Derek Tournear, director of the Space Development Agency, said York Space Systems has made its laser communications system operational on its military satellites and that SDA’s next step is to link the company’s spacecraft with SpaceX’s satellites by laser, Breaking Defense reported Monday.
“I’m excited to report that, over the weekend, York was able to get optical communication networking working on their satellites,” he told reporters. “Now we have both a set of transport satellites and a set of tracking satellites with the optical connectivity.”
“The next step on that, obviously, is to have the York and SpaceX satellites talk to one another and form a complete mesh network,” said Tournear. “It’s critical that it works.”
The creation of the mesh network is key to operationalizing the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, also known as PWSA.
According to the previous Wash100 awardee, the concept behind PWSA is to transition away from the Department of Defense’s traditional “stovepipes” into one that adopts open architecture.
With open architecture, vendors can plug-and-play their capabilities to facilitate communications and machine-to-machine data-sharing, a capability that is key to advancing DOD’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2.