Page 46 - Australian Defence Magazine November 2022

46 SPACE
NOVEMBER 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
JP 9102 is set to bring Australia’s SATCOM capabilities home through the provision of between two and four sovereign communications satellites, ground stations and supporting infrastructure. Coverage will stretch from the central Indian Ocean in the west to the Solomon Islands in the east, and from the Arctic in the north to the Antarctic in the south. IOC is expected around 2027, at which point Australia will begin the transition away from the WGS network and onto its own system.
Five companies have created local teams and submitted responses to Defence’s tender: Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Optus (in a joint bid with Raytheon and Thales). Of these, Airbus was unable to facilitate a response by the time we closed for print, but some details of its plans appeared in the February 2022 issue of ADM.
BOEING DEFENCE AUSTRALIA
Boeing Defence Australia is working with Leidos Australia, Viasat, Indigenous Defence and Infrastructure Consortium (iDiC), Saber and ClearBox on its bid for JP 9102, which leverages the company’s satellite communications pedigree dating back to the first geostationary satellite launched in 1964, a single channel analogue that was used to live- broadcast the Tokyo Olympics.
“Since then, we have done more geostationary launches than any other company,” Kathryn Burr, Boeing’s program manager for JP 9102, said. “From a milsatcom perspective, Boeing has been the incumbent through the WGS program for over twenty years and we are on contract for the next [US] wideband satellite program (WGS-11), which passed critical design review at the end of last year and will be launched around 2024.”
EWEN LEVICK | MELBOURNE
A CLOSER LOOK AT JP 9102
The Commonwealth’s current SATCOM capabilities include a payload on the Optus C-1 satellite,
launched in 2003; access to UHF communications channels through Intelsat IS-22, a commercial satellite; and proportional access to the WGS network, which Australia gained by paying for WGS- 6 (New Zealand contributed to the cost of WGS-9). Now Defence is seeking to gain a sovereign SATCOM solution and reduce its dependence on American resources through JP 9102.
BOEING