Military Satellite Trends And Outlook: Part 1

By Asif Anwar

The use of space is increasing and becoming an essential component for infrastructure in communications, navigation and timing, agriculture and weather monitoring, and disaster relief efforts. From a military perspective, space assets provide necessary resources to support troops, including the provision of imagery, supporting communications, improving targeting, and conversely reducing collateral damage. As a force multiplier, space assets can provide advanced capabilities and compensate for reductions in other conventional assets.

The continuing and growing dependence of modern society on space will also result in space becoming increasingly congested, contested, and competitive, as well as introducing vulnerabilities to both intentional and non-intentional (both natural and manmade) hazards impacting space assets. Examples include space traffic, space debris, space weather, anti-satellite attacks / jamming, cyber attacks, and attacks on ground-based infrastructure. There will therefore be increased importance attached to mitigating these risks, justifying efforts towards developing robust resilience strategies.

With space power and access to space systems essential to maintaining both domestic capabilities and international operations, space is regarded as a sovereign asset. To maintain autonomy in space, national strategies will need to recognise the importance of space across civilian as well as military applications and develop a collaborative “whole of government approach” that emphasizes the importance of space across both civilian and military domains.

Pooling And Sharing Commercial And Military Assets

While space is a sovereign asset, maintaining this asset is expensive, and with constrained budgets over the next 3 to 5 years there will be a growing need to balance military capabilities and sovereignty while reducing costs.

“Dual use” will be one increasingly common approach with increased technical and operational cooperation of assets for both civilian and military usage. This will also be coupled with the potential for bilateral, multilateral, European, and transatlantic cooperation across both military and civilian satellite assets. The fiscal environment will also dictate future project financing with public-private partnership (PPP) schemes such as the UK’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) finding increasing favor.

Benefits cited to a dual-use approach include the sharing of costs and risk to obtain best value, as well as being able to take advantage of technological advances. From a military perspective, it also allows defense departments to gain access to greater system capacity. In practice, this dual use is compartmentalized with in some cases up to 75% of resources assigned for civilian applications. On the other hand, the defense sector would retain access to certain capabilities, e.g. access to image resolutions < 1m. These capabilities would either not be available or would require civilian members to obtain additional security clearances.

Dual use of civilian and military satellites in Europe has been helped by the Lisbon Treaty, which assigned a shared competence to the EU Commission on space. This covers both military and civilian space operations and the resulting European space policy was approved with administrative agreements signed by the ESA (European Space Agency) and EDA (European Defence Agency). As well as dual use, this also increases the potential for defense payloads to be hosted on commercial satellites.

The Italian COSMO SKYMED (CSK) is one example of dual use and also represents the largest Italian investment in an earth observation space system. Managed by both the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Italian MOD, CSK provides use of a SAR sensor for both civilian and military use and will be operational until 2016. The second generation of the COSMO SKYMED program (CSG) in development is using the same dual-use approach while offering enhanced capabilities and performance that will increase the number of images processed. The CSG is also being made open to international cooperation.

We also see international cooperation on dual use with the Athena-Fidus communications satellite being one future example. The Ka band communication satellites are a result of European cooperation involving the French, Belgian, and Italian Defense Ministries and French and Italian civil protection services. It is designed to provide broadband satellite telecommunications services with a launch expected in 2013.

The pooling of resources will be another feature in this environment, and the GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) program represents a future example of how civilian assets will be used for defense applications as a means of offsetting declining budgets for dedicated military platforms. The primary role of this European Earth monitoring program is to provide monitoring of Earth subsystems (land monitoring, ocean/marine environment monitoring, and atmosphere monitoring) and also provide imagery for emergency and security services. A range of vehicles will be launched to cover different missions.

On the other hand, SatCen is an example of a service primary dedicated to the provisioning of information to government agencies using military/government platforms. A range of satellites are used, including commercial satellites and low resolution platforms, depending on mission requirements. With some restrictions, SatCen also uses use a range of existing and emerging military/dual-use platforms based on bilateral and multilateral cooperation. These include the Helios II, COSMO-SkyMed, and SAR-Lupe platforms.

The primary missions of the European Defence Agency (EDA) is to support Council and Member states to improve EU defense capabilities in the field of crisis management, as well as sustain the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP).The EDA is also involved in developing mechanisms to allow the pooling of resources and is working on several areas in the area of space and satellite. The European SatCom Procurement Cell (ESCPC) work strand, as one example, is being used to centralize procurement of commercial satellite communications. Member states pool requirements and the ESCPC acts as a negotiator with operational planning based on a pay-per-use principle.

As well as dual use, there are increasing examples of bilateral, multilateral, European, and transatlantic cooperation around military satellites. In the area of Earth observation, international projects involving the European MOD partners include MUSIS (Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, Greece, and Germany), ORFEO (Italy and France), and HELIOS II (France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Greece).

In the area of SATCOM, the NATO SATCOM Post-2000 is a good example of cooperation among three major NATO European partners, namely the British, French, and Italians, using their respective assets (Skynet 5, Syracuse 3, and Sicral 1B) to provide capabilities for a 15-year period from January 2005 until the end of 2019.

United States-led programs are also drawing in international partners. For example, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Netherlands are among the nations working with the US on the AEHF (Advanced Extremely High Frequency) program. The UK is pursuing collaborative efforts with the US to trade capacity with services from the AEHF program to support the UK’s submarine requirements. The UK is also looking to leverage the MUOS (Mobile User Objective System) satellite program to be used for aerial, maritime platforms, ground vehicles, and dismounted soldiers.

The fiscal environment will also dictate future project financing through public-private partnership (PPP) schemes to fund military satellite capabilities. Some core advantages to using this approach include the fact that the PPP schemes can fund the development and building of systems and services, as well as pick up the expenditure associated with maintaining and operating the assets over a contracted period. Furthermore, the risks associated with developing, building, maintaining, and operating space assets are shifted away from the defense ministry to the private sector. From a budgetary perspective, the use of PPP schemes lowers the large initial outlay and subsequent burden on defense budgets, as well as providing a smoother payment profile for a defense ministry over the timeframe of a project.

The UK has been an early user of PPP schemes with a private finance initiative (PFI) that was used to acquire the Skynet 4 and Skynet 5 constellations. The Skynet 5 satellites feature both X band capabilities and also include UHF payloads to provide a military (nuclear) hardened secure satellite control link, while anti-jamming antennas on the Skynet 5 platform provide protection against both hostile and non-hostile interference. Through the PFI, the UK MOD uses EADS Astrium for the primary build and delivery of the satellites and EADS Astrium subsidiary company, Paradigm Secure Communications, for delivery of Skynet 5 services. Under the PFI, Paradigm also delivers communications services to NATO using spare capacity on the satellites.

Another example of the use of PPP schemes from Europe is the Italian Sicral 1B communications satellite. This was co-financed by the Italian MOD and a consortium comprising companies including Finmeccanica and Telepazio. From the commercial perspective, the project entitled Telepazio to offer part of SHF and UHF capacity on the Sicral 1B to non-military users. With this experience in tow, alternative procurement schemes are also being considered for the OpSIS and SIGMA projects. OpSIS is a high resolution optical satellite while SIGMA is a communications satellite that will work off Ku and Ka bands.

Part 2 of this guest column will explore the increasing development and use of small satellites, as well as technology trends in military satellites.