U.S. Navy To Rely on Netted Iridium Service as Gap-Filler

Space News ^ | 01/08/2010 | Turner Brinton

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

Facing a looming gap in its mobile satellite communications coverage, the U.S. Navy plans to tap a new service developed by commercial provider Iridium Communications LLC as it waits for its next-generation constellation to come on line.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which buys commercial satellite capacity on behalf of Pentagon users, plans to spend about $20 million this year on the Netted Iridium service, Bruce Bennett, DISA’s director of satellite communications, teleports and services, said in a Dec. 14 interview. DISA spent about $70 million on Iridium mobile satellite services in 2009, and the total amount should increase to about $80 million this year with the addition of the Netted Iridium service, he said.

The Navy today relies on its UHF Follow-On satellites — the last of which launched in 2003 — and leased capacity on older satellites for so-called narrow-band communications capacity. Several of the UHF Follow-On satellites failed earlier than expected, and others are operating on backup systems and could fail without warning. Even if no further failures occur, the UHF Follow-On system could degrade to an unacceptable level of performance by May 2010, government documents show.

Meanwhile, the Navy’s next-generation Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) continues to hit development snags, and the launch of the first satellite in the series has slipped to early 2011.

In 2008, the Navy began looking for opportunities to fly a UHF payload on a commercial satellite, but that idea was scrapped last year when it became clear that a commercial solution could not be operational until around 2012. Instead, the Navy has turned to Netted Iridium, a retooled variant of the traditional Iridium service the military has used for years.