Commercially Hosted Resilient Communications

Intelsat General Corporation (IGC) presents a paper for the (AT&L)/SIO sponsored session on “Protected Communications Over Commercial Satellites” at MILCOM 2011 entitled “Commercially Hosted Resilient Communications” to describe the evolution of commercially provided satellite communications serving challenged and contested environments. This paper explores avenues for “Resilient SATCOM” technologies to be included aboard commercial missions as readily as Unprotected and Wideband SATCOM technologies. IGC surveys the viability of hosted military payloads with heritage to the FLTSAT EHF Package (FEP), Milstar, and Advanced EHF (AEHF) payloads. We will cite evidence of recent studies, advancements and successes in hosting full-featured standard military payloads on-board commercial spacecraft. IGC finds that a “Protected Tactical MILSATCOM” solution could be hosted to provide anti-jam, low probability of intercept / detection / exploitation (LPI / LPD / LPE) communications in both contested and benign operational environments without costly shielding and special hardening in design and construction of the space platform itself. IGC finds that the existing functionality of EHF SATCOM can be reconstituted using hosted payloads at considerable savings to the U.S. Government.