Government/Military

[Via Satellite 07-30-2014] Boeing, working with ViaSat, has signed its first U.S. government customer for Inmarsat’s Global Xpress (GX). Boeing reports the customer has rights to military Ka-band capacity on the first GX satellite, Inmarsat 5, until Sept. 30, 2015. Inmarsat is launching three high throughput satellites (HTS) for GX, with the option of launching...

[Via Satellite 07-29-2014] SES Government
 Solutions (SES GS) reports that as of July 8, 2014, the company has received approval from the General Services Administration (GSA) to
 offer O3b Networks services on the agency’s schedule. The approval makes SES GS the first distribution partner offering services from O3b’s Medium Earth Orbiting (MEO) constellation to U.S.
government...

[Via Satellite 07-29-2014] United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, launched three Air Force satellites on July 28, 2014. Using a Delta 4 rocket, the company carried two Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) satellites and the Automated Activation and Guidance Experiment for Local Space (ANGELS) satellite to near-Geostationary Orbits...

[Via Satellite 07-28-2014] To reign in the ever-expanding proliferation of space debris, cooperation between the governments of the United States and Russia is essential, said Jer-Chyi Liou, chief scientist for orbital debris with NASA’s orbital debris program office. Speaking at the NewSpace 2014 conference, Liou admitted that, though tensions with Russia do currently exist, working...

[Via Satellite 07-28-2014] Rockwell Collins has sold its satellite communications business to an Atlanta-based private investor group. Roughly 365 employees along with operational centers in Duluth, Ga., and Stockholm, Sweden, have now become a new entity named DataPath. The company will keep its focus on designing, manufacturing and servicing ground-based satcom systems mainly for military...

[Via Satellite 07-24-2014] The U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) does not have a clear way of enduring another round of sequestration, Gen. William Shelton said Tuesday at the Atlantic Council. With budgets remaining tight, the general insisted that the challenges faced by AFSPC differ in ways that make sustaining more cuts next to impossible....

[Via Satellite 07-24-2014] NASA has issued a Request for Information (RFI) to build a set of communications satellites for Mars. The approach signals a major change in the way NASA procures services from the commercial sector, as the operator would continue to own the satellites while in orbit around the Red Planet. The space agency...

[Via Satellite 07-24-2014] The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has awarded a license to Tempus Global Data for a hyperspectral imaging and sounding system constellation. Tempus will leverage the Sounding and Tracking Observatory for Regional Meteorology (STORM) instrument through an exclusive agreement with Utah State University (USU) who built the instrument for NASA. The...

[Via Satellite 07-23-2014] Harris Corporation received an order for wideband handheld tactical radios from an undisclosed Middle East country. The order, worth $15 million, provides the country with RF-7850M multi-band, multi-mission radios. The RF-7850M-HH is capable of supporting the latest wideband and narrowband networking waveforms, and is interoperable with the Harris Falcon 2 and Falcon...

[Via Satellite 07-22-2014] The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected SSL to build flight hardware capable of taking a variety of small missions to space aboard the company’s geostationary (GEO) satellite platform. SSL said it intends to use the SSL 1300 platform, integrating the first Payload Orbital Delivery System (PODs) for carrying...