by the Space Force to track satellites, spacecraft and other objects on orbit. The software-based platform is the foundation for a broader effort to replace the 1980s-era Space Defense Operations Center (SPADOC) computer system.

“ATLAS is going very well, we expect to go into operational acceptance testing this year,” Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, head of Space Systems Command (SSC), told reporters last week during a media roundtable at the annual Space Symposium.

ATLAS is designed to integrate and disseminate a range of data types — including space domain awareness, command and control, and intelligence — with the help of automation capabilities to give operators a complete picture of the space domain. The system is one piece of the service’s Space Command and Control initiative, started after the previous SPADOC replacement known as the Joint Space Operations Center Mission System (JMS) was terminated in 2018 due to poor performance.

Although it’s now on track, ATLAS was considered one of the service’s most beleaguered programs by former space acquisition lead Frank Calvelli. The Space Force initially wanted the system operational by 2022, but software integration challenges and lack of trained operators have plagued ATLAS during its development, forcing the service to delay decommissioning of SPADOC.

Furthermore, the program has notched multiple Category 1 deficiencies — designated for problems that could cause serious harm or damage — as well as less severe Category 2 deficiencies.

To tackle some of ATLAS’s key challenges, Calvelli last year directed that the program be moved from SSC — the service’s acquisition arm — to Mission Delta 2-Space Domain Awareness. The organization is one of the newest integrated mission deltas under Space Operations Command (SpOC) and brings the mission area’s personnel, training elements and acquisition professionals for maintenance and sustainment under one commander.

Garrant commended the decision, as it allowed guardians to better understand the complexities of the system and put urgency on developers to deliver capabilities on time.

“The connective tissue with the operators and getting them early time on the system, and even closer connections at low echelons of command between the developer and the operator — that’s probably the biggest success we’ve seen in all of our mission deltas and all of our sustainment squadrons,” he said. “It’s been incredibly successful, I think you’re going to see more of that.”

The new approach was also key for L3Harris in its work to get ATLAS across the finish line, because the company is now working closely with operators to test and integrate capabilities through an agile development cycle, Charles Clarkson, vice president and general manager for the company’s space superiority and imaging division, told DefenseScoop.

To prepare for IOC this year, SpOC is conducting quarterly capability integration tests (SCITs) where test squadrons, space operators and L3Harris work together to analyze ATLAS and deliver additional capability. The service recently completed its tenth SCIT in March.

“We test it in a development environment, and then we also test it in an operational environment, with the operators then being able to provide that real-time feedback to the software development team,” Clarkson said in an interview on the sidelines of Space Symposium. “It’s all about creating closeness to the mission, and then being able to incorporate those requirements to keep pace with the threat.”

L3Harris received a $53 million indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract to develop ATLAS in 2018. Since then, the company has received multiple extension awards from the Space Force for the program — including a $90 million follow-on contract in January to “meet ATLAS initial operational capability and achieve software stability,” according to the Defense Department.

The contract extension will also give L3Harris the opportunity to improve ATLAS with additional tools and technologies, Clarkson added.

“It’s also looking at then, how do we build on [and] augment capability on top of that foundational layer that was primarily giving operators and warfighters a modern toolset, and just scaling so that we could keep pace with the exponential launches in space,” he said.

Clarkson emphasized that even with the delays, L3Harris did not have to pare back any of the capabilities for ATLAS. The company is also resolving the remaining deficiencies identified during SCITs, he said. An SSC spokesperson confirmed to DefenseScoop that all of the program’s Category 1 deficiencies will be resolved “prior to trial period entry.”

“I don’t look at it and say, ‘Hey, we had a dozen, two dozen, three dozen [Category 1 deficiencies] coming out of a SCIT,’ as a negative thing. What that really means is we’ve actually seen an increase in recent SCITS, and that’s really driven by the fact that it’s becoming very, very real,” Clarkson said. “That’s exactly what we want to see in agile software development, is you identify those deficiencies and you burn them down over the next sprint.”

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SDA announced the delay for Tranche 1 of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) in a statement on Friday, citing continued supply chain woes as the main contributor to the decision to postpone launch. The agency plans to conduct around one launch per month until all 154 Tranche 1 sats are on orbit.

