PNT at a Crossroads

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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Hey, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us for this afternoon session. I’m Charles Galbreath, a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute Space Power Advantage Center of Excellence. Today we’re talking about the future of position navigation and timing or PNT. The global reliance on PNT, space-based PNT in particular, has continued to grow over the past several decades. I mean, we can hardly get by any portion of our life without using some type of PNT signal, whether it’s farming or timing for banking or navigating to this location. PNT has become ubiquitous for the globe. We’ve also seen in recent conflicts that PNT is threatened from jamming, potentially cyber attacks and others. And so to help us sift through where we are with global PNT signals, where the threat is and what the United States Space Force can do to overcome these threats, I’m really thrilled to have this incredible panel with us here this afternoon. First we have Dr. Jeffrey Hebert, AFRL senior scientist for PNT. Next I’m glad to welcome Colonel Andy Menschner, commander of Mission Delta 31. Delta 31 is Space Force’s PNT integrated mission delta. And finally we have Dr. David Voss, director of the Space Force Spectrum Warfare Center of Excellence. Thank you all for joining us today. And I’m glad that you’re not hung over from any Mardi Gras activities. Happy Mardi Gras, everybody. Okay, let’s just jump right in. And Colonel Menschner, let’s start with you. Talk about the value of PNT. I mean, I kind of highlighted it a little bit, but could you describe it in more detail and what the potential impact might be if there was a global loss of PNT?

Col. Andrew Menschner:

Absolutely. Thank you. I appreciate the time and the chance to be here today. As you mentioned in your opening, PNT is absolutely vital to the modern way of life. And it is absolutely critical to global military operations. It is critical to space superiority. And space superiority is the foundational requirement for the success of a joint force. My job is to prevent those disruptions that we were talking about. And so we do that by fielding redundant systems and using strategies to help deny what we call a first mover advantage. So said another way, if we’re surprised by a threat or we have one of those disruptions, our team hasn’t been doing our job. For GPS, that may mean we may take several different types of actions. First, we may look at diversity of the constellation. We may in the future look at different ways of hanging satellites in orbit to get different effects. We may look at smaller, low-cost type of satellites and expanding our orbital presence that way. We may look at increasing the size of the constellation. Simply put, more vehicles gives you more PNT and more accuracy. And then we may look at new command and control strategies, all to get after that prevention of disruption that you talked about, because it would be devastating, not only to the way we do military operations, but the way we live our lives. Our role in Mission Delta 31 is to make sure that the United States Space Force can fight through an attack and continue to provide the global PNT services that we all rely on.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Great. Thank you. So can you, at an unclassified forum like this, can you elaborate a little bit more about the current threat environment, where you see that threat evolving over the next maybe five to 10 years?

Col. Andrew Menschner:

