Kratos Advances US Army LEO Satellite Communication With OpenSpace Demo

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions has completed a demonstration of its OpenSpace Platform as a fully virtualized low Earth orbit satellite communications ground system for connecting U.S. Army missions. Kratos partnered with Telesat Government Solutions and Cobham Satcom in the demo for establishing simultaneous and resilient satellite communication using LEO constellations. 

Satellites in LEO orbit provide connectivity with lower latency than communication constellations traditionally in geosynchronous Earth orbit, an important difference as future military satellite communication networks must rapidly adapt to varying requirements of multiple missions, Kratos said Thursday.

According to the company, OpenSpace is the only fully software-defined satellite ground system commercially available, offering greater agility than traditional, hardware-based platforms.

Chris Badgett, vice president of technology at Kratos’ space business, pointed out that only a software-based ground system can derive the maximum flexibility, mission speed and adaptability from multiple network resources.  

During the demonstration, U.S. Army soldiers tested the flexibility of the OpenSpace network architecture via Telesat’s LEO 3 satellite using Cobham’s digital-ready antennas integrated with Kratos’ OpenEdge 2500 digitizer. Besides flexibility, the demonstration also showed OpenSpace’s interoperability with other satellites, Kratos said. 

The company performed the demo for the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, with funding from the Network Cross-Functional Team of the Army Futures Command.