Exclusive: DARPA ‘Likely’ To Demo Only 2 Blackjack Payloads

WASHINGTON: While DARPA’s Blackjack program currently is exploring a handful of different payloads for small, cheap, low-flying satellites, only two are “likely” to be chosen to fly, says Stephen Forbes, program manager. Those are a radio-frequency package, and a missile warning sensor.

“I’m going to let the technical decisions drive that [choice], but I can say that, at the end of the day, we’ll probably end up with two different configurations … two different payloads,” Forbes explained in an interview.

While Forbes said nothing is set in stone under the multi-faceted effort, the Blackjack satellites probably will end up carrying a radio frequency (RF) system capable of both communications and geolocation, and an overhead persistent infrared (OPIR) missile warning payload. (Geolocation involves using radio signals to detect targets, and even track moving vehicles.)

“Those are actually our primary payloads that we intend to demonstrate,” he said, noting that each of those payloads would probably require a different bus design. This is because the requirements for satellite subcomponents such as antennas are different based on payload types.

The high-profile program is widely seen by the satellite industry as a boot-strap into a lucrative DoD market for smallsats in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). DoD sees LEO constellations as potentially providing a host of services to warfighters in highly-contested conflict zones — both as alternatives to today’s uber-expensive handful of milsats, and as a foundation for Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2).

More than a dozen companies — from defense behemoths to tiny startups — are currently under Blackjack contracts.

Program goals

Blackjack is designed to redesign commercial technology and manufacturing practices for building small, cheap, low-orbiting satellites for military uses. The program’s specific goals are:

• Develop payload and mission-level autonomy software and demonstrate autonomous orbital operations including on-orbit distributed decision processors.
• Develop and implement advanced commercial manufacturing for military payloads and the spacecraft bus.
• Demonstrate payloads in LEO to augment [national security space] assets.

“We’re still not focused on a specific mission,” Forbes explained. “We’re not trying to solve specific capability gaps or technical gaps, related to a specific sensor payload, which is why you continue to see a broad swath of contracts and other activities ongoing with the program because of that architecture,” he said.

Thus, up to now, Blackjack has been exploring multiple types of payloads and multiple bus designs from multiple companies.

Further, he added: “If there’s opportunities to get more payloads on orbit by by putting two payloads on one bus, we may we may look at that,” he said. “But if it becomes where that starts to drive cost or schedule, we’ll go into separate configurations.”

Another, perhaps even more important, factor that could pique Blackjack to switch directions regarding payloads, he explained, is whether or not demand signals from military users changes.

“We’ve made the conscious effort to focus on tactical with this program,” Forbes said. “We really focused on payloads that had tactical utility, because they were an underserved market.”

The Army, in particular, has been pushing for years to get more fast access to satellite data to inform tactical decisions — with commanders begging for everything from more reliable communications in places like the mountains of Afghanistan, to assured positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) signals in conflict zones where GPS is unavailable or jammed, to even asking for it’s own ISR imagery and data, which currently is provided to it by the NRO and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

The Army is one of the potential “transition partners” for Blackjack, along with the Space Development Agency (SDA) and the Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center, which will soon morph into the new Space Systems Command. Forbes wasn’t about to wade into that potential food fight, and to be fair, he really has no reason to do so.

“Space acquisition, especially when it comes to LEO, is going to be resolved at a pay grade much higher than mine,” he said with a laugh. “So, I’m in the fortunate situation where — since Blackjack is focused on the architecture — to me it doesn’t really matter who acquires the architecture.”

Indeed, when DARPA started Blackjack in 2017, the space environment was fundamentally different. Since then, DoD has formed Space Command and the Space Force, and concerns have grown about the vulnerability of US space assets to interference and/or attack by Russia, China and others. Meanwhile, the commercial space sector has exploded, especially with regard to the use of LEO sats for everything from high-speed comms to imagery to even signals intelligence-like capabilities (such as RF geolocation) once closely held by NRO.

So, Forbes explained, the original goal of Blackjack was to bring as many types of payloads, busses, propulsion systems, and constellation designs as possible into the proof of concept. Phase One of the program, now concluded, was aimed at bringing multiple ideas through design review, he explained, and allow DoD customers to check them out against needs.

Keeping DARPA’s options — and those of potential users — open remains a concern, he said. “We want to make sure we don’t cut off promising development efforts too early,” he said.

Program enters Phase 2

Now, as Blackjack moves into its second phase, DARPA is funding a more than a dozen contractors, each working on a different technology set. Not all those contracts will result in products that make it to orbit, Forbes stressed.

Nor do the contract face values represent real dollars, in that each individual contract includes options for equipping up to 20 satellites. Thus, he explained (to our dismay), it doesn’t work to simply add up the value of contract announcements to figure out the overall Blackjack budget, which currently is being kept secret. And while DARPA allows contractors to disclose certain contract parameters, not all companies choose to do disclose anything at all.

Primes

Lockheed Martin was chosen as the prime integrator of payloads and satellites for Phase 1 of Blackjack last April; this April it won a follow-on contract modification worth $27.3 million for Phase II integration (for a total of $40.4 million).

Two companies, SEAKR Engineering and Scientific Systems Co. Inc (SSCI), were both awarded Phase 1 contract; SEAKR in March won the follow-on contract worth up to $60.4 million for Phase 2 and Phase 3 development of (and integration of payloads into) the Pit Boss cloud-based, autonomous mission management system for the constellation.

Bus contracts

There are three contractors working on Phase 2 bus designs, according to a list provided to Breaking D by DARPA: Blue Canyon Technologies, Telesat and Airbus US.

In February, Blue Canyon (now a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies) won a contract worth up to $26.5 million to potentially build six more standardized satellite buses, as a second installment in a contract awarded last year for $14.1 million to produce four. Telesat last October won $18.3 million to produce two busses. Airbus announced in 2019 that it had won a bus contract for an unspecified amount of money to produce an unspecified number of busses.

Payload contracts

Three contractors have won awards to build different types of RF payloads: SEAKR; Systems & Technology Research, under a 2020 award worth up to $79.5 million; and Augustus Aerospace Co., a tiny Colorado-based startup working on a payload designed to meet Army Space and Missile Defense Command needs under an undisclosed award.

Two contractors, Raytheon (under a contract worth up to $37.4 million issued last June), and optical-system specialists Danbury Mission Technologies (contract undisclosed) have won awards for OPIR payloads designed to track missiles.

Northrop Grumman Mission Systems is working on an alternate PNT system, under a just announced $13.3 million Phase 2 contract for development of two payloads.

L3Harris was contracted in May 2020 to develop an electro-optical/infrared payload for missile warning, again, with the parameters not disclosed. However, colleague Nathan Strout reported that the company lost out on a follow-on Blackjack contract to Raytheon (see above).

Finally, SA Photonics is developing optical inter-satellite links (OSILs) for the Mandrake 2 experimental satellites under a Blackjack contract — satellites that are specifically aimed at demonstrating capability for SDA’s National Defense Space Architecture.

Forbes explained that DARPA is continuing to fund development of the OSIL payloads, but that the rationale has changed — because the commercial industry isn’t as far along in development of the underlying technology as DARPA and SDA originally thought.

“They have really moved from less of a payload for a tactical user” to instead being seen as “a critical enabling technology for Leo constellations,” he said. DoD “realized that we couldn’t rely on the commercial folks to be there on our schedule, and it was a place where the DoD needed to make an investment to ensure that we had the communication links between the satellite to support the architecture.”