Military's space demands keep topping supply

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."

So great is the demand that new systems like Boeing's Wideband Global Satcom and Lockheed Martin's Advanced Extremely High Frequency may not much change the extent to which the military relies on commercial providers.

Lt. Gen. Michael Hamel, commander of the Space Command's satellite-buying Space & Missile Systems Center, said military demand was now basically double the supply.

"We're getting the job done, but it's really not being done in a way that meets our users' needs," he told reporters after a speech to the symposium. He said compromises were constantly made because of the crunch.

Also adding to the growing demand was commanders' wish to provide Internet services as a morale-booster to their troops in remote spots.

"They want to see YouTube. They want to do MySpace," said Peggy Slye, an expert on space and telecommunications at the Futron consultancy.

Such Internet access is now available to deployed forces thanks to devices using National Security Agency-approved encryption designed to secure communications from prying eyes.

Wynne told the symposium the United States also must do more to protect space assets on which it relies for a large and growing list of commercial and civilian needs.

His prepared text referred to China's January 2007 use of a ground-based ballistic missile to destroy an aging satellite in polar orbit without alerting other nations in advance, though he dropped the reference when he spoke.

"While we have made considerable progress in fielding space capabilities, we have not sufficiently addressed space survivability among many of our space systems," Wynne said.

(Editing by Gary Hill)