Space Force bets on industrial entrants in $4B satcom contest

American warfighters want jam-proof communications, and the Space Force is planning to spend a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands to make sure they’ve them.

As a part of that effort, the service established the Protected Tactical Satcom program to construct out safe battlefield communications through satellites. The Space Force has already awarded contracts to protection primes Boeing and Northrop Grumman to develop prototype payloads for satellites heading to far-away geostationary orbit.

Now, this system is getting into a brand new section. On Tuesday, the Space Force awarded 5 further contracts for the design and demonstration of purpose-built satellites to offer jam-resistant comms to tactical forces. The winners embrace earlier winners Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Viasat, and Intelsat, plus a relative newcomer: Astranis, a venture-backed startup based mostly in San Francisco. (Intelsat will purchase its satellite tv for pc bus from K2 Space, one other venture-backed startup.)

The preliminary awards are comparatively small, totaling $37.3 million mixed. But this system has a $4 billion award ceiling, so the winners might signal on to a way more profitable protection deal.

Each agency will develop its architectures by means of January 2026. After that, the Space Force will choose one design and award an extra contract for the primary satellite tv for pc, with a launch deliberate in 2028. Additional manufacturing awards shall be doled out, additionally in 2028.

The PTS-G contracts are a notable departure from how the navy has traditionally procured geostationary satellites, which have sometimes had extraordinarily lengthy timelines from contract award to launch, and would value a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands to over a billion {dollars} per spacecraft.

In distinction, the Space Force is clearly making an attempt to leverage the velocity of business entrants and encourage competitors by choosing a number of distributors for the preliminary section of this system.

“Our PTS-G contract transforms how SSC acquires SATCOM capability for the warfighter,” program government officer Cordell DeLaPena Jr. mentioned in a information launch. “The incorporation of commercial baseline designs to meet military capability significantly enhances the Space Force’s speed and efficiency to add capability to meet emerging threats.”