Sure. Absolutely. So I mentioned that the Space Force is fully integrated into the Joint Force, and we, our entire way of military operations relies on precise navigation and, precision and navigation and timing. Our adversaries know that. And so we’ve watched the threats both on the ground and on orbit grow over the last several years. We’re really trying to get after those threats and stay one step ahead with three main strategies. First and foremost, we have to get our people ready for that type of event, where we’re challenged in space. So we’ve designed a series of realistic exercises that our teams have been running through over the last year. First, about this time last year, we walked onto the operations floor and flipped off circuit breakers. Okay. Let me say that again. We flipped off circuit breakers, shutting down the system, and had the crews react to that. And they were responsible for diagnosing the problem and moving the mission to our backup location. And they were able to do that very, very successfully. Without any impacts to users, they were able to pick up, move the whole crew several states away and get things back up and operating. Secondly, every day we rely on four dedicated ground antennas and supplementary contacts from the satellite control network. We’re pretty confident that in times of conflict, we won’t have access to all those resources. And so we’ve been putting our team through a series of exercises, how could you operate with just two ground antennas? And they’ve done very well so far. It takes some planning. It takes some coordination up front. But they’ve been able to successfully get through that. Second, we’ve been able to counter our threats with technology. So first, by wringing every bit of capability out of the technology that we have today. And I use an example of an increase in the number of navigation uploads that we do on a daily basis in 2024. For those of you who are paying attention, you may have noticed that our accuracy improved by about 30% of 2023 to 2024. Fielded systems usually don’t get a 30% improvement in performance. That was really based on unleashing the creativity of our operators and charging them with wringing every bit of capability out of the fielded system. Secondly, we’re bringing on new technologies. So in your opening, you mentioned some of the jamming that occurs, even not only for our military teams, but for our civilian partners in civil aviation and things along those lines. We’re very soon about to bring on the L5 signal. And that will essentially help the civil aviation community work through some of those jamming challenges. And then finally, we’re challenging ourselves with, hey, what could happen? And how do we get after threats that we don’t see today? So in December of this year, we launched a GPS vehicle in something we called the Rapid Response Trailblazer. We challenged ourselves to respond to a simulated on-orbit failure of a GPS vehicle and looked at how quickly we could get a new vehicle on orbit. It turns out to do so, we had to switch boosters. We had to switch our shipping mechanism from C-17 to over the road. We had to train our crews and get the — process the spacecraft. We were able to do that in about a four-month time frame. I’m hopeful that we are able to cut that timeline down even further in the future. So as we’re seeing threats evolve, our team spends each and every day trying to look forward to predict what’s coming next and stay one step ahead. And the reality is there is no one solution to staying ahead of a threat. It takes a coordinated effort across multiple areas, our people, our technology, and our ways of doing business to keep PNT secure.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Thank you very much. Dr. Hebert, I want to bring you into the discussion. As Colonel Mishner mentioned, there’s multiple ways to get after some of the threats. One of those potential ways is the ability to incorporate signals from a variety of sources, whether that’s GPS or Galileo or GLONASS or even Badao, as well as signals that are more advanced, such as the GPS M-code. So can you talk a little bit about the receivers and the ability to integrate into a multi-GNS or utilize M-code?

Dr. Jeffrey Hebert:

Yeah, absolutely. So there are a plethora of PNT sources available to our warfighters. And we have a strategy in the Department of the Air Force that’s underpinned by, you know, two main characteristics. And I think it really speaks to this crossroads we’re at. It’s a very aptly named session, right? We’re entering an era where resilience is extremely important. And so that’s one of the attributes of our PNT systems that our strategy calls for. The other is robustness. And when we started with GPS modernization about 20 years ago, there are a lot of benefits to the user. And from a user perspective, a majority of those benefits are in the form of robustness. You know, and I think of robustness like we think of, you know, the ability to take a punch. And the increased anti-jam capabilities, the, you know, the improvements in terms of the signal quality and where the signal is in the spectrum really helps us operate through jamming, the enhanced, you know, encryption allows us to deal with other threats as well. So, you know, really a strong, well-designed signal. To get to resiliency from the user perspective, we need to look at diversifying sources. And, you know, there are many different sources of PNT. You mentioned multi-genus S. And for those that don’t know, you know, other countries and groups operate systems similar to GPS. So we have the Chinese Beidou system, the Russian GLONASS system. The European Union has Galileo, for instance. And those systems are the most like GPS, the easiest to integrate. But what we have to do is to be able to trust them. And that’s really the linchpin. You know, if you think about dropping a bomb with Beidou, for instance, you know, there’s an initial, I think, healthy gag reflex that we all probably have. You got to muscle through that. But after you do, right, we can think about all the benefits, the pros and the cons. And the idea really is about controlling the electromagnetic spectrum. You know, that’s a domain that we need to control. And being able to use signals when they’re left undefended. And to be able to impose on our adversary constraints. And so in the navigation warfare concept, right, we need to be able to prosecute navigation warfare better than our adversaries. And multi-genesis is one way that we can accomplish that. But to get to the trust aspect, we can take a lot of inspiration from civil aviation. They’ve had to basically trust all of our lives, anyone who’s in the flying public, right, with GPS en route navigation, with being able to do a GPS approach to an airfield. And so in order to trust an unencrypted GPS signal, they’ve put an augmentation system in place. And so that augmentation system has components at the local level, say, the tactical level, at the more theater level. And it involves monitoring, looking at the quality of those systems, and providing side channel information to the user that enhances their trust and the ability to use those in a safety critical perspective. So what we’ve got to do is basically take some inspiration from that, but then map it to the use case of the military, which is a bit different than what the FAA is looking at, which is anomalous satellite behavior that isn’t necessarily caused by malicious intent. So there are building blocks for us to do this. And we’re really excited about being able to demonstrate those capabilities in our science and technology and capability development programs.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Thank you very much. Dr. Voss, some nations are pursuing sort of regional augmentation or enhancement to the global signal. Can you talk a little bit about that sort of architectural approach and how that works in integrating to improve PNT in a regional versus a global sense?

