tsat gone newsat & viasat here

TSAT Replacement?
ViaSat Communications Satellite Piques Pentagon's Interest

Since the decision in April to cancel the six-year-old, four-years-late, $26 billion Transformational Satellite (TSAT) program, U.S. Air Force leaders have been pondering how to replace it.

Now, a California satellite communications company says its new spacecraft could provide a lot more bandwidth than TSAT, a lot sooner and at a fraction of the cost.

ViaSat, of Carlsbad, Calif., is building its first satellite - ViaSat-1 - and plans to use it for delivering high-speed Internet service to areas of the United States where it's now unavailable, or is slow and costly.
TSAT Replacement?

ViaSat Communications Satellite Piques Pentagon's Interest


-- This is not a new story (year ago) but things may be due to happen on this front??

When it's launched in early 2011, ViaSat-1 will be the world's fastest satellite in terms of data throughput, ViaSat executives say. It will be able to transmit 100 gigabits per second. Its closest competitors can manage only 10 gigabits per second.

TSAT, too, was expected to handle about 10 gigabits of data per second.

ViaSat has at least piqued the U.S. military's interest.

"We are talking to the Defense Department about what it would take to have that kind of capability in their own fleet," ViaSat Chief Executive Mark Dankberg said during a May conference call with investors.

"It's the right kind of satellite" for many of the military's needs, Ric VanderMeulen, a ViaSat vice president, said in an interview. "We are having discussions with them, they're considering it, they're thinking about it. Obviously, we're not under contract with them."

An Air Force spokesman said his service was not currently in discussions with ViaSat.

If 100 gigabits of throughput seems like an amazing number, consider this figure: $400 million.

That's the price of a ViaSat-1 system - the satellite, insurance, launch services and ground equipment, VanderMeulen said. By itself, the satellite is about $250 million.

That compares with $26 billion for a five-satellite TSAT constellation - more than $5 billion per satellite.

But the comparison is not quite that simple.

ViaSat-1 could deliver a boatload of bandwidth, which the U.S. military might find useful as it relies ever more on sensors that deliver streaming video, on-the-move communications, even PowerPoint presentations.

But ViaSat-1 does not provide the survivable, jam-resistant, secure communications that TSAT was supposed to deliver. TSAT's radiation-hardened processors were designed to survive a nuclear attack and provide emergency communications for senior military leaders, including the president.

ViaSat-1 won't do that.

Of course, neither will TSAT now.

An Air Force spokesman said that ViaSat-1 could be "useful for a limited number of missions, such as homeland defense." That's because ViaSat-1 is to be stationed over the United States.

And satellites such as ViaSat-1 stationed elsewhere "would be another option for the Defense Information Systems Agency to lease capacity if necessary," he said.

It seems inescapable that the U.S. military will need more bandwidth.

"ViaSat-1 has real applicability for video for FCS," VanderMeulen. And even as major parts of the Army's controversial and now-renamed Future Combat Systems program are being scrapped, "the video mission is definitely surviving," he said.

The Army hopes to spread satellite communications so widely that there are antennas, receivers and terminals in tanks, armored vehicles, helicopters and Humvees.

But to do that, satellite communications gear must be much cheaper and able to handle much more data, VanderMeulen said. And that's where ViaSat-1 is expected to excel.

With "10 times the throughput of any other Ka-band satellite," ViaSat says, the new satellite will have "the highest capacity of any satellite ever built." In fact, it will have more throughput capacity "than all other Ka-band satellites combined," the company claims.

The enormous throughput is achieved in part through hardware improvements, but mostly through better use of frequency both by satellite and by the ground equipment, VanderMuelen said. "It's a very clever system design," he said.

TSAT was the Air Force's effort at a very clever design.

It was supposed to offer "significant increases in capability across a broad range of functions and aspects" for military satellite communications, Air Force Secretary Michael Donley told a House Armed Services subcommittee this spring.

"These were viewed as very desirable by combatant commanders, but also very high risk and potentially high cost," he said.

Indeed, after spending $2.5 billion and three years developing TSAT, the program was in trouble. The date of the first satellite launch was pushed back from 2015 to 2019.

In a May 18 speech, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn said TSAT was among a number of programs scrapped because they relied on unproven technology. In their place, the military will buy systems that "we know will work," he said.

So instead of TSAT, the Air Force is to buy two Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellites.

Like TSAT, the AEHF is designed to be survivable, jam-resistant and secure. And like TSAT, the AEHF has suffered a raft of problems. Cost increases of more than 25 percent triggered a "Nunn-McCurdy breach" in 2008. Nunn-McCurdy is a federal law that says programs must be canceled if costs increase by 25 percent or more - unless the defense secretary persuades Congress that the program is critical to national security.

AEHF survived, but the launch of the first AEHF satellite has slipped from 2008 to 2010.

By contrast, Dankberg told ViaSat investors that "the ViaSat-1 project is coming in on performance, on schedule and significantly under the initial budget. We've seen improvements in launch costs, insurance costs and in the ground gateways."

Why the difference? TSAT, and AEHF perhaps to a lesser degree, are striving for leaps in technology, VanderMuelen said. ViaSat-1, on the other hand, relies heavily on proven technology.

It's not exotic, but it works. "This is a better way to get bandwidth in 2011 - low risk using proven technology," he said.

TSAT's demise "highlights the need for innovative new approaches to high-speed broadband satellite for several DoD missions," Dankberg said. It's "a good opportunity for us."

Leasing satellite services or buying satellites and associated technology from ViaSat would not solve the military's need for radiation-hardened, highly secure, high-level communications, VanderMuelen conceded.

But the trend at the Pentagon is promising. Under Defense Secretary Robert Gates, there has been a push to focus more on what's needed to carry out today's missions and less on what might be needed for the future, VanderMuelen said.

If that also applies to bandwidth, ViaSat might be a beneficiary. ??


-- Google ViaSat Newsat