One of the most important program decisions of this administration was made on Tuesday last week. After years of dithering, the Pentagons Deputys Advisory Working Group (known affectionately as the DAWG) approved Tier 2 — the next stage of the Transformational Satellite Communications system.
For a program that had just been whacked by $4 billion over the fiscal 2009 Program Objective memorandums five years this is a remarkable achievement and is testament to the enduring need for enormous amounts of protected communication bandwidth. Lockheed Martin and Boeing executives, who just four months ago feared the program was headed for the trash heap of history, were elated. Lockheed partners with Northrop Grumman and Juniper Networks on the program. Boeing partners with Cisco and Hughes.
T-Sat, aside from providing the vaunted comms on the move capability, will provide something even more important enough bandwidth for the Armys future Combat System and other key joint systems to function. There are two separate T-Sat programs — the ground segment and the satellite segment. The DAWG meeting approved going ahead with the satellites and the plan is to build five of them and one spare.
The June 10 decision came as quite a surprise to several industry players. One told us Thursday that their company could not believe that the Pentagon leaders had approved the program unanimously.
The DAWGs action spells an end to several years of questions about whether to go with what many people have called T-Sat light, which would have been basically a fifth version of the Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite. Congressional staff had been leaning increasingly to such a solution to cover what they feared might be an 18-month gap in protected comms coverage as the old MILSTAR satellites began to fail.
The gap is no longer a concern, according to a senior Pentagon source, adding that launch is now set for 2018. This source says that the DAWG locked in the T-Sat requirements. Doing that basically means that this program barring major technical or schedule screwups is likely set for a long life.
– Colin Clark
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There is a company called Expand Networks which is also in the “WAN optimization” market along with Juniper and Cisco. Expand however is the longest free standing WAN optimization solution and is the only solution that utilizes SCPS acceleration (a NASA protocol) for improving satellite communications.
http://www.expand.com/Products/Free-Evaluation.aspx
The critics who were predicting the demise of TSAT failed to take into account both the dramatic uptick in bandwidth demand based on real-time encrypted imagery projections as well as the subtle linkage between WGS, AEHF and TSAT in terms of how these 3 constellations actually fit together and how they do not reinforce each other at all with respect to comms-on-the-move. That said, the current model which is emerging for the next decade relies on a bandwidth intensive reachback architecture that may not hold up over time. MUOS narrowband has yet to make its presence known, too.