Space Force, Lockheed Harden GPS Sats, Ground Stations

WASHINGTON: Space Force and prime contractor Lockheed Martin say they are hardening the GPS satellites and ground stations to improve the network’s ability to withstand jamming and hacking.

The government organization that evaluated cybersecurity on the Lockheed Martin’s upgraded stopgap satellite control system says “GPS III now is ‘one of the most secure space systems’ they have assessed,” a Lockheed Martin source said, adding that the company cannot disclose the organization involved.

The Space Force announced Saturday that it had accepted as operational Lockheed Martin’s latest anti-jam upgrade to the software system for the stopgap operational control system, called Ground Operational Control System, built to fill in until Raytheon’s long-troubled OCX system is made available (currently planned for circa 2023).

The software system is known as GPS III Contingency Operations (COps). COps was developed to allow the legacy system (even more confusingly called the GPS Architecture Evolution Plan Operational Control System, or AEP OCS) used by all previous versions of the GPS satellites to handle the new GPS III configuration. There are currently 31 operational GPS satellites dating back to the later 1990s: 1 Block IIA; 11 Block IIR; 7 Block IIR-M; and 12 Block IIF.

“The Space and Missile Systems Center achieved a major Global Positioning System milestone on March 27 with the Contingency Operations (COps) program and GPS III Space Vehicle (SV) 02 receiving U.S. Space Force’s Operational Acceptance approval,” the press release said.

The SV 02, nicknamed Magellan, was launched in August and represented a comeback for the beleaguered GPS III program.

Also, Lockheed Martin has just begun installation of new receivers at ground control centers to monitor the functioning of GPS III’s encrypted M-code signals. A  Lockheed Martin spokesperson told me that effort would wrap up in November. The six GPS ground control centers are located at Schriever AFB, Cape Canaveral, Hawaii, Ascension Island, Diego Garcia Atoll, and Kwajalein Island.

The two milestones follow the recent Space Force assessment that a new cybersecurity package, known as Red Dragon, has passed its operational utility evaluation, according to a Lockheed Martin press release.

All of these efforts fall under the so-called GCS-II (for GPS Control Segment Sustainment) contract awarded to Lockheed Martin in January 2019 to sustain and further modernize the GPS control system, a Lockheed Martin spokesman explained. (The 2019 contract itself a follow-on to a 2013 contract.) The contract, for an undisclosed amount, runs through 2025. The idea was for the work under the contract to fill in until subcontractor Raytheon is expected to have completed development of its long-troubled Next Generation Operational Control Segment (OCX) designed for GPS III.

As Breaking D readers know, the development of OCX has been stormy,  including a Nunn-McCurdy breach in mid-2016 –– meaning that the program had exceeded its costs by more than 25 percent and had to get reauthorized by Congress. However, SMC since last August has been convinced the company is making good progress.

And as I reported last Friday, Raytheon was granted $378 million to replace the current IBM chips running GPS software to eliminate cybersecurity risks — winning a vote of confidence from SMC head Lt. Gen. John Thompson.

SMC admitted that this may means schedule delays for delivery of OCX, although the press release downplayed the chances. A Lockheed Martin source characterized the expected delay as “unfortunate” at a time when the development effort seemed to have turned a corner.

Lockheed Martin is building 32 GPS III and GPS III Follow On satellites for the Space Force. The third GPS III satellite, called Columbus, is expected to launch on April 29 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9. That launch remains on the manifest despite the current work force disruptions caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.