The news marks yet another setback for SDA, which in recent weeks has been grappling with leadership changes and questions regarding the agency’s semi-independent acquisition authorities. However, the launch delay appears to be caused by supply chain bottlenecks related to the sheer number of satellites the agency plans to put on orbit.

“SDA continues to aggressively work toward the first Tranche 1 launch; however, as we progress through a normal assembly, integration, and testing campaign, with the added challenge of late supplier deliveries, it has become clear additional time is required for system readiness to meet the Tranche 1 minimum viable capability,” the agency said in a statement.

The PWSA is a planned constellation comprising hundreds of satellites stationed in low-Earth orbit. The program is divided into two main mission areas — data relay and communications in the transport layer, and missile warning and tracking in the tracking layer. SDA initially pursued an aggressive acquisition and launch schedule known as “spiral development,” which sought to put new satellites in space every two years.

The agency originally planned to begin launching Tranche 1 — considered the first operational batch of PWSA sats that would provide regional coverage of the Earth — in September 2024. That date was then postponed and re-slated for spring 2025, largely due to supply chain bottlenecks that have been a persistent hurdle in the architecture’s development.

Tranche 1 will consist of 158 satellites, including 126 in the transport layer, 28 in the tracking layer and four “missile defense demonstration” satellites. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, York Space Systems and L3Harris are all prime contractors on the program.

The number of sats is a stark contrast to previous military space constellations, which historically only included a small quantity of large and exquisite space vehicles. As a result, both SDA and the space industrial base have been challenged to deliver critical parts — including optical communications terminals (OCT) and encryption devices — on time and at the scale needed to launch the PWSA.

“OCTs have experienced some scaling issues, encryption devices are limited and subject to approval outside SDA, propulsion systems were a challenge on [tranche 1] due to business issues as a supplier that several [tranche 1] prime vendors were using,” an SDA official told DefenseScoop on background.

The launch campaign for tranche 1 will begin with the transport layer, the official added. However, the agency has not yet determined which vendor will be the first to go on orbit in summer 2025, or how many space vehicles will be part of the inaugural tranche 1 launch, they said.

SDA emphasized that despite the latest delay in launching Tranche 1, the agency is committed to finishing on-orbit test and checkout of the satellites by mid-2026 and delivering “the entire initial warfighting capability” in early 2027.

“We are conducting enhanced integration checks and testing on the ground between now and the start of launch which helps build a higher degree of operational confidence,” the SDA official said. “It should also smooth out the test and checkout process on orbit to allow us to get to initial warfighting capabilities in 2027, as the warfighter is expecting.”

The official said subsequent launch campaigns for tranches 2 and 3 are still on track, noting that SDA began the acquisition process for tranche 3 earlier to allow for more time between award and launch. Because the supply chain issues impeding tranche 1 are related to scaling up production, the agency believes it will experience fewer delays once the industrial base catches up to SDA’s demand, they added.

“SDA’s top priority is to quickly deliver capabilities promised to the warfighter. Launch is a major milestone but one in a much larger path to delivering viable capabilities. Our goal remains to rapidly deliver functional capabilities with a high degree of operational confidence,” the agency said in a statement.

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Much work remains, however. Company officials noted that in live testing, the firm has experimented with fewer than 100 platforms to date, although they hope to soon begin expanding that.

The technology, dubbed Autonomous Multidomain Operations Resiliency Platform for Heterogenous Unmanned Swarms (AMORPHOUS), gets at some of the difficult challenges the Defense Defense is trying to tackle as it relates to autonomy.

“One of the big problems that has yet to be solved is, how do you think about the control of not 10, not 100, not even 1,000 — but thousands of assets simultaneously? And that’s really not something that’s possible to do with human control only. You have to have a system that can be the orchestra conductor once it’s given a command,” Jon Rambeau, president of integrated mission systems at L3Harris, told reporters last week ahead of the company’s announcement on Monday. “We think the problem to be solved here for our Defense Department customers is, how do warfighters command and control autonomous assets at scale — that’s thousands of assets — and really do that in the combat scenario that’s going to involve not just the autonomous assets, but also manned assets, aircraft, surface vessels, subsurface vessels?”

