The Air Force continues to give serious consideration to the commercialization of its Wideband Global Satcom system. While the Army would remain in control of the communications payload, private industry would take charge of running the satellites.
The prospect of commercialization took a big step forward toward becoming a reality in September when the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) sent out to industry a request for information exploring the possibility. The RFI should help generate a picture of potential start-up and operations cost, transition timelines, and industry’s ability to provide the necessary capabilities.
Commercialization is expected sometime in 2016, and likely will not be without its challenges for the military, according to Eric Moltzau, Manager, Space Services Development, Intelsat General. Military buyers may be accustomed to buying things “as simple as cell phone service,” he said. “But when you think about space, and contracting out to a company to service your space assets, it requires a little bit of a different approach.”
Even as mMilitary planners wouldmay need to adapt to the new paradigm, but providers see the possibility for a relatively easy transition. “There is a commercial model out there that alreadyalways exists in the marketplace,” Moltzau said, though he noted there will have to be some tweaks in the model, especially in the pricing of classified services, if required by the DoD, which will no doubt add to the final price tag.
Commercialization will come with the usual concerns about security, but Moltzau said the satellite industry can handle the challenge. He noted that satcomSATCOM already is a $208 billion industry, entrusted with the security and protection of a range of highly sensitive information sources. The industry also delivers the redundancy needed to avoid outages and ensure seamless operations in critical areas.
All this together represents a “serious and significant” capability to deliver military-grade service as needed, he said.
The Air Force wants commercialization for all the typical reasons. It’s banking on a private provider being able to deliver greater efficiencies while dramatically reducing the number of Air Force personnel needed for the job. Commercialization could pull personnel off of routine maintenance functions and free them for battle management tasks.
Intelsat General officials also make the argument that commercialization would potentially diversify the government command and control network, which could thus makeing it more robust.
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