The Defense Advanced Development Agency (DARPA) of the US Department of Defense has launched the Space-BACN program to create cheap optical communication terminals that can adapt to most standards of optical communication lines between satellites. So the military wants to combine various groups of small satellites in low Earth orbit, which cannot yet exchange data, into a "space layer".
According to the head of the Space-BACN program, Greg Kuperman, tens of thousands of small satellites may appear in low-Earth orbit in the next ten years. The US military itself plans to place a group of several dozen satellites capable of detecting hypersonic weapons and gliders on it. Satellites, even government satellites, can only exchange data within their own grouping.
On September 13, DARPA announced the Space-BACN program. Its goal is to create cheap optical communication terminals that would help unite various groups of small satellites in low-Earth orbit. The military wants the data transfer rate of such a terminal to be 100 gigabits per second. At the same time, no more than 100 watts of energy should be enough for it, and it should cost less than one hundred thousand dollars.
The program involves the creation of a cheap optical aperture that can emit and receive all waves in the C-band, a modem that supports various signal forms, as well as an architecture that could automate interactions between government and commercial satellites.
The US military is interested not only in low, but also in medium Earth orbit. The US space forces also hope to place satellites there to monitor the launch of cruise, ballistic and hypersonic missiles, as we wrote earlier.
Vasilisa Chernyavtseva