COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—The Air Force doubled the military’s space-based communications capabilities with a single rocket launch.
Air Force leaders say Thursday’s launch of the first Wideband Global SATCOM satellite begins an upgrade of a 25-year-old network of satellites, and each one of the new $300 million spacecraft can carry 10 times the amount of data one of its predecessors could transmit.
“It will almost double the bandwidth available on all other military communication satellites,” said Air Force Space Command’s Col. Jim Wolf, who watched the early morning launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., over a television link to Schriever Air Force Base.
It’s the military equivalent of switching to broadband from dial-up Internet.
Wolf, Space Command’s director of navigation, command, control and communication division, said the satellites will be controlled from Schriever. The communications equipment aboard the satellite will be operated by the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command at Peterson Air Force Base.
Wolf said every stage of the launch was met with clapping and cheers at Schriever.
The new satellite is based on a Boeing design for commercial communication satellites and can deliver computer data, voice transmissions and television signals.
It operates a number of different antennas and is far less limited in the signal frequencies it can process than its predecessors.
Leaders hope it will reduce the military’s growing dependence on commercial communication satellites that stems from its continued use of Cold War-era technologies that predate the military’s use of the Internet and video signals on the battlefield.
Now, even the smallest of Army units in the field carry satellite-communications gear, and battalions and brigades use satellites for everything from secure video conferences to viewing data collected by unmanned spy planes.
Eventually four more of the satellites will be in orbit, allowing worldwide coverage.
