COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The Defense Department and National Reconnaissance Office provided the first detailed look Tuesday (March 8) at the Transformational Communications Architecture (TCA), a next-generation space-communications infrastructure to be shared by U.S. intelligence, defense and space agencies.
Rear Adm. Rand Fisher, director of naval space technology programs and head of the Transformational Communications Office within NRO, said during this week's National Space Symposium that the new multi-service architecture shares many traits with the public Internet. These include a shift from circuit to packet communications and severe bandwidth bottlenecks in the last mile to the user.
Two new satellite systems will play a key role in the new architecture. TSATs, or Transformational Satellites, will be protected, Extremely High Frequency (EHF) communication satellites operating in both Ka and X bands. They may also have the capability to communicate with the Mobile User Objective System, or MUOS broadband satellite.
A second new system, the Advanced Polar Satellite, is a special high-speed system handling IP and circuit-switched data, with an RF cross-link to the Advanced EHF satellite now under development. The Pentagon plans to spend at least $9.6 billion on TCA development, with $6.3 billion alone going to TSAT and APS satellites.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld opened the TCA Office last October. Howell Estes, former U.S. Space Command head, said the rationale for combining NRO and NASA resources was to "close the last mile to the tactical war-fighter, by extending bandwidth to forces on the move."
Wish list
Fisher said there's a long wish-list for TCA, with some service branches placing a high priority on nuclear survivability while others want a dynamically adjustable communication system capable of supporting thin clients.
Ideally, a single prime contractor would help coordinate these requirements, Fisher said, adding that he doubted whether a single corporate contractor could juggle all the information necessary to satisfy NRO, Pentagon and NASA demands.
Troy Meinke, deputy project leader in the Milsatcom Program Office at the Air Force Space and Missiles Center, said planning is already underway for incorporating laser-based inter-satellite communications, as well as optical links to aircraft, into the overall TCA network.
The Pentagon has so far earmarked $260 million program funding for development of an Airborne Optical Satcom Terminal for TCA.
If the Defense Department can develop effective network-management and provisioning software, the TCA network will be able to perform the same type of quality-of-service prioritization, even across agencies, that is performed in advanced Internet subnets.
Ideally, Meinke said, two agencies could sign a service-level agreement for bandwidth in the same way carriers or Internet service providers do today.
Fisher said the TCA program's biggest asset is the elimination of parallel and superfluous space programs across military and civilian agencies.
"If I can glue an architecture together with common standards and protocols, I care less about the specific organizations developing this," Fisher said.
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Peter Teets, director of the National Reconnaissance Office.
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NRO Director Peter Teets, a former Lockheed Martin Corp. official, told a crowd of 3,000 at a keynote dinner Tuesday evening that TCA will "remove both bandwidth and access as constraints to the warfighter."
He added, "The effort is not about satellites, not about ground terminals, but about a whole new architecture to support our war-fighting efforts."
Still, bandwidth remains a concern. Prior to the opening of the war in Iraq, Pentagon officials were scrambling to lease commercial satellite communications capacity. Demand for broadband capacity has soared as planners seek to move real-time data and video from U.S. Central Command headquarters to commanders in the field.
