Jon Harper
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Discussions about the eventual phaseout of Link 16 tactical data links are ongoing as the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency works to build out a network for optical communications, according to a senior official involved in the effort.
Optical comms networks use lasers to transmit data between satellites and from space vehicles to terrestrial platforms. These capabilities offer some advantages over RF networks, experts say.
“As space becomes increasingly contested and congested, traditional radio frequency communications are hitting some limits. We’re facing bandwidth constraints, security vulnerabilities, plus growing susceptibility to jamming, interference. Meanwhile, our adversaries are rapidly advancing their own space-based capabilities, making secure, high-speed data transfer more critical than ever. And this goes beyond space. The collaborative, real-time partnering attributes we’ll need in the terrestrial domains will rely on connectivity — and laser comms will be a big part of that equation. It offers a crucial pathway forward promising higher data throughput, lower latency and inherent resistance to interception,” Jennifer Reeves, senior resident fellow for space studies at the Mitchell Institute, said Wednesday during a panel at AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.
“We will use that network for our own purposes to backhaul data. We call those ground entry points. … We’re building out a network of those. We also have a number of test sites, and we used those in some recent demonstrations,” he said during the panel. “We use them so that we can opportunistically connect with satellites. And then we’re also working with the warfighter community to develop what we call tactical optical sites and those capabilities. So, kind of three classes of optical terminals. We’re excited because we see optical comms at an inflection point, and we see it start to scale up and start getting economies of scale. So … we’re excited about the scale that’s coming, and we’re trying to be very adaptive to that.”
SDA is creating what the Defense Department calls a Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, which is expected to eventually include hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit for data transport as well as missile tracking.
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