Executives said AMORPHOUS and associated technologies have been on multiple contracts to date, and they believe the overall solution has a lot of room to scale and meet the DOD’s problems.

In designing the architecture, Rambeau noted that the company wanted to develop something that could be disaggregated given how fast and distributed the battlefield of the future is poised to be.

The so-called “mothership” concept, in which swarms of systems are controlled by a central brain, is likely not ideal, he said, given that capability could be thwarted by adversaries.

“We believe that’s not the best approach, because if something happens, that asset’s degraded, it’s attacked, it’s no longer able to communicate, then what happens? We’ve come up with an architecture that allows the control to pass from one asset to another seamlessly, so if the swarm is degraded, they continue to function,” Rambeau said.

The contractor has developed a single user concept where a warfighter could control assets with a tablet across all domains of warfare.

Company officials noted that AMORPHOUS has been designed with an open architecture to be able to integrate various platforms built by a variety of vendors. The software integrates onto any vendor’s hardware, they said.

To date, AMORPHOUS has only been live tested in “double-digit” numbers of systems, officials said, but they hope to see that go to “triple digits” in the not-too-distant future.

The ultimate intent is to control thousands of platforms — a concept that can be challenging to test given the scalability and availability of ranges and systems. There’s expected to be reliance on live, virtual, constructive methods.

The architecture L3Harris is using for AMORPHOUS, however, has already successfully stress-tested over 100 assets, despite AMORPHOUS itself not testing that much, according to company officials.

They expressed confidence in the system’s ability to be able to begin scaling given they are drawing from programs that have successfully operated at a larger scale.

While the capability and associated tech have worked with multiple military services, L3Harris officials noted there isn’t necessarily an on-ramp for a single service to onboard it, but rather, all the services desire the technology and it’s applicable to all.

“All the services are asking for the same thing. One of the reasons we formed an enterprise autonomy team inside of L3Harris is this is not service specific,” said Toby Magsig, vice president and general manager of enterprise autonomous solutions at the company. “This is taking a more centralized look at what is the right architecture, the right approach, the right technology to give all the services what they need to be able to do this multi-domain, multi-asset, swarm-of-swarm solution. I think we’re seeing them all ask for the same thing, but they all are benefiting from a multi-domain approach.”

While AMORPHOUS is being designed for a single user interface, officials explained they are also building it for the operational level of war and below, meaning there must be multiple user interfaces for others to have control.

In joint operations at the four-star combatant command level, operations towards objectives are carried out across multiple domains by multiple services. While an Army soldier likely won’t be controlling both land and maritime systems, there has to be a way for multiple users interfaces to monitor and provide direction for thousands of systems in a swarm on future battlefields.

“When you’re talking at this scale, there’s going to be multiple commanders that are interested in what the effects are and how this is being used,” Magsig said. “When you look at multi-domain, it’s really the joint commanders that are providing that level of joint integration across multiple domains, and are going to have control of the scale of heterogeneous swarm.”

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The company has sought to outfit its Vehicle Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) to small unmanned surface vessels, Jon Rambeau, who leads the Integrated Mission Systems business at L3Harris, said in an interview at the annual WEST conference in San Diego.

VAMPIRE has already been deployed to Ukraine to help counter Russian drone attacks, and officials from the vendor view it as a potentially key system in thwarting other unmanned threats, such as those from the Houthis, a group backed by Iran that has controlled portions of Yemen — including the capital — since 2014. That group has been firing missiles and drones at Navy and commercial ships in the Red Sea in response to U.S. support for Israel’s war against Hamas.

“In the Red Sea to take out these very low cost, attritable threats, this is an alternative that has an interceptor that is between $20,000 and $30,000 a shot, so just vastly more affordable. These could be set up as a picket line as a standoff to either commercial ships or military vessels,” Rambeau said.  

The Navy has expended multimillion-dollar missiles to shoot down enemy drones in the Red Sea, resulting in an expensive cost-per-kill ratio. Service officials have noted this isn’t sustainable, and they’ve called for the development of better, more cost-effective countermeasures against them, such as non-kinetic methods.

