SIGNAL: Hybrid Space Architecture Poised To Become Operational

Excerpt:

"Defense Innovation Unit officials are preparing to transition the Hybrid Space Architecture (HSA) following capability demonstrations next year to warfighters during military exercises, including Cope North and Northern Edge.

Rogan Shimmin, the Defense Innovation Unit’s HSA program manager, told SIGNAL Media in a recent interview that program officials are mapping out their involvement in Cope North and Northern Edge and are interested in a handful of other exercises as well. The exercises will serve as capabilities demonstrations for warfighters prior to the program’s transition to operational status. The Defense Innovation Unit works on technologies at high readiness levels to allow for rapid transition. Officials hope to see HSA capabilities in use in 2025.

The program aims to integrate commercial and government satellites to preserve operational and informational security while enabling collaboration between military services and with allies and international partners, according to a program press release. The architecture will link multiple ground communications systems with diverse satellite networks, using all available links, including laser, radio frequency, military tactical data links and existing and future ground segment wired networks. [...]

The architecture should substantially expand and enhance satellite communications, Shimmin indicated when asked to list the benefits. “Ubiquitous communications for satellites, so you can task your satellite at any time without having to wait for it to pass over the right ground station. And you can also pull data from your satellite,” he said. “It massively reduces the latency of tasking and operations for the military. But it’s also going to provide high-bandwidth data for a lot of our constellations—especially imaging constellations that are producing petabytes of data every day, most of which gets wasted because we don’t have the bandwidth to pull that down from the satellites.”

For a military program, the HSA could be described as moving at light speed. The Defense Innovation Unit first solicited solutions from industry in October 2021. It then awarded its first tranche of contracts to Aalyria, Anduril, Atlas and Enveil in July last year, and a second tranche to SpiderOak Mission Systems, Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s Project Kuiper and Microsoft Azure Space in November.

Read full article at The Cyber Edge by SIGNAL here.