Space Force to get NOAA antennas to supplement Satellite Control Network

MAUI — The Space Force will soon have access to antennas owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to augment the capacity of its aging Satellite Control Network used to keep US military satellites flying, according to a senior official at the service’s primary acquisition command.

“We have a program right now called Federal Augmentation Service, FAS, which is essentially leveraging some NOAA antennas. And so that … is sort of a prototype effort that’s going operational here very, very soon, next probably month or two,” said Col. Patrick Little, system program director for Space Access and Network Services at Space Systems Command’s new(ish) System Delta 85.

“They have excess capacity we’ve been able to use right now,” he told Breaking Defense on Wednesday at the annual Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance conference here.

The SCN is used to support launches and early satellite operations, track and control satellites, and provide emergency support to tumbling and lost satellites for constellations owned by the US military, the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA and NOAA. The network comprises 19 antennas and ground systems at seven locations around the globe that undertake what are known as TT&C functions — tracking (determining where a satellite is located), telemetry (collecting information about its health and status) and command (transmitting signals to control subsystems and maneuvering satellites if necessary).

However, not only are those antennas all old-school parabolic dishes that can only talk to one satellite at a time, but also there is simply not enough ground system capacity to keep tabs on all the satellites the US government has launched over the past few years. And the number of US satellites is only expected to grow.

Thus, the initiative to use excess antenna capacity from NOAA ground stations is part of a broader modernization effort for the SCN, all together budgeted at $81.5 million in fiscal 2025 and $93.8 million in FY26.

Little said the program with NOAA, which was launched in 2023 under an initial memorandum of understanding, has been “a little bit clunky” but that SSC has “learned a lot” from it — lessons that will help System Delta 85 as it moves out on agreements with other agencies, as well as with commercial providers.

SSC in May granted two prototype contracts to Boecore, a subsidiary of Auria, and Sphinx Defense to create two parallel systems for connecting military and government satellite control centers in need of antenna time and bandwidth to third-party ground systems providers under the prototype Joint Antenna Marketplace (JAM) program. Boecore received $8.1 million and Sphinx $9.5 million “to demonstrate the core, cloud-based capabilities to support an enterprise commercial solution with an emphasis on scalability,” the SSC announcement said.

The companies in essence are serving as “brokers” to match users first with commercial operators — such as Amazon Web Services and Kongsberg Satellite Services — and later with other government agencies such as NASA or NRO, Little explained. They would, for example, figure out which of the providers let into the JAM pool could meet users antenna frequency needs.

Little stressed that SSC, rather than the two companies, will vet providers for inclusion in the pool, including certifying that they have all the right cybersecurity protections in place.

“We need to go through the process of doing an authority to connect, to connect from our architecture out to their commercial site, and … develop a repeatable, approved approach to doing that. We’ve got an approach right now that’s approved, but sort of from a prototype perspective. So we’re going to try it out, and we’re going to work with the security community to say, here’s how we think is the best way to approve these connections,” he said.

Little said that the idea behind JAM is to expand satellite control capacity at a lower cost than building new SCN antennas.

“Basically, what it does is it gives us a dial for capacity. So today, I’ve got a fixed amount of capacity. … I’ve got this many antennas. We haven’t put up a new antenna in a while, right? And we’re, might have noticed, we’re launching a lot of stuff,” he said.

“What I need to have is I need to have [commercial providers] connected in, I need to have a secure way to talk to them, to actually reserve and schedule time, and a business model to pay it, and then I can reserve the time when I need it. And so get into a situation, get into combat, whatever it is, and we need to turn that dial, I now have a dial, And so that’s really what it does for us is gives us the ability to flex,” he elaborated.

While the business model isn’t yet sorted out, Little said the idea is to have users pay into the system to use either the SCN antennas or those from outside augmenting the network.

“We’re kind of experimenting, prototyping with a model where we … basically say, ‘okay, everybody’s gonna have to pay for their contacts.’ Maybe, whether you’re using the SCN or not, you might need to pay for contacts on the SCN in order to contribute to that sustainment,” he said. “And then you have a much more sustainable model.”

Another problem SSC is hoping JAM can help solve is the fact that many of the signals used by the SCN antennas “are in a bandwidth that most other countries aren’t allowing us to use anymore, [as] they’re selling it off for other purposes. So we have to find another way to connect to those satellites.”

The JAM prototype effort is first concentrating on finding commercial antenna providers using “unified S-band,” and transferred those government satellites using the SCN on that band to the new providers, Little said. Unified S-band is widely used by commercial providers.

As a next step, he added, the effort will look at how to expand access for satellites using “military Ka-band.”