The adaptation of VAMPIRE to the maritime domain is part of L3Harris’ strategy to get systems to the battlefield faster. Rambeau noted that the expectation with the new administration is there won’t be a lot of patience for lengthy and expensive developmental efforts.

In his first message to the force, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he wants to rapidly field emerging technologies.

Utilizing systems that have been proven in one domain, such as VAMPIRE, and making slight modifications to bring them to another, is a prime example of using what’s already out there to speed delivery, Rambeau said.

“I think L3Harris has a lot of very affordable, relevant, mature capability on the shelf that’s right here now … Single-digit millions off the shelf ready to go,” Rambeau said, regarding VAMPIRE as well as other offerings the company is looking to modify. “I’ve said this very directly to a number of our stakeholders in government, there are relevant, operationally proven, mature capabilities available off the shelf today for what’s [a] rounding error on cost of a ship or a satellite or a couple of radar arrays or fill in the blank. Very, very, very affordable and can be delivered in time to be relevant in 2027. We’re anxious to provide as much of that capability as possible.”

Rambeau said they’ve written algorithms to adjust for the maritime domain for VAMPIRE already, which is the challenging aspect of it. Now, they’re waiting for range time to test it, which should take place by the end of April.  

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“We do not have the industrial capacity built today to get after this,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said Dec. 7 during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “We’re going to have to start getting comfortable with the lack of efficiency in the industrial base to start getting excess capacity so that we have something to go to in times of crisis and conflict.”

Resilience through proliferation

Historically, the Defense Department tended to develop a few very large and exquisite satellites to conduct critical military missions. But with the growing use of space as a warfighting domain by both the United States and its adversaries, the Pentagon is now focusing on different ways to build resilience in its space systems — such as by launching hundreds of smaller, inexpensive satellites for a single constellation.

At the forefront of the relatively novel approach is the Space Development Agency’s spiral acquisition strategy that is being used for the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA). Once it’s built out, the constellation is expected to comprise hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and include space vehicles carrying different communications, data relay, missile warning and missile tracking capabilities.

SDA plans to field systems in batches every two years, with each iteration carrying the latest technology available. Although the first operational satellites known as Tranche 1 were slated to launch in fall 2024, that deadline has since been delayed to March or April 2025 due to supply chain bottlenecks, according to SDA Director Derek Tournear.

“I will say that what we’re seeing in the supply chain in the small LEO market has caught up to what SDA’s needs are, but it took them about eight months longer than they anticipated to ramp up,” Tournear said during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum. 

A total of 158 satellites are being developed for Tranche 1 of the PWSA: 126 data transport sats, 28 missile warning/missile tracking sats and four missile defense demonstration sats. The agency will also launch 12 tactical demonstration satellites under the Tranche 1 Demonstration and Experimentation System (T1DES) initiative to test new capabilities that can be leveraged in future PWSA tranches.

Across that order, four prime contractors are on the program — York Space Systems, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and L3Harris — and each of them is working with dozens of subcontractors.

Executives from various Tranche 1 primes who spoke to DefenseScoop acknowledged that they encountered supply chain bottlenecks in their work for the contract. Issues have now mostly been resolved and the vendors are on track to launch by the new deadline, they said.

However, companies are still using those lessons learned to mitigate setbacks for future tranches that go beyond just purchasing long-lead items.

“We’re seeing the results of that demand signal that SDA has been sending us on a very consistent basis through their spiral tranche acquisition. Is it perfect yet? No. We’ve got some places to go,” Rob Mitrevski, vice president and general manager of spectral solutions at L3Harris, said in an interview.

Tranche 1 isn’t the first time SDA has experienced delays. The agency was forced to push back the launch of Tranche 0 — a group of 27 satellites that served as a proof of concept for the entire PWSA — by about six months.

The holdup was attributed to supply chain bottlenecks that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic when many manufacturers were forced to slow or stop production lines. Specific microelectronic components such as resistors were particularly difficult to buy, Mitrevski noted.