Dr. David Voss:

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to join the panel. When we think about the force direction that we’re going with SatNav, there are kind of three elements to that. The primary path is to build upon the foundation of GPS as an extremely stable, trusted global source. We want to be able to add resiliency to that with the goal of resilient by design. How do we add proliferation within the MEO layer, the integration of technology faster, the ability to launch more satellites on a single launch. But we also want to make that compatible with the UE that we’re doing. That’s within the sovereign system as the foundation of our primary path for the joint force. As we look at MGNSS, the question that Dr. Hiebert was answering there, how do we take advantage of all of these RF optimized signals that are raining down that we can, through responsible monitoring, providing that information to the joint community, how can we take advantage of these not only in MEO but potentially in LEO as well as GEO systems that are providing RF optimized signals for PNT? And that’s really the kind of the core of where you see a lot of these regional augmentation systems. The third part of the strategy then is how do we really provide PNT over COM, which is a non-RF optimized PNT source. It’s designed for COM, but there’s a lot of advantages to that in terms of being able to do providing coarser time and position. And so when you look at regional augmentation systems, a lot of them are built on the foundation of a global PNT source being provided by the US or some of these other countries that are out there. And so kind of once you assume there’s this global capability that’s available to you, how do we bring potentially enhanced performance? So typically, as we’ve done the analytics within the sat nav, it’s challenging to have a affordable regional LEO constellation because of the needs of coverage. And so although we’ve modeled a bunch, if you’re at higher latitudes, you can begin to do some optimization of your constellation. But if you’re in LEO, just due to the physics of LEO, you tend to be providing coverage for most of the globe when you’re in the low earth orbit. MEO, you can have some optimization opportunities. But really, it’s GEO that becomes an attractive solution for that. And so kind of within the strategy of hybrid architectures are taking advantage of what’s out there opportunistically. There’s a lot of advantages to providing a GEO source for a particular geographic area of the world. And that really fits into that second part of the strategy for us is through partnerships with QZSS or potentially Europe or others, how can we provide — how can we take advantage of those signals for particularly urban canyon or actual canyon performance? But it also gives you orbital diversity as well. And any time you can get orbital diversity within the architecture, there’s a strong advantage to that in terms of resilient by design. And so we see them as a key part of the strategy, but a regional augmentation by itself, it needs to be built upon the foundation of these global services, especially for the U.S. where we have global requirements for the joint community that we have to be able to service.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Great. Thank you. So this question’s a little bit for you, Dr. Voss, and also for Colonel Menschner. The Space Force last year started the resilient GPS program. They did it as a quick start, leveraging the Space Enterprise Consortium. So from an architecture perspective and from an operational perspective, what should the audience understand about resilient GPS versus what we already have with a 30-ball constellation?

Dr. David Voss:

Yeah, when you think — so as a force designer, I’ve done a number of force designs. Kind of the first one I did had a joint community of this size. As I moved to narrowband and broadband, the community got larger. And as I moved to the sat-nav force design, the community that the P&T community supports is millions and millions, billions of devices. And so you can’t move quickly in that community for good reasons because of the global dependency on it. And so built upon the foundation of the GPS architecture, the 3s and the 3Fs that are coming, that provides a foundation that is very — it’s responding to a lot of the RF challenges. It’s supporting partners in other parts of the U.S. government. We talked about civilian integration. And so we still saw that as a core part of the strategy going forward over the next 3 to 15 years. But what we want to do is take advantage of a lot of these new space principles that are coming out. How do we take advantage of rapid tech insertion? How do we take advantage of the ability to do multi-launch? You don’t necessarily need all the requirements on a more tactical version of that. And then as we look at the threat surface, there’s a lot of work that was being done on GPS in terms of the RF environment, as you look at potentially kinetic attack or some of these other ones, nodal diversity becomes a challenge, right? And so how do you proliferate within the MEO? We looked at all architectures, but in particular how do we provide the backwards compatibility to the UE that’s going to — if there’s a conflict that the UE that is out there is kind of core tenants of these early phases of our GPS. And so there’s a lot of advantages to being able to provide some of that diversification. It adds to performance, additional numbers, builds performance, and that’s at the heart of Resilient by Design is how can we build resiliency with performance or capability? And so that was the part of the strategy to really be able to bring in some of these tech insertions, be able to provide nodal diversity while still being — supporting the current UE.

