The Space development agency (SDA) would like to link its planned constellation of satellites to transfer military data to combatants with commercial satellite systems that can provide battlefield intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, enhancing military capabilities and providing more business opportunities, the agency chief said on Tuesday.

SDA already has a contract with Capella space, which supplies commercial synthetic aperture radars with its satellites to various government customers, to include compliant inter-satellite optical links (OISL) on their satellites to connect to the agency’s transport layer, said Derek Tournear during a round table organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The benefit to the government is that “it allows us to take this tactical data from whoever has the detection solution, merge it with other data that might come from government systems or other commercial systems, merge that to board and to use only to send our protected tactical data links directly to the combatant in theater, ”said Tournear.

For industry, adding OISLs to their satellites gives them a new market offering, he said, that the government could pay “by the data stream or have some other type of subscription area.” .

US government agencies, including in the intelligence community, are increasingly exploiting commercially available satellites and their data to meet mission needs. Tournear said SDA would like to create a market where its agency will buy “hundreds of satellites” every two years, which would allow the industry to plan accordingly and invest to the point where much of the components used in satellites would be “commoditized” and production lines would continue to operate.

“Plus, it would be great if they adopted the model of keeping enough stock on hand so that when we bought them it didn’t start from scratch and you have all those long lead items and ‘they could just shoot from the same parts that they used to develop and build their commercial satellites for themselves or for other commercial companies and integrate them, “he said.” So that’s it. that SDA envisions. Establish a very stable and very predictable market in which the industry can feel empowered to invest and know that they can pursue and gain some of that market share. “

This article was first published by our subsidiary Defense Daily.