The recent issues aren’t caused by COVID-19 conditions, but are instead reflective of the sheer volume of systems SDA is asking of its contractors and an industrial base that wasn’t quite ready to meet the increased demand.

“I think a lot of that has been just scaling — getting past designing tens of things to designing lots of things,” Louis Christen, senior director of proliferated systems at Northrop Grumman, said during a tour of the company’s Space Park facility in Redondo Beach, California, where it’s manufacturing Tranche 1 birds.

To alleviate potential risk, Northrop Grumman has been moving through production as much as possible and building multiple satellites in parallel, Christen said. Working very closely with its multiple subcontractors throughout the process has been another critical strategy.

“Although they’re commercial suppliers, we’re not just buying stuff from them. We’re a partner. We’re there on a daily basis and helping prop them up,” he said.

Dirk Wallinger, CEO and president of York Space Systems, said challenges the company had weren’t specific to its Tranche 1 contracts, but actually reflect a lack of diversity in the supply chain that is affecting the entire space industry. 

“One of the key bottlenecks results from [requests for proposals] with subsystem performance specifications that inadvertently narrow the qualified vendor pool to a single supplier,” Wallinger told DefenseScoop. “This limits the value tradeoffs of all of the prime contractors and by creating dependency on sole-source suppliers, exacerbates delays.”

Addressing the problem would require rethinking high-level performance requirements in a manner that would diversify the supplier base and enable more competition in industry, he added.

L3Harris is also trying to move away from single or sole-source suppliers by building strong relationships with the swath of subcontractors it has worked with on all three of its contracts for the PWSA, Mitrevski said.

“The supply chain works to create scale over time, and the scale is created through a diverse group of suppliers,” he said. “What you’ve seen in the way we’ve evolved from [Tranche 0] through now [Tranche 1] and [Tranche 2] is a continual improvement of the scale and diversity in that supply chain.”

Wallinger noted that they’ve found the most effective way to mitigate supply chain risks has been to buy satellite buses from providers ahead of receiving mission specifications. In the future, it’s crucial that the government secures these long-lead items as early as possible to effectively eliminate delays, he added.

“Schedule risk is mostly induced from bus component suppliers, not mission payload developers,” Wallinger said. “Commoditized satellite buses are the only ones being considered, and by definition can support a range of mission sets. They are the critical component to procure in advance.”

Mitigating future delays

While SDA has tried to ensure its system requirements can leverage readily available hardware, Tournear said there are some components that must be tailor-made for the Tranche 1 satellites. Mesh network encryption devices that are approved by the National Security Agency have been a significant headache because there’s only one manufacturer able to make them, he said.

The agency has adjusted its timeline expectations for future PWSA tranches to allow more time for vendors to build their platforms, adding several months to overall production time.

Mitrevski also noted that SDA’s overall strategy to fund development of capabilities that can be tested early on is beneficial. 

“They have a number of efforts where they’ve clearly acquired leading-edge capabilities with the intention of driving the maturity level of those leading-edge capabilities forward and then make use of them later on,” he said. 

York Space Systems has also discussed with SDA ways to mitigate risks outside of supply chain diversification, Wallinger said. One area of improvement could be ensuring long-lead items are aligned with current and future mission requirements, he noted.

“We have had several instances where the second- and third-tier suppliers had stock on hand, but that stock didn’t have the right interface protocols or didn’t have the right form factor, and couldn’t be used to meet the actual mission needs,” he said. “So you had those suppliers spending capital on things that simply had to be completely redone at a cost to the [U.S. government] and us.”

But with plans to only grow the number of military satellites on orbit — not just for the PWSA, but also other programs across the Defense Department — SDA’s work is likely going to create a ripple effect of both growth and demand within the industrial base. The supply chain woes are serving as a “canary in the coal mine” for the national security space community writ large, and will require the entire department’s effort to fix them, Guetlein said.

“Because of the quantities that he’s ordering, he’s now starting to uncover the challenges that we have with the industrial base,” Guetlein said, referring to Tournear. “And these challenges are significant, and we need to figure out how to get after them.”

