Air Force Research Lab eyes space data transport demo in 2026

DAYTON, Ohio — An Air Force Research Laboratory team convened to help the Space Force test and prototype new spacecraft concepts plans to launch its first experimental satellites as soon as 2026.

AFRL created the Rapid Architecture Prototyping and Integrated Development, or RAPID, lab in 2022 to partner with the Space Force’s various architecture and system design organizations to wring out ideas for future on-orbit capabilities.

Andy Williams, AFRL’s deputy technology officer for space, said the group is making progress on its first task: helping the Space Warfighting Analysis Center, SWAC for short, determine whether its plans for a future network of data transport satellites are feasible.

SWAC, which for the last three years has been conducting mission-by-mission analyses and designs aimed at defining the service’s future force, completed its plan last year for a space data transport architecture. That plan calls for a hybrid communications network — essentially a space-based internet comprised of commercial and military satellites.

With SWAC’s initial work completed, the RAPID lab’s role is to take a re-look at the strategy, identify any challenges and craft a plan to test and validate the architecture through experimentation on the ground and in space.

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Williams told a small group of reporters during a July 31 interview that challenges include sharing data across multiple orbits, making sure those transmissions are secure and managing different interfaces between multiple commercial providers.

“This is not an environment that the government acquisition community is used to operating in,” he said during a visit to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. “We’re used to our bespoke stovepipes where we own the satellite, we own the ground control system, we own all the data.”

Working through these problems, however, is essential for the Space Force as it looks to improve both the resiliency of its satellites and the capability they provide to users on the ground, Williams said.

The RAPID team has made progress on some of these issues and is now testing some of the concepts on the ground. Starting next year, his team will shift its focus to on-orbit experimentation and will likely demonstrate some capability in space by 2026 or 2027.

He added that the Space Force’s acquisition arm, Space Systems Command, is developing an initial version of those demonstration capabilities now and will build on those through an iterative design process.

Along with the on-orbit spacecraft, RAPID is working closely with the organizations developing the future ground network to determine what kind of terminals will be needed to support this space internet concept. That includes AFRL’s Global Lightning project — which has been experimenting with various commercial SATCOM providers like SpaceX, OneWeb and Telesat since 2018 — and the Defense Innovation Unit’s Hybrid Space Architecture effort.

DIU has partnered with a slew of companies, including Anduril, Aalyria, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure Space to demonstrate cybersecurity solutions, develop communication payloads and link ground-based cloud capabilities with commercial communication satellites.

“The work that we’re doing in RAPID on the back-end orchestration of that is really looking at how we leverage that,” Williams said. “We’re in a lot of different states of capability, but we know that we’ve got to go fast, so we’re pushing all those different capabilities out as they’re ready.”