Col. Andrew Menschner:

Sure. Thank you. I would just add to that, it’s a great step towards resilience, in this case, by increasing the number of vehicles on orbit. There is value in resiliency just in that. We’re moving forward, taking our first step by leveraging commercial technologies and concentrating on a core set of signals. Certainly the opportunity is there to expand beyond the initial first step to include greater numbers of vehicles and greater numbers of signals. I would just point out that to my earlier comments on space superiority, this is the type of thing we’re trying to get after. We’re trying to look at ways to quickly field capabilities, build redundancy, build resilience in areas where we traditionally have just simply not had it. And this is a great example of us — of the Space Force moving forward with that.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Okay. So you mentioned commercial. I think you both did, actually. But can you expand a little bit more on that? I don’t think most people think about PNT as a commercial service, because the Space Force has been providing it for free to the globe for decades. So is there a paradigm shift here? Again, PNT at the crossroads, folks. Go ahead.

Dr. David Voss:

Yeah. I think, you know, once again, in kind of hybrid architecture theory, taking advantage of all sources available is key to graceful degradation, increased performance. I think a lot of times, as we look at the space systems in the ’80s, the ’90s, early 2000s, you know, GPS is a homogeneous service that we provided to the globe. We use the term, you know, GPS in our car or something to represent how ubiquitous it is for everybody. As we look at the availability of multisource, not only for PNT, SATCOM, you can go down the list of ISR sensors between commercial and DOD or IC-dedicated systems. The question is not, should we take advantage of these things? The question really turns into, what is the ingredients and what is the amount of trust we put or core dependency on any one service over the aggregate of all the others? And so, from a strategy standpoint, as we were modeling commercial, you know, I think when a lot of folks have talked about MG and SS, most people think about sovereign MG and SS systems. It’s very exciting to see, to me, commercial now entering into that domain as well. I think there’s a place for it, particularly for a couple applications. One is, it provides potentially orbital diversity. That’s a fantastic opportunity. Where we’re able to provide spectral diversity, away from the core and GPS consolation, is another advantage to that. And there are a lot of users who can’t take advantage of M-Code due to the swap or the security requirements of those systems. And so, how do we provide a trusted signal to those systems that might not be able to have the swap available to take advantage of M-Code, but are still part of our joint community or commercial community? And so, we see commercial potentially filling that niche for us within kind of the direction we’re going. We’re excited to see how they come on. And of course, trying to understand how they, what is the performance, the power, the signal types, will play into kind of the questions of how far does it integrate into the joint community.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Great. Thank you. So, Colonel Menschner, this morning I hosted a panel on commercial, and I was reminded that ground is sexy. So, with that as the premise, the ground for GPS is sometimes sexy, and sometimes the butt of some jokes. So, particularly next generation OCX. So, can you help tell us where we are in the delivery of OCX, and how that’s going to help overcome some of the challenges that we’ve had in the past?

Col. Andrew Menschner:

Sure. I’d love to. So, what many people don’t realize is OCX is much further along than most people are tracking. OCX has been involved in all seven GPS 3 launches through their Block Zero. We have deployed all hardware to all monitoring stations and control stations around the world. The software is installed at both of our control stations. Our operators are using it every day, running through testing and burndown of requirements. We have nearly 60 live contacts with vehicles through the OCX program. And our team is working through those operational scenarios, giving timely feedback, and their impressions have been largely favorable to this point. Our crews are working through the certification process. That’s a whole challenge in and of itself, getting them certified to operate the system. And for some period of time, we’ll have both the legacy system AUP and OCX ongoing. But we’re working through that process right now. Ninety-seven percent of the requirements of OCX have been tested. And we are building towards two decisions later this year. One is called ready to transition to operations, and that’s the last decision in the acquisition channel that says this program is ready to transfer over to the operational community. The second decision follows that, and it’s called fielding decision. And that’s really just what it sounds like. The system is ready to be fielded and turned over for operations. We expect both of those later this year. And so, like I said, we’re a lot closer than most people realize. Once that fielding decision happens, that’s when the Constellation begins running on OCX rather than GPS. So one of the big game changers for us that’s allowed us to make a lot of progress over the last two years has been the standup of integrated mission deltas within the Space Force. For those of you that aren’t tracking, Delta 31 had the opportunity to be one of the first ones. What that meant for us is that we combined operations of GPS with sustainment of GPS and near-term acquisition, in this case, the OCX program. What that meant was we got to bring the best and brightest of both sides together and put them in a room and say, “Okay, help us figure out what are the most challenging operational scenarios that we have to go deal with, and what are the things that we can get to later?” And so the teams have been attacking that together with their contractor counterparts and getting after all the things that need to be burned down before we get to that fielding decision. So tremendous progress, and I think we really have a chance to prove the concept of the integrated mission delta when we get to the fielding decision later this year.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