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During the test, the contractor for the first time connected its hybrid SATCOM terminals to two commercial internet satellite systems — one stationed in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and another in geosynchronous orbit (GEO), according to the firm. The demonstration was the company’s first for AFRL’s Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI) effort, also known as Global Lightning.

“Northrop Grumman is responding to the U.S. Air Force’s need for rapid deployment of resilient communications to develop and field the technologies required by our warfighters to meet today’s challenging missions,” Steven Conn, the company’s director of advanced communications and signals intelligence, said in a statement. “This successful test, leveraging a diverse team of commercial and defense SATCOM providers, is critical for the pace of maturity on the Global Lightning program and the ability to begin flight testing in the near future.”

At the July demonstration, Northrop Grumman established connectivity between its hybrid SATCOM terminals to a commercial proliferated LEO communications provider at Ku frequencies, as well as with the ViaSat F1 satellite in GEO at Ka frequencies. The event validated ubiquitous communications and the ability to rapidly switch between constellation systems and orbital regimes, according to the organization.

Global Lightning looks to leverage commercial space internet services to establish path-agnostic communications for warfighters. The program is linked to the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort, which aims to connect disparate systems across the battlespace under a single network to enable rapid data transfer between all warfighting domains.

AFRL has given awards to various defense contractors and commercial SATCOM providers for the effort in recent years. In 2023, Northrop Grumman received a four-year, $80.3 million contract from the research lab to execute the demonstrations as part of its “call 3” phase that will demonstrate connectivity between military platforms and commercial space internet constellations across two use cases — communications in the Arctic region and airborne comms.

L3Harris also received a three-year deal worth $80.8 million to perform work on the call 3 exercises for Global Lightning. The company announced Sept. 10 it had completed a critical design review for its Rapidly Adaptable Standards-compliant Open Radio (RASOR) capability that will be used to test connectivity between military platforms and commercial space internet.

“Following this successful CDR, we plan on conducting integrated hardware testing within the next year to support Air Force flight tests currently scheduled to begin at the end of 2025,” Adam Milner, L3Harris’s senior manager of space networks, said in a statement.

Viasat, SES Space & Defense, SpaceX, OneWeb and Telesat are among the commercial SATCOM providers that have been contracted for the Global Lightning program since it began.

Meanwhile, AFRL is already looking forward to future demonstrations. Viasat announced Tuesday that it received a $33.6 million contract from the research lab to develop and deliver active electronically scanned array (AESA) systems as part of Global Lightning’s “call 4” phase.

The commercial AESA antennas are expected to support communications for tactical aircraft and enable connectivity across multiple frequencies, orbits and commercial networks.

“We believe hybrid resilient communication solutions are central to future government mobility operations and our teams are committed to continuing to help solve these multi-band, multi-orbit, multi-constellation interoperability challenges with high performance, cost-effective capabilities,” Michael Maughan, Viasat Government’s vice president of space and mission systems, said in a statement.

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Space Systems Command (SSC) dropped Raytheon from the Resilient Missile Warning and Tracking — MEO (MEO MW/MT) program in May due to significant cost growth, slips in launch schedule and unresolved design challenges experienced by the company. Raytheon was originally contracted in 2021 to build three space vehicles for the missile-warning constellation’s first batch of satellites, known as Epoch 1.

As SSC prepares to launch the remaining Epoch 1 systems and receives proposals for the subsequent Epoch 2 space vehicles, officials are exploring how to make up for the capability lost by dropping Raytheon from the contract, Col. Rob Davis, PEO for the command’s space sensing directorate, said Wednesday during a media roundtable at AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.

“We have plans to go ahead and make sure we don’t have a loss of capability in Epoch 1. We expect to have equivalent capabilities in the requirements being satisfied with Epoch 1,” Davis said. “Flowing into Epoch 2, that [request for proposals] is on the street. We’re tracking that, eagerly waiting to get those back and seeing where that takes us to finish out the initial warfighting capability of that constellation.”

The MEO MW/MT constellation is being developed to track high-speed missiles from medium-Earth orbit (MEO) as part of the Space Force’s plans to build a resilient architecture of missile warning and missile-tracking satellites across multiple orbits.

