Space Systems Command awarded Boeing up to $2 billion in June for two more Mobile User Objective System satellites, the sixth and seventh in a narrowband constellation whose first five went up between 2012 and 2016. The new pair are not expected to launch before 2031 and 2032, and they are meant to carry the network into the mid-2030s. MUOS is the Defense Department’s ultra high frequency network, the one built to reach a handset in bad weather and broken terrain. The program director who runs that division takes the MilSat Symposium stage at Silicon Valley Space Week in October.
Katherine Coens is System Program Director of the Narrowband SATCOM Division at Space Systems Command in San Diego, where she manages a program whose space, ground and sustainment components supply ultra high frequency narrowband to more than 150,000 joint warfighters and weapon systems. She took over the division in December 2025. Before that she was materiel leader for GPS IIIF, the $10 billion program for 22 satellites. She led the systems engineering portion of the effort to certify SpaceX’s Falcon 9, managed the National Security Space Launch enterprise baseline, and was deputy for the Advanced Extremely High Frequency space segment. She started in the Weather Directorate on the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program and COSMIC-2. She is a chemist by training, with a bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College, where she graduated magna cum laude, and a master’s from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned a SMART scholarship in 2008 and interned the following summer with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base, studying hypergolic fuels.
The program bills the session as managing a major acquisition category, and Coens’s is an ACAT I program. The arithmetic of this one is in the dates. Four of the five MUOS satellites on orbit are operational and the fifth is a spare. MUOS turns commercial third-generation cellular technology into secure military communication, which is what lets a radio small enough to carry reach a satellite. The Space Force took responsibility for the system in 2023, and in 2024 it paid two companies $66 million each for preliminary design and risk reduction ahead of the production award this June. The newest satellite on orbit launched in 2016. The first replacement is not expected to launch before 2031. Narrowband sits inside the Space Force’s satellite communications and positioning, navigation and timing portfolio, one of the nine the service settled on when it finished reorganizing its acquisition enterprise in July, under acting portfolio acquisition executive Erin Carper. Coens came to the division from GPS IIIF, which SatNews reported in June had picked up another $514 million for more jam-resistant satellites.
Coens sits for “Interview – Managing a Major Acquisition Category” on Thursday, October 29, from 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, retired, a founding partner of ElaraNova, conducts the interview. It is the first talk of the symposium’s final day, and a comparable interview closes the opening day, with the Space Force’s launch portfolio executive. At 9:30 the room turns to Golden Dome and whether industry can deliver interceptors against a 2028 clock.
Silicon Valley Space Week runs Tuesday, October 27 through Thursday, October 29 at the Computer History Museum, with Satellite Innovation across the first two days and the MilSat Symposium across the last two. Coens opens the final morning. The two satellites her division bought in June are not expected to launch before 2031 and 2032.
