Military's space demands keep topping supply

By Jim Wolf

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado (Reuters) - U.S. military demand for satellite services will continue to outrun supply as the United States fleshes out a global information "mosaic," the Air Force's top civilian said Wednesday.

"We are entering an age when warfighters want more of what space has to offer," Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne told a conference here known as the National Space Symposium.

"And I think demand will continuously outstrip supply for the foreseeable future," he said, referring to such satellite-enabled gains as pinpoint targeting, secure communications and battlefield awareness.

Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co, Northrop Grumman Corp, Raytheon Co and other U.S. defense contractors are vying for billions of dollars of work on advanced military communications, navigation and other satellite systems that will boost U.S. signal-processing power as much as 10-fold compared with systems being replaced.

In the meantime, closely held Intelsat and Americom Government Services, a unit of Luxembourg-based SES, provide as much as 80 percent of the bandwidth, or communications pipelines, to the U.S. military, according to Futron Corp, a Bethesda, Maryland, aerospace consultancy.

Since 2001, funding for Air Force space programs has nearly doubled, Wynne said, for everything from monitoring weather to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

Working with commercial providers, "we are extending this global information mosaic in a very new and very powerful way," he said.

Gen. Robert Kehler, head of the Air Force Space Command, said meeting U.S. forces' ever-growing bandwidth needs, including video from the growing fleet of remotely piloted surveillance aircraft, would be a challenge "for a long time."