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A U.S.-Norway initiative is bringing enhanced polar satcom capabilities and broadband commercial services to military and civil users above 65 deg. N. Lat.
In an era of greater competition in the Arctic, governments operating in the High North are seeking greater connectivity for regional activity via high-speed, secure broadband and satellite communications.
The recently launched Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission (ASBM)—a unique partnership between the U.S. Air Force and Norway—now offers that capability to government users in the High North, as well as civil and scientific communities.
- ASBM is the first highly elliptical orbit mission carrying commercial broadband payloads
- U.S. exploring options to host payloads on Japanese satellites
The two-spacecraft constellation involves the first U.S. military payload to be hosted on a commercial space vehicle while being operated by a foreign partner. The program’s stakeholders include the U.S. Air Force, the Norwegian Armed Forces, Norwegian state-owned enterprise Space Norway, Northrop Grumman and Viasat.
The ASBM satellites were launched Aug. 11 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg SFB, California, five years after the program was established. The satellites follow a highly elliptical orbit (HEO) over the polar regions, providing continuous broadband coverage and protected military satellite communications (satcom) above 65 deg. N. Lat.
Northrop Grumman built the satellite buses based on its commercial GEOStar-3 spacecraft under a 2019 contract with Space Norway and also provided secondary structures, propellant tanks, solar arrays and heat pipe panels.
Under a separate contract with the Air Force, Northrop Grumman developed the Enhanced Polar System-Recapitalization (EPS-R) payloads—two extremely high frequency tactical military communications satellites—and an upgraded Control and Planning Segment ground system. The ASBM satellites also each carry an X-band payload for the Norwegian defense ministry, a Global Xpress Ka-band payload for Viasat customers and a radiation-monitoring instrument built by Norwegian company Integrated Detector Electronics AS.
Interest in international cooperation for military satcom programs dates back to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Since then, countries around the world have invested more deeply in sovereign space capabilities, while technological innovation in the commercial space industry has fostered more collaborative opportunities.
The space industry has long wanted to strengthen its collaboration on national security missions, having found success in scientific initiatives where information can flow more freely, says Blake Bullock, vice president of military space systems at Northrop Grumman. “But a lot of times, when the rubber meets the road, we find that’s not an easy thing to do,” she tells Aviation Week.
Space Norway began discussing the development of a new Arctic satcom constellation around 2015, and the U.S. Air Force approached it about a potential partnership a year later, says Kjell-Ove Orderud Skare, ASBM program director for the company. At the time, the service was studying options for collaboration on the follow-on program for its original EPS satellites.
It was “paramount” to have the three main customers—the U.S. Air Force, the Norwegian defense ministry and Viasat—fill the spacecraft entirely, Skare says. The total cost of ASBM to Space Norway was equivalent to $450 million, he adds. That total includes: the procurement of two commercial satellite buses; the payloads for Norway’s military and Viasat; integration of the EPS-R system; satellite control equipment by Northrop Grumman; ground systems with six gateway antennas; two control centers, including operational support by Kongsberg Satellite Services; and launch services.
The Defense Department awarded Northrop Grumman a $429 million contract in 2018 to build the two EPS-R payloads and an $87 million contract in 2019 to upgrade the associated ground systems. The Space Force has said the partnership with Space Norway has saved the U.S. more than three years of development time on the EPS-R program.
Senior Pentagon officials are more openly discussing the threat environment in space, as recent reports detail suspicious activities, such as Russia’s co-planar satellite deployment alongside a U.S. spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO).
Skare, a retired two-star general in the Norwegian Armed Forces, says cybersecurity and other protective measures were critical to the ASBM program from its genesis.
Stationing the satellites in HEO—outside of more populated orbits vulnerable to space debris issues or hostile spacecraft hovering nearby—“may be one security element in itself,” he says. To harden the U.S. military’s capabilities, Northrop Grumman developed a secure interface for the program that would isolate the EPS-R payload from the rest of the satellite, as well as from any adversarial activity.
Since ASBM was established, the Pentagon has delved more deeply into international collaboration in space with allies like Japan, which will host a pair of U.S. space domain awareness payloads in its Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) constellation. Washington and Tokyo signed a memorandum of understanding in 2020 to host payloads developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Labs on QZSS-6 and QZSS-7. The satellites were delivered to Japan in 2023 and are scheduled to launch in fiscal 2025.
The two countries have also expressed interest in partnering on a LEO-based detection and tracking constellation for long-range missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles. The U.S. Space Development Agency (SDA) is also in conversations with Japan about contributing to the SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, which is being developed with an open architecture and common standards so new partners can easily plug into the network, SDA Director Derek Tournear said at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Ascend conference in Las Vegas in August.
Tokyo could supplement the LEO constellation’s data communications or missile tracking layers, Tournear said. “They can develop capabilities that are essentially synonymous with ours and all tied together in a synergistic way.”
The EPS-R program is meant to be a bridge to the Defense Department’s future military satcom architecture. The Space Force has begun to shape requirements for its Protected Tactical Satellite Communications program and released solicitations in April for the Evolved Strategic Satcom program for next-generation nuclear command and control.
With that in mind, Bullock sees opportunities to take the ASBM model into the future tactical satcom architecture. “This is something we’ve really demonstrated with EPS-R and the ASBM mission, that we can bring together a U.S. Space Force critical capability with a commercial military satcom bus, and we can help achieve the goals of the organization quickly and affordably,” she says.
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