No, that’s great news. I mean, one, validation of the approach of the integrated mission delta, and two, the success so far of OCX and the milestones that you’re going to overcome this year. So congratulations on all of that. Dr. Hebert, I’ve got a couple of questions for you, but let’s start with NTS3. And it’s been a huge effort for AFRL to demonstrate some new advancements in the technology for PNT. And Dr. Voss even mentioned PNT from a — PNT signals from geo as an incredible value. So can you talk a little bit about NTS3, where it is, and what the value of that program is going to be?

Dr. Jeffrey Hebert:

Yeah, absolutely. So NTS3 is a really exciting program. We can’t wait for launch. It’s currently scheduled on the next Vulcan — well, the first Vulcan military launch, you know, the first certified launch. And so when Vulcan goes, we’ll go, and we’re hoping that it’ll be soon in a few months. And so what NTS3 is going to provide, it provides all three segments. So we are providing a software-defined satellite. So we will have a fully reprogrammable satellite that we can do some amazing things with. It comes with a control segment, obviously, that allows us to command and control the satellite and to ensure that that satellite is responsive to the environment that surrounds us. And then we have software-defined user equipment as well. The really exciting thing about software-defined user equipment is that we’ve actually transitioned that technology into acquisition. So we’ve started the acquisition of software-defined user equipment receivers even before the satellite is launched, right, so — which is super exciting. Some of the key technologies that are going to be experimented with — and again, I want to emphasize this is an experiment, you know. And we have a year planned full of, you know, 100 experiments or more. We don’t know how many we’ll be able to get to. But for instance, we’d like to be able to sense what the environment is on the ground for our terrestrial users and be able to respond through the control segment up to the satellite and look at ways that we can work with the fact that everything is software-defined, everything can be reprogrammed, and just take things to another level. We’re already responsive with the current control segment that we have. OCX will allow us to be even more responsive. And we’re just taking it up, you know, to turn in the dial up to 11. And what the important thing is to realize is that this is an experiment. And so we are going to be looking at how much reprogrammability do we need and using that to help inform future force design decisions. So we’ll be looking at those experiments very closely. One of the technologies that has me really excited on NTS-3 is the fact that we have a phased array antenna that can provide a high-power signal from space, coming from GEO at this point. But it’ll be able to do some things that we really have only dreamed about. For instance, being able to provide multiple spot beams and servicing different users in different parts of — let’s say it’s over CONUS — in different parts of CONUS with different services. And we’ll be able to evaluate, well, what’s the real value of being able to do that? And through the entire chain, from the user to the control segment to the space vehicle, we’re going to look at new ways of ensembling our clocks. And, you know, what is the benefit of that? So in an experimental sense, we may have multiple clocks with different performance levels. And then we’ll look at tying them together in new and interesting ways to improve our performance and to provide better P&T services to the end users. So that end-to-end reprogrammability just opens up so many possibilities that hopefully, you know, we’ll use that to inform those future decisions and be able to make smarter decisions. You know, the last NTS mission — I think it was 1978 or so — kicked off what is the current GPS era. And so we’re really excited to see what this experiment leads to and what the next generation of satellite navigation might be.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Now, that is very exciting. It’s almost tempting to think, well, GPS has been here for so long, and it’s going to be here, and it’s static. But that couldn’t be further from the truth with the technology that’s advancing, the way you’re all approaching different avenues to overcome the threats. That is very exciting. Follow-up question. Another potential way of delivering a P&T signal is by embedding it in signals that are already out there, communications, for example. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? And Dr. Voss, if you want to chime in from an architecture perspective or a force design aspect, that would be great, too.

