Space Force wraps initial plan for building "hybrid" commercial/military 'outernet"

WASHINGTON — The Space Force’s forward planning unit has completed a “force design” that lays out the parameters of a new hybrid military/commercial internet in space, known as the “outernet,” designed to link all of the service’s mission-specific networks together — and acquisition planners are now working on transferring that plan into a reality, a senior service official said today.

The Space Warfighting Analysis Center (SWAC) “just this year completed what they call the space data transport force design,” Col. Eric Felt, director of architectures and integration at the Department of the Air Force’s space acquisition office, told a C4ISR webinar.

“So we are now working through how are we going to pivot the [current satellite communications] architecture to work towards the SWAC force design,” said Felt, who reports to Frank Calvelli, the first-ever DAF space acquisition executive.

Calvelli, appearing before the House Armed Services’ strategic forces subcommittee today, said, “We are fundamentally transforming our military satellite communications and data transport architecture through a disaggregation, proliferation, capacity expansion, partnership with allies and with commercial, which will enhance our ability to fight and contested and degraded operational environments.”

The SWAC force design laid out what traditional wideband and narrowband satellite communications (SATCOM) are needed to support for the joint force, but beyond to identify commercial SATCOM networks that could be included and envision a seamless capability to transfer high-volume data (such as video) satellite-to-satellite, Felt explained.

The force design took into account “all of the different things that we need to do with passing data in space … in a fight with a peer competitor, what would be required,” Felt said. “Then they decomposed that into the basic principles of how are we going to deliver a resilient architecture that can that can produce that, and they came up with some key elements of that architecture.”

Felt said that the SWAC force design moves “away from the traditional demarcations” of different services using different SATCOM networks and signals “into a broader view of what data needs to get where” to provide needed information to joint force operators.

“A key element” of the force design is fleshing out what the Space Force now calls ‘the outernet,’ Felt said. “The outernet is the internet taken to space.”

The concept would see concentric circles of linked SATCOMs networks — highly encrypted military constellations, slightly less secure SATCOM provided by allies, and unclassified commercial constellations.

“The basic idea being that if I’m a sensor or a satellite in space, I shouldn’t have to worry about how the data gets to where it needs to go. If I’m a terrestrial sensor, I don’t have to worry about where my packets get routed, they get routed very resiliently to the right place,” Felt explained.

Further, the space data transport force design focuses on how to make that happen via a resilient architecture, rather than via today’s military satellite constellations that are “fat juicy targets,” he said.

“And so that’s a principle that they adopted in the SWAC force design, to make sure that we have a robust network in space that might go through commercial systems, might go through government systems, and have multiple paths to get the data where it needs to go.”

A “big part” of enabling the network design will be “integrating in” commercial SATCOM constellations, Felt stressed. “Commercial is low hanging fruit. It’s already ready in many cases for us to bring into the architecture. And so, my job as the as the director of architecture, is to make sure that our architectures are conducive to bringing in commercial as well as our department capabilities so that we can get those resilience benefits quickly. Not years down the road.”

In turn, the future outernet would serve as the Space Force’s input to the Defense Department’s overarching Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) capability, which is being developed to link “sensors” across all domains — air, land, sea, space and cyberspace — to “shooters” in all those domains.

The outernet, Felt said, “gives us real-time command and control and access to our data, even from [low Earth orbit], which we don’t always have today. … [T]hose are going to be game changers in terms of the capabilities that we’re able to deliver to the joint fight. That’s why that’s so important.”