The award stems back to 2002, when the U.S. Air Force awarded Boeing a contract to develop FAB-T systems that would work with the AEHF satellites. The program experienced several hiccups and spent 10 years in development, leading to several cost overruns that forced the military to issue a Request For Proposal (RFP) in April for alternative solutions as a risk mitigation effort.

   Since 2002, Raytheon has won three separate contracts for similar terminals, all of which were upgrade contracts or new start programs that would introduce AEHF terminals to three different branches of the U.S. military. The AEHF military terminals that Raytheon currently produces already meet 80 percent of the Air Force’s requirements.

   Raytheon Network Centric Systems Vice President of Integrated Communication Systems Scott Whatmough spoke to Satellite News about how his company plans to meet its development milestones during the next six months to a year since winning the FAB-T development tract last month.

Whatmough said that the first milestone Raytheon must meet the contract is to get to a critical design review (CDR) within 10 months of signing the contract, which gives the company until July 10, 2013.

   “This is not a typical CDR where we’re starting with a clean piece of paper, as we are already starting with an 80 percent solution that has already completed the most difficult work – the advanced AEHF waveform and logging onto the satellite,” said Whatmough. “What we’re really doing is a CDR on the 20 percent that we didn’t already have fully functioning.”

   Raytheon previously achieved technology milestones on two high-priority civil space and government satellite projects in November 2011, when its Army Secure Mobile Anti-jam Reliable Tactical Terminal (SMART-T) became the first operationally fielded terminal to interoperate with the in-orbit Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite. The company recently completed its set of operational tests after the launch of the first AEHF satellite in August 2010.

   SMART-T AEHF, which is both fielded and in production, already demonstrated interoperable communications using the AEHF satellite’s eXtended Data Rate (XDR) waveform. Raytheon said the XDR moved data more than five times faster than previous EHF systems. The company also demonstrated backward compatibility to low- and medium-data-rate operation supported by earlier EHF satellites on the new AEHF satellite. Raytheon also successfully tested its U.S. Navy Multiband Terminal (NMT) with the AEHF satellite in December 2011.

   “Because of the benefit we’ve had on SMART-T, NMT and NMPU, all three of those systems have already been on satellite and have successfully completed all of their testing,” said Whatmough. “We can now take that capability and then add to it the Air Force specific capabilities required for FAB-T, which are interfaces required for specific protocols that the Air Force would use in taking Presidential National Voice Conferencing (PNVC) capability from SMART-T and porting it into the FAB-T baseline.”

   Raytheon must also demonstrate those capabilities as part of the remaining 20 percent of the FAB-T requirement due by July 2013. “We haven’t picked the exact week that we will hold those demonstrations, but it’s conjunction with the CDR, so it’s at the end of that 10-month window that ends in the July timeframe,” Whatmough said. “We also will be showing the hardware that we will have adapted in the configuration required to be in an airborne platform, which is different than the configuration for the Humvee-mounted SMART-T, or the ship-mounted NMT.”

   Raytheon’s FAB-T development tract deal provides full funding for this development work. Whatmough noted that the contract contains provisions to continue development work through a full 24-month period. “This allotted time gets us through a full qualification of the hardware and production-ready systems,” he said. “The expectation is that we will continue on that development path and show complete continuity from start to finish. All of this is geared toward the Air Force’s need for a September 2015 launch of a fully functioning FAB-T terminal. That is an important date for the Air Force.”

   The FAB-T development deal also contained no contractual relationships or requirements to work with Boeing, according to Whatmough. “Our offering was based on our existing capabilities and not dependent on anything that was done on the original FAB-T contract,” he said. “This allows complete autonomy and it allows the Air Force to have an honest, competitive environment.”

   While admitting that a normal program of this complexity would not be able to establish the kind of maturity that the Air Force would want in a risk reduction program in just 10 months, Whatmough said he had no worries about the work ahead. “There’s nothing involved with this program that keeps me awake,” he said. “We’re fully confident that we’ll get the job done.  We are fully staffed with engineers and personnel that will allow us to meet these deadlines. We are right on track.”