Dr. Jeffrey Hebert:

Sure. So the convergence of P&T and communications is well upon us now. And I think everybody in this room probably has, you know, a cell phone like this. And I would posit that there are probably more P&T comms converged devices in this room than there are humans. And that’s probably going to be true for every room that we are in for the rest of our lives. And well, with the exception of a SCIF, right, or something like that. Right? But the point is, it is ubiquitous. And as we integrate this capability into the military, we really need to be intentional about how we do it. And we need to look for opportunities to make the integration of P&T and communications mutually reinforcing. And what we don’t want to do is have a situation where, say, a vulnerability on one side, say a P&T vulnerability, takes out your communications, or a communications outage takes out your P&T. When we fused GPS and inertial navigation back in the, you know, ’80s and into the ’90s, we found that combining GPS and INS together made both of them better. You know, bringing an INS tightly coupled in with a GPS receiver made it more responsive to dynamics and better performant in jamming. And similarly, the GPS constrained the drift of an inertial system. It constrains the drift of a clock. Right? So that synergy is what we’re striving for in the convergence of P&T and communications. It’s not going to come for free, and it’s going to require some creativity. But we just have to make sure that when we put them together, we get the best of both worlds. And then the last thing I would say is that, while it’s super important for us terrestrially, I think we’re going to see huge benefits to our space users of P&T, especially as we go into cislunar, lunar environments, and in pretty much all of the space domain. So I’m curious if David has thoughts on those things.

Dr. David Voss:

No, that was fantastic. I’ll just echo. You know, first of all, the SWAC has had a fantastic relationship with AFRL. They’ve been a key partner in my program and all our force designs in helping us assess the technology’s readiness for being integrated into our analytics. And so as we look at a lot of these really exciting concepts and ideas that folks have talked about for a long time in this community, you know, Dr. Hebert and others have really helped us assess, prioritize, and then integrate those into our analytics. But PNT over COM is really the third part of our strategy. And I think what a lot of folks don’t realize, as Dr. Hebert was highlighting, is yes, position’s important, but time synchronization is so foundational to modern-day communications that we take it for granted. And so making sure we don’t have a critical dependency with our COM systems on GPS, for instance, can we provide a time dissemination architecture? A lot of strategies for clock backup or clock synchronization are fantastic. We should do that. But you don’t get to the hundreds of thousands, millions of devices that don’t have access to those high-performance clocks. And so the time dissemination is what really matters. And so if we can really work with the P&T over COM strategy, I think the challenge is not so much should we do it, it is how much of that complexity should we put in into what generation of the space and UE hardware? Because you’re really talking hybrid UE at this point. Once again, for those of you who have a phone, this is very common when you think about it on the ground side. It’s not as common when you think about it in military UE. And so how do you weight a signal if your timing over COM disagrees with your MGNSS sources or your GPS source, which is getting spoofed or not? That’s a complex question, and so we need to do that well in the acquisition process. But definitely a key part of the architecture.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Thank you very much. So this last question is really for all of you, and I’d like to have you take it from different perspectives from the operations and acquisition perspective, the technology perspective, and the force design perspective. But when we think about the continuous development of new capabilities and new ways to overcome these threats, maybe in a spiral development model, how should we look at this from an architecture approach to delivering these new capabilities? I mean, we’re talking about GPS 3F, new technologies with NTS 3, as well as others. So Colonel Menschner, why don’t we start with you?

Col. Andrew Menschner:

I would argue that GPS is an example of doing continuous technology improvement well over the course of the program. Just use the latest example. So we transitioned to the Block 3 version of vehicles. We increased accuracy three times. We increased anti-jam eight times. We increased the life expectancy of the vehicle by 25%, which is saying quite a bit, given how well engineered the vehicles are and how long they last on a day-to-day basis for us. And so what we’re looking to do is continuously improve and continuously upgrade the baseline. Let me just give you a couple examples. GPS 3, SVO 9 and 10 will include laser retroreflector arrays. That’ll be the first time those have been on GPS vehicles. That’ll help us increase our accuracy of the constellation overall. GPS 3, SV 10 will include an optical cross-link demo. And that’ll be the first time we’ve been able to demonstrate that technology in MEO. And we’re excited about the possibility of what that might bring for future versions of the constellation. Whether it’s incorporating new technology within the run of one family of vehicles, or making the leap from GPS 3 to GPS 3F to incorporate search and rescue payloads, regional military protection, we’re always looking at pushing the ball forward. And so I’d point out that it’s tempting to look at a GPS family of vehicles as a static entity, and it is not. It is an ever-continuously evolving technological base.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Thank you.