SSC is leveraging a spiral development model for the program by developing and fielding the systems in “epochs” that each deliver incremental capability — similar to the strategy used by the Space Development Agency for its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA). The intent is to have the MEO MW/MT constellation work with the PWSA birds in low-Earth orbit and other satellites in higher orbits to track advanced missile threats from space.

Boeing subsidiary Millennium Space Systems was also contracted in 2021 to build six satellites for the constellation. Later in 2023, L3Harris received an award to complete sensor payload design for Epoch 1. SSC expects to launch the six Epoch 1 vehicles — which will provide initial missile-warning capability — by 2027.

Bob Fitzpatrick, vice president of requirements and capabilities at Raytheon, told DefenseScoop that moving forward, the company is able to carry the development work it did on Epoch 1 into its proposal for future phases of the MEO MW/MT program.

“We actually worked hand in hand with [SSC] to really develop a good point to kind of bring it to closure, because we saw how much it was going to do for our business but equally for what they wanted to do,” Fitzpatrick said Tuesday on the sidelines of the AFA conference. “It actually turned out to be very positive for both of us, and we are now looking at leveraging that technology for the Epoch 2 series.”

In August, SSC released a request for prototype proposals for development and procurement of up to 18 space vehicles for Epoch 2. The satellites will build upon the Epoch 1 birds and be able to track advanced hypersonic and ballistic missile threats, according to the solicitation.

Davis noted that the Epoch 2 platforms will carry “in-plane, vendor-specific crosslinks,” meaning the space vehicles will only be able to share data and communicate with those made by the same company located in MEO. Once the contracts are awarded, it’s possible SSC will look into an additional crosslink to advance the technology.

“From a tech maturation [standpoint], we’re really looking to Epoch 3 to have that technology ready to support where we really want to get to — that point where we’re meshing between vendors,” Davis said.

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The Defense Department announced on Aug. 26 that L3Harris won a five-year, $587.4 million contract for the engineering and manufacturing development of the Next Generation Jammer Low Band (NGJ-LB) system. The NGJ family of systems is a replacement for the decades-old ALQ-99, that will be mounted on the EA-18G Growler aircraft.

The program was initially broken up into three separate jamming pods covering various ends of the electromagnetic spectrum based on criticality of current and emerging threats: Mid-Band (which was awarded to Raytheon in 2016), Low-Band and High-Band (for which there hasn’t been any line item in Navy budgets since at least fiscal 2020).

The Low Band program is a collaboration with the Australian military, according to Navy budget documents. It is intended to counter a larger capacity of enemy systems in the low-frequency electromagnetic spectrum and is scheduled to reach early operational capability in 2029, according to the Navy.

Overall, the pods in the program are expected to be significantly more powerful than the ALQ-99, with extended range and the ability to jam multiple targets simultaneously. With the increase in sophistication and range of adversaries’ military systems — especially across the Pacific — such a jamming capability could be critically important for U.S. forces in future conflicts.

The Low-Band is coming off a lengthy litigation battle, which involved a stop-work order issued by the Government Accountability Office that effectively rendered the program stalled.

L3Harris, which won the bid for low-band over Northrop Grumman, filed suit in September 2021 in the Court of Federal Claims protesting a decision by the GAO that required the Navy to potentially reopen proposals for the effort.

The GAO sided with Northrop, which alleged the Navy failed to consider the potential conflict of interest of a former Navy employee that developed specifications for the program while simultaneously negotiating for employment with L3Harris during the solicitation.

Complicating matters further, the service during the Low-Band bid process awarded two companies under a demonstration of technologies and planned to choose the best solution for the ultimate award. One company was Northrop Grumman — which teamed with Harris — and the other was L3 (at that time, L3 and Harris had not yet merged).

The Navy, along with the companies, came to an agreement and reopened bids for the Low-Band program.

Now, with a contract award, the Navy can get to work on this critical capability.

“NGJ-LB will meet current and emerging electronic warfare threats and increase the lethality of 4th and 5th generation platforms and strike weapons,” Rear Adm. John Lemmon, program executive officer for tactical aircraft programs, said in a release this week. “The Navy will partner with L3Harris to get this key capability into the hands of the warfighter.”

