Kratos Defense demonstrates fully virtualized SATCOM over LEO

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions demonstrated a fully virtualized satellite communications ground system using Kratos’ OpenSpace Platform for the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical. With demonstration partners Telesat Government Solutions and Cobham Satcom, the three companies showed dynamic support of simultaneous communication pathways for resilient SATCOM at Low Earth Orbit. LEO constellations are strategic to military operations, delivering connectivity with lower latency than a traditional Geosynchronous Earth Orbit satellite. These capabilities will be increasingly important as future military satellite communications networks must quickly adapt to multiple missions and multiple orbits. A virtualized ground system such as OpenSpace provides far greater resiliency and agility needed for these modern military operations, including multi-orbit, multi-mission support when compared to traditional, hardware-based systems. Kratos’ OpenSpace Platform is the industry’s only commercially available, fully software-defined satellite ground system. The demonstration showed a flexible network architecture that allowed soldiers to connect Telesat’s LEO 3 satellite through Cobham antennas. Kratos’ OpenEdge 2500 digitizer was integrated with Cobham’s Tracker 1300TT antenna, enabling standardized traffic to pass directly from Cobham’s digital-ready antenna through virtualized modems at the network’s edge to the LEO 3 satellite.