Outer space

Air Force laying groundwork for future military use of commercial megaconstellations

The megaconstellations that promise to bring cheap broadband to the masses have drawn the military’s attention. Commercial space internet provided by hundreds or thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit will become a reality in the next few years, and the Pentagon already is trying to figure out how it will buy and use these services.

Laying the groundwork for the military’s future use of LEO broadband is a small office located at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The Air Force Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation office in December awarded SpaceX a $28 million contract to test over the next three years different ways in which the military might use the company’s Starlink broadband services.

Greg Spanjers is the chief scientist at the Air Force’s experimentation office and oversees a program called Global Lightning that is “trying to determine to what extent, and where it makes sense, for the Air Force to use emerging commercial space internet as another option for communications,” he said in an interview with SpaceNews.

SpaceX received the largest Air Force contract so far of any of the LEO broadband companies under the so-called “Defense Experimentation Using the Commercial Space Internet” program. Iridium got $2.5 million. And more contracts are coming as other constellations get built, Spanjers said. OneWeb on Wednesday launched its first six satellites. Telesat a year ago put up its first LEO broadband satellite.