Delays in satellite programs push Navy to look elsewhere
By
Bob Brewin
Service considers leasing capacity on Australian and experimental birds.
Development and launch delays in the next generation of satellites that ground forces and naval ships use for communications have forced the Navy to consider leasing time on Australian military and experimental satellites, top service officials told lawmakers on Wednesday.
The majority of Defense Department satellite programs "have experienced problems during the past two decades that have driven up costs by hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars, and stretched schedules by years and increased technical risks," Cristina Chaplain, director of acquisition and sourcing management at the Government Accountability Office, told a hearing of the Strategic Forces subcommittee.
The Navy, for example, awarded Lockheed Martin Corp. a contract to develop an ultra-high frequency satellite system called the Mobile User Objective System. The first of four satellites originally was scheduled to go into operation this month. But now it will not go live until December 2011, because of technical challenges, inadequate funding and an overly optimistic schedule, Chaplain said.
The mobile user program will replace an aging constellation of eight satellites in the UHF Follow-On System, which first went into operation in 1993. Chaplain said some of those satellites, which communicate with small shipboard terminals and mobile systems that ground forces use called manpacked terminals, will start to degrade in January 2011, nearly a year before the first mobile user satellite begins operation.
In a joint statement, Vice Adm. David Dorsett, deputy chief of naval operations for information dominance and director of naval intelligence, and Gary Federici, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence and space, said the service has started to plug coverage gaps by leasing capacity on a satellite operated by Intelsat and the Skynet 5 satellite operated by Paradigm Secure Communications for the British Ministry of Defence.
Dorsett and Federici told the hearing the Navy also plans to ensure continued service by signing a memorandum of understanding with the Australian Ministry of Defence for capacity on a UHF payload dedicated to serve military users on another Intelsat satellite slated for launch in early 2012.
If needed, the Navy will lease an additional channel on the Sicral satellite system operated by the Italian Ministry of Defense, Dorsett and Federici said.
The service also is considering using 10 UHF channels on the experimental TacSat-4 satellite developed by the Office of Naval Research and scheduled for launch later this year.