Illustration of a LEO constellation. Credit: Space Development Agency
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force awarded $60 million to five companies to demonstrate how satellites from multiple vendors can connect to its Space Data Network, a military communications architecture whose core backbone is being supplied by SpaceX.
Amazon LEO for Government, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab and York Space Systems each received $12 million in contracts and prototype agreements, the Space Systems Command said Aug. 13. The work will test connections between commercial satellite systems and the Space Data Network, or SDN, including on-orbit data transport and standardized interfaces that would allow different providers to operate across the same network.
The SDN is a planned mesh communications architecture in low Earth orbit designed to move large volumes of data among satellites and between space and the ground. SpaceX in May won a $2.29 billion contract to build the Space Data Network Backbone, or SDN-B, a proliferated constellation using optical crosslinks to route data from satellite to satellite.
The latest awards address how systems supplied by other companies will connect to that backbone, an important part of the Space Force’s effort to avoid locking the broader network into a single vendor.