Dr. Jeffrey Hebert:

Thanks. You know, DARPA’s been credited with many inventions, you know, amazing things like the internet and stealth fighters and stuff like that. One of the things DARPA did was develop a way to make open architectures and modular open systems applicable to PNT. And AFRL and the Army and the Navy, we partnered with DARPA, and we’ve fostered that over time and transitioned it into programs of record. So there’s a program out there, it’s maybe not as well-known as others, but it’s called REGI. It’s the Resilient Embedded GPS INS. Basically what REGI is, think of it as the PNT hub that goes into an aircraft. It’s, you know, the heartbeat of that aircraft from a position, navigation, and timing standpoint. And so, you know, REGI had a really important set of milestones in the last year. One of them was incorporating vision-aided navigation into the navigation solution, and flying GPS denied for about two and a half hours on one of the flight tests. It did multiple flight tests. But the really remarkable thing about that was that it was a program that took a third-party vision-aided nav system, integrated it in 26 days. So 26 days from contract award to flight test result, you know, getting 10-meter accuracy in using visual-aided navigation with no GPS for hours at a time. And so that is just amazing, completely remarkable, but was the vision of that DARPA program that started many years ago. And so we’re really excited about what that portends when we want to introduce additional sources of PNT, whether it’s celestial, magnetic navigation, PNT over comms, you name it, multi-GNSS. We have a hub where we can plug in additional sensors and rapidly integrate them, and we’ve demonstrated that in flight tests.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Awesome, thank you.

Dr. David Voss:

I typically think of us in the third era of space. The first era of space was the discovery of space, how do you use it? The second era of space was, space was deeply woven into the fabric of our society and our weapon systems, our joint fight. GPS is a fantastic example of that. This third era of space, we have seen the diversification of orbits, the growth of commercial, the growth of allied and adversary. It goes from a sanctuary state to a contested state. We have variable performance. You got exquisite to not exquisite. How do you take each of these different pieces and put them together? And so as we look at this from an architectural standpoint, as I’ve attacked force designs over the last few years, I very much echo Colonel Menschner. When you look at GPS, as I looked at the current fielded force, GPS has already been evolving to the threats, maybe not always as fast as we would want, but you look at it, there was a jamming threat, there’s a spoofing threat, right? We’re adding more power, we’re adding better, M-Code’s coming online, so it was evolving. The pace of threat though is even going faster. And so when you look at the ability to respond, continuing to put more and more and more and more requirements on one vehicle system, like in the second era of space, is no longer a practical approach. So now it’s about how do we allocate which requirements to which element of the architecture? That becomes powerful because we don’t have to make GPS do every single PNT requirement for the globe. There’s a three-pronged strategy for doing that. The challenge though is that comes with complexity, it comes with collaboration across multiple acquisition orgs, multiple acquisition programs, it comes with hybrid UE complexity, and so we’re trading this ability to go fast in certain elements of the architecture, take advantage of commercial or allied with this idea of complexity. And so we just gotta be willing to understand that, acknowledge that, work together, educate each other, practice it, field it, there’s a lot there to do. But it comes with a lot of value in aggregate. And so it’s really where I see that element of continuous integration, understanding the generational construct of satellites, whether you call it LEAP, EPIC, BLOC, TRONCH, whatever term you wanna use, this generational construct allows us now to get improvements much, much faster. We just have to understand which program we’re putting the requirement on and in which EPIC, BLOC, LEAP generation that it’s going towards.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Very good, well gentlemen, thank you so much for your time and your insight, and most importantly for your incredible leadership in this important field, thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this brings to the end of this panel. Thank you for your time and attention. Please be sure to stop by the Mitchell booth at the far end of the corridor near the exhibit hall entrance. Thank you all for joining us again, and from all of us at the Mitchell Institute, have a great Space Power Day, thank you.