Eyeing DoD Biz, Inmarsat Buys Airborne Terminals

WASHINGTON: With an eye on increased DoD interest in commercial satcom, Inmarsat Government is buying airborne terminals for use with its Global Xpress network from Israeli firm Orbit Communications Systems Ltd.

The new terminals, to be delivered next year, are Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSAT) designed to connect drones, aircraft and helicopters to communications satellites. An Inmarsat spokesman said the companies are not releasing the exact value or volume of the buy, but that it involves a large number of new terminals.

Called Multi-Purpose Terminal (MPT) 46WGX, the Orbit systems are small and “designed to be fully interoperable with military Ka-band systems and optimized for use over Inmarsat’s Global Xpress constellation,” according to a joint Orbit-Inmarsat press release. Airborne satcom terminals are essentially mini-ground stations, with antennas and various levels of internal data processing capability.

Inmarsat’s Global Xpress satellites are the company’s newest models, providing military- and commercial-grade Ka-band services in Geostationary Orbit. The fifth one, GX-5, was launched on Nov. 26 and provides service across Europe and the Middle East.

The new satellite “has more capacity in that single satellite than all four of our current Global Xpress satellites … but it’s 25 percent of the size,” Rebecca Cowen-Hirsch, senior vice president for government strategy and policy at Inmarsat Government, told me earlier this week.

The company is already working on the next-generation of the GX, she said.

Inmarsat GX7 through GX9 are being built by the German firm Airbus Defence and Space using agile manufacturing techniques. They should launch in 2023. The three new GX satellites will represent “the first software-defined constellation for global mobile connectivity,” according to Inmarsat.

“Each satellite will deliver twice the total capacity of the entire current GX network. Their ability to simultaneously generate thousands of independent spot beams of different size, bandwidth and power that can be reconfigured and repositioned across the globe means we will be able to respond to peaks in customer demand instantaneously and with pinpoint accuracy, and stack up overlapped capacity over regional hot spots,” the company’s website explains.

Breaking D readers may remember that Inmarsat, along with its contemporaries in the field including Hughes, Viasat, SES and Eutelsat — have been pushing DoD to move toward buying so-called “managed services” (kinda like your average mobile phone or cable TV/Internet plan) rather than leasing commercial bandwidth in fits and starts for short periods of time.

“When you start looking at it at a SATCOM as a service, an end-to-end capability — an end-to-end capability, you look at it very, very differently” than DoD does today, Cowen-Hirsch explained. “And you can get those attributes of cybersecurity, committed information rates — you know you’re going to have your always-on quality of service. The things that we as consumers expect from our telecommunication service provider, the military should expect and demand that and more.”

As I reported in October, DoD is on the cusp of releasing a SATCOM Vision, crafted by Air Force Space Command (soon to be folded into the new Space Force) aimed at creating a seamless network of military and commercial comsats in all orbits, accessible to troops, vehicles, ships and aircraft via ground terminals and mobile receivers that would automatically “hop” from one satellite network to another.

The ability to maintain connectivity between sensors, especially satellites, and “shooters” — i.e. military platforms in the air, at sea and on land — is the central goal of DoD’s evolving Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) concept.

DoD also completed in June 2018 an internal analysis of alternatives (AoA) for DoD’s future satcom architecture,  according to a Government Accountability Office review released yesterday.  The AoA concluded the US military needs a “hybrid architecture” including both “purpose-built” DoD satellites — such as the current Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) system built by Boeing for secure milcoms — and a mix of commercially provided bandwidth.

“DoD concluded in the Wideband AoA that integrating purpose-built satellite systems and commercially provided systems into a hybrid architecture would be more cost effective and capable than any single purpose-built or commercial system alone,” the GAO report said.

However, the AoA also found that DoD needed more information before pursuing satcom as a service. DoD needed to further explore whether to add new commercial constellations in Low Earth Orbit (such as those being launched by OneWeb and SpaceX) to into the mix.

And GAO found that the Pentagon does not yet have any strategy for implementing the AoA’s findings, expressing some concern that the ongoing musical chairs regarding space acquisition is making complicating decision-making. This includes the establishment of Space Command, the launch of the Space Development Agency and the new Space Force.

“DOD and Congress are taking steps designed to ultimately streamline decision-making and clarify
authorities for space; however, it will likely take several years to implement such changes,” GAO found.

Inmarsat has been providing telecom services to the US government since its start up in 1979 — including the US military. The company is one of the oldest satcom firms, originally designed as the International Maritime Satellite Organization (INMARSAT), a non-profit intergovernmental organization at the behest of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the United Nations’ maritime body, to provide connectivity for ships on the high seas out of reach of many land-based radio networks.

“Our largest business unit if you will, is maritime because we are a commercial operator and our origins were started with maritime. And that continues to be our largest business area,” Cowen-Hirsch said. “The United States government, however, is our single largest customer.”