Photo: SpaceWERX AltPNT challenge.

SpaceWERX has awarded TrustPoint two Direct-to-Phase II contracts to mature the company’s GPS-independent technologies as part of the SpaceWERX AltPNT Challenge. TrustPoint announced the two awards on Wednesday, worth $3.8 million total. 

The AltPNT challenge is a SpaceWERX initiative to solicit industry ideas to advance U.S. and Allied warfighter PNT capabilities with new sensors, data sources, and processing techniques to improve PNT resilience. SpaceWERX is the innovation arm of the U.S. Space Force and a division within AFWERX.

TrustPoint is developing a commercial GPS service with a planned C-band Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation to provide greater accuracy, security, and availability for government and commercial GPS users.

TrustPoint CEO Patrick Shannon told Via Satellite that each of the contracts is intended to mature and demonstrate core technologies that enable high performing C-band LEO GNSS capability to the Space Force. 

The first contract is to demonstrate TrustPoint’s GPS-independent ground control segment. 

“This control segment will allow our constellation to operate completely independent of the heritage GPS system and service. This independence decouples possible failure modes so that critical national security and safety critical of life civil/commercial applications [such as] aviation, automotive, etc. can benefit from improved reliability and resilience when using multiple complementary PNT services,” Shannon said, citing the example of GPS and TrustPoint.   

Shannon said the second contract is for an advanced security application that TrustPoint is not revealing the details of. 

SpaceWERX is awarding multiple contracts under the AltPNT challenge, like the Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) Challenge. SpaceWERX announced 20 contracts on August 9 with a total contract value of $34.8 million. Other winners include Slingshot Aerospace and Xona Space Systems. 

The AltPNT focus areas include technologies for a government-funded Alternative PNT innovation center; PNT situational awareness monitoring; PNT assurance and integrity; non-radio frequency PNT; fusing multiple independent sources of PNT; and space-based PNT from derived from non-GNSS sources and orbits. 

Hear from TrustPoint CEO Patrick Shannon in a recent episode of the On Orbit podcast