Kratos Demonstrates Fully Virtualized SATCOM Over LEO for U.S. Army

Showcases Software Ground System to Support Interoperability and Multi-Mission Capability with Partners Telesat Government Solutions and Cobham Satcom

SAN DIEGO, April 04, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc. (Nasdaq: KTOS), a technology company in the defense, national security and global markets, announced today that it successfully demonstrated a fully virtualized satellite communications (SATCOM) ground system using Kratos’ OpenSpace Platform for the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T). 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).

LEO constellations are strategic to military operations, delivering connectivity with lower latency than a traditional Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) satellite. These capabilities will be increasingly important as future military satellite communications (MILSATCOM) 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^TM 2500 digitizer was integrated with Cobham’s Tracker 1300TT antenna, enabling standardized traffic (DIFI) to pass directly from Cobham’s digital-ready antenna through virtualized modems at the network’s edge to the LEO 3 satellite.

In future conflicts, it will be crucial to have multi-orbit operations seamlessly share information among military branches and international partners. Kratos has worked with several satellite service operators over the past year to test and verify functionality of OpenSpace as a gateway and edge platform at each of the major orbital belts, GEO, MEO and LEO. Kratos has successfully demonstrated the openness, flexibility and interoperability of OpenSpace in other satellite orbits, with other satellite operators and equipment partners.