Northrop Grumman’s Protected Tactical Satcom Rapid Prototype (PTS-P) payload, ahead of integration in January 2025. Photo: Northrop Grumman

U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC) is awarding contracts for the Protected Tactical Satcom-Global (PTS-G) program to Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Viasat, Astranis, and Intelsat General, the U.S. division of Luxembourg’s SES, which bought Intelsat this month.

The awards announced this week are initial, firm fixed price orders for $37.5 million. The overall PTS-G Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract is worth up to $4 billion.

SSC said in a release that each awardee will mature a design and provide demonstrations based upon their established commercial product lines, to meet PTS-G requirements. The results will inform follow-on orders.

SSC said on Tuesday said that it plans to award a PTS-G production contract next year to meet initial operational capability “with a projected launch in 2028, putting the first PTS-G satellite in orbit.”

“A second wave of production awards for additional PTS-G satellite capability is planned for 2028, with launch planned for 2031,” SSC said.

Last November, SSC said that it planned a competition to award “up to four Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity contract for PTS-G as well as PTS-G Design and Demonstration Delivery Order 001.”

PTS is the follow-on to Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Extremely High Frequency communications satellite constellation. The program includes PTS-G, PTS-Resilient (PTS-R), and PTS-Prototype payloads.

PTS-G delivers resilience to military users worldwide with proliferated small satellites providing anti-jam capability in GEO, SSC said.

“Lower complexity” PTS-G Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites in Ka-band and X-band are to fill a gap between the “more focused” PTS-R and the “broadly-available but also the lower assured access capabilities provided by existing/emerging milsatcom and commercial services,” Space Force has said.

PTS-G was a new start in the Department of the Air Force’s fiscal 2025 budget request (Defense Daily, March 14, 2024). In a briefing before the fiscal 2025 budget release, former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said that “if you look at the Chinese space order of battle today — the Russians are a problem, but not as much — and you look at what that order of battle is going to be in five years and you compare where we are and where we think we’ll be, we’ve really got a problem in space.”

Space Force and U.S. Strategic Command have worked on PTS and the Protected Tactical Enterprise Service ground system program to counter adversaries’ satellite jamming through the use of a Protected Tactical Waveform.

This story was first published by Defense Daily