“Our Next Generation Jammer – Low Band solution provides the U.S. Navy with the latest digital, software-based technologies to address advanced and emerging threats from peer adversaries,” Christopher E. Kubasik, chair and CEO of L3Harris, said in a statement Thursday. “L3Harris is proud to support the Navy’s efforts to extend U.S. air superiority and operate seamlessly with coalition forces.”

The company noted it will deliver eight operational prototype pods to Naval Air Systems Command for fleet assessment and additional test assets for airworthiness and design verification over the next five years.

In 2023, the Navy initiated a change to the Mid Band program to develop an extended pod, NGJ-MBX, to provide increased range and address specific gaps. This capability provides a frequency extension of the Mid-Band as the quickest way to address near-term threats in light of the High Band capability that remains unfunded.

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Space Systems Command notified Raytheon of the discontinuation in May and held a design closure event earlier this month, an SSC spokesperson said in an email. The service decided to drop the company from the program “because the RTX Epoch 1 development effort was facing significant cost growth from the original agreement baseline, projecting slips to the launch schedule, and had unresolved design challenges,” they added.

Raytheon received an other transaction agreement in 2021 to design digital models of three space vehicles for Epoch 1 of the MEO MW/MT program. The planned constellation is intended to track high-speed missiles from medium-Earth orbit (MEO), and is part of the Space Force’s plan to build a resilient architecture of missile-warning satellites in multiple orbits. 

Similar to the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), the MEO MW/MT satellites are being developed in phases — referred to as “epochs” — that are designed to deliver the latest capabilities in increments. Raytheon is also contracted with SDA to build satellites for Tranche 1 of the PWSA’s missile tracking layer, which will be launched into low-Earth orbit.

“RTX remains committed to supporting the U.S. Space Force now and in the future,” a company spokesperson said in a statement when asked to comment on RTX’s discontinuation from the Epoch 1 effort.

Boeing-subsidiary Millennium Space Systems received a contract at the same time as Raytheon in 2021, to design six satellites for the constellation. In June 2023, L3Harris became the third vendor for Epoch 1 when the Space Force awarded it a one-year contract for sensor payload design.

The service announced in November that the six satellites from Millennium passed space system critical design review, and the SSC spokesperson noted the company also achieved CDR for its ground segments in March. In addition, L3Harris completed critical design review for its infrared sensor payload designed for Epoch 1 in May, according to the company.

The SSC spokesperson noted that the decision to remove Raytheon from the program has not impacted the other vendors nor the program’s schedule to launch the satellites sometime in 2026 or 2027.

To replace the three scrapped space vehicles, the Space Force now plans to either build additional space vehicles from another vendor contracted for Epoch 1 or through its upcoming competition for Epoch 2, the next iteration of the MEO MW/MT constellation.

A request for proposal for Epoch 2 of MEO MW/MT is expected to be released in July, according to the spokesperson.

“We are still on path to deliver to our Epoch 1 goals to provide an initial missile tracking capability, prototype several key technologies, and refine operational concepts in MEO,” they said. “The MEO program has done an outstanding job of creating a sustained competitive environment, allowing us to execute this action without compromising our ability to meet the requirement to provide a resilient missile warning and tracking capability for the nation.”

News of the service dropping a vendor emerged in the detailed funding tables of House appropriators’ fiscal 2025 defense spending bill, first published by Politico on Monday. Lawmakers proposed a $75 million decrease in funds allocated due to “MEO vendor termination,” as well as an additional $10 million drop for “Epoch 2 ops and integration early to need” and another $10 million cut for “management services excess to need,” the documents show.

In total, House appropriators allocated $750 million in research and development dollars for the MEO MW/MT program. The Space Force had originally asked for $846 million in its budget request for fiscal 2025.

Along with the MEO MW/MT program cuts, House appropriators’ proposal would pare down the Space Force’s fiscal 2025 budget to $28.7 billion — around $900 million less than what the service requested in March, and about 5 percent less than what the Space Force was allocated in fiscal 2024.

The House defense appropriations bill must be reconciled with the Senate version during conference before becoming law, so it remains to be seen how much funding will ultimately be approved by Congress.

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