The Defense Innovation Unit said Monday it has selected 12 companies to join its effort to build a secure network of military and commercial communication satellites, which will begin conducting demonstrations later this summer.
The Hybrid Space Architecture program, or HSA, brings together a slew of Defense Department organizations — including DIU, Space Systems Command and the Air Force Research Laboratory — to show the value of integrating commercial satellites and communications systems into the military’s architecture to provide more bandwidth, security and flexibility.
“The HSA network has the potential to increase network resilience by employing multi-path routing of communications to optimize data transport and mitigate adverse effects caused by weather or other obstructions,” DIU said in a statement. “HSA seeks to integrate commercial persistent sensing, data fusion, high-performance edge compute, and resilient data transport capabilities to significantly enhance real-time access to information.”
The effort is closely linked to the Defense Department’s concept of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control — a vision to connect military forces and their information-sharing systems, regardless of whether they’re operating in the air, space, sea, land or cyber domains.
To achieve that aim, the department needs a more secure and agile communications backbone that can connect satellites that reside in multiple orbits, take advantage of cloud computing infrastructure to process and distribute data and fuse data from an array of sensors.
DIU chose eight initial firms to begin developing prototypes through the program in 2022. On Monday, it added 12 new vendor teams: Capella Space; EdgeCortix; Eutelsat America Corp. and OneWeb Technologies; Fairwinds Technologies and AST Space Mobile; Illumina Computing Group; Lockheed Martin; MapLarge; SES Space and Defense; Skycorp; SkyFi; Ursa Space; and Viasat.
Hybrid Space Architecture demonstrations are slated to start this summer and will continue over the next year, according to DIU, with the goal of piloting an operational network in 2026.
As part of that work, the program team plans to launch a live network that will support the demonstrations and exercises and help integrate warfighting concepts and tactics.
“Success with these demonstrations will be moving the Department closer to realizing an operational, resilient, and hybrid space architecture,” DIU said in a statement.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
