By Chris Forrester
Phil Carrai, President, Space, Training & Cyber Division, Kratos, moderated the panel for Silicon Valley Space Week’s Milsat Symposium strand on October 23. It examined the topic (The Multi-Orbit, Multi-Mission, Multi-Tech Network) and a packed room heard highly-relevant advice from the panellists with expertise ranging from LEO to Lunar.
Carrai asked his panel how they were addressing the mission tasks. Matt McGuire, Principal Director, Booz Allen Hamilton, touched on AI in his response and the differences it would make and advised people not to so much worry about AI taking their jobs, but that the staffer who understood AI might be taking your job!
Rika Nakazawa, Chief Commercial Innovation, at Japan’s NTT, said that the use cases coming on line from commercial applications and now with SpaceX, as well as Amazon, but there was a convergence between commercial and military and it was now essential to be ready to achieve the risk-mitigating elements and handle the data being generated. “Data is worthless without interpretation, and multi-orbit, multi-mission ability affects national economies not just defense and intelligence.”
“Data management is already crucial. We talk about optical, and we talk about cross-links, but getting data to and from space is the challenge. We place a software layer which enables our customers, the end-user, whether government or commercial, to access many different antennas. Having that layer allows the user to expand as progress is made,” said Brad Bode, CTO, Atlas Space Operations. “Some government clients want to see the data in their long-accepted format. That’s fine, but for multi-mission payloads this means more complexity and greater risk and can pose challenges in getting the data down with enough latency, and that has to be paid for.”
Dan Adam, President, KSAT, called for greater use of standards but also called for more spectrum for control and data transfer purposes. “We are limited to L-band, and years ago the use of this protected spectrum was considered a benefit, but it also has limitations. More spectrum would aid redundancy and this in particular affects some aging government applications. We need alternatives.”
Art Loureiro, Director, Space Defence Solutions, L3 Harris said multi-domain had different meanings depending on who you were talking to. “Consolidating multi-mission into a single satellite, especially for the military, adds risk. Take out that satellite and you lose all that multiple flexibility, and redundancy.”
