Space Norway’s $450 million Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission will soon be providing secure, 24/7 internet access to military and government customers across the Arctic.
Two satellites will soon be providing broadband internet to both military and government customers in the Arctic. If all goes well, next month, the Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission (ASBM) procured by Norwegian state-owned company Space Norway for $450 million and built by longstanding U.S. military contractor Northrop Grumman will be launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The twin satellite mission, which is Norway’s largest satellite program to date, aims to enhance secure, high-speed internet connectivity across the Arctic with a focus on government customers and “warfighters in the North Polar Region, in benign and contested environments,” according to an unclassified U.S. Department of Defense document. ASBM will achieve these aims by hosting both civilian and military payloads onboard its two satellites.
A highly-elliptical orbit to reach the whole Arctic
ASBM’s civilian payloads are two commercial Global Xpress (GX) Ka-band communication payloads owned by Viasat and engineered by Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems. While you might be familiar with the California-based Viasat from using their in-flight wifi services, they provide high-speed satellite broadband and secure networking to government and military customers, too.
GX10A and 10B, as ASBM’s two commercial payloads are called, will extend Viasat’s Global Xpress internet services across the Arctic with a focus on government customers. The company will be able to reach more customers in the north because ASBM will use a highly-elliptical orbit (HEO) above Earth.
ASBM’s HEO will resemble the Molniya orbit discovered by Soviet scientists in the 1960s, which the country used for its communications satellites that linked the countries’ northernmost reaches to Moscow at light-speed. (I’ll write more on the Molniya satellites program in my next blog post.)
Unlike countries at lower latitudes, the Soviet Union could not use geosynchronous orbits in which satellites sit in a fixed location over the equator, as they don’t provide ample coverage above 70°N (or below 70°S).
With HEO orbits, satellites linger above the targeted hemisphere while traveling rapidly around the opposite hemisphere, as shown in the Soviet stamp at left. A diagram Viasat shared on LinkedIn also illustrates the concept. Two satellites are necessary to constantly cover a region from a HEO orbit, which is why ASBM is a pair.
Rather than having a precise Molniya orbit, ASBM will be centered over the North Pole to provide coverage across the whole Arctic. ASBM will be the world’s first HEO mission involving a commercial broadband service payload.
On its website, Viasat states, “To ensure our broadband network consistently delivers when it matters most, enhancing coverage in the Arctic region all the way down to 65 degrees North will be essential to support scientific research, underpin strategic government action in a new geopolitical landscape, enable new trade routes, and keep people connected.”
Will ABSM compete with Starlink?
Commercial broadband has been late to arrive to the Arctic. One of the region’s largest cities, Norilsk, Russia (population 175,000) only got hooked up to high-speed internet in 2019.
That same year, U.S. company SpaceX launched the first satellites in its Starlink constellation, which provides high-speed internet from Low Earth Orbit as opposed to HEO. Over 200 of Starlink’s 6,000+ satellites, provide internet to the Arctic. The service has significantly improved connectivity for many people in the western Arctic, particularly in Alaska and Canada.
Since the commercial megaconstellation is so close to Earth than ASBM, it is able to provide high-speed, low-latency connections to customers. While Starlink satellites are on average less than 500 km above Earth, ASBM will float 43,000 km above the planet at its apogee, or highest point in orbit. This difference is one reason why Viasat would likely struggle to compete with Starlink in the Arctic for residential customers. There are dozens of Reddit posts from rural locations across the U.S. bemoaning Viasat and praising Starlink’s high speeds. Viasat, therefore, seems to be keeping its focus on government customers in the north.
ASBM’s military payloads
Norway and the U.S., both NATO members, perceive a strong need for constant, secure connectivity. As such, ASBM will be carrying instruments for the Norwegian Armed Forces and the U.S. Air Force alongside its commercial payload.
According to eoPortal, onboard each satellite will be an X-band instrument for the Norwegian Ministry of Defence and an Enhanced Polar Systems-Recapitalization (EPS-R) instrument for the U.S. Space Force. In addition, ASBM-1 will operate the Norwegian Radiation Monitor, a sensor built by the European Space Agency and Norwegian company Integrated Electronics AS to monitor space radiation and space weather while passing through a wide range of orbital environments above the Earth.
ASBM’s X-band instruments for the Norwegian Armed Forces
The X-band lies within the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. In most developed nations, significant portions of the X-band are reserved for military and government applications such as defense and vessel tracking, air traffic control, and weather monitoring.
Lying between 8 and 12 gigahertz, the X-band sits in the sweet spot of having the excellent signal throughput characteristic of high-frequency bands while remaining low enough in the spectrum to be resistant to atmospheric attenuation, or the interference of rain or snow with electromagnetic signals (a problem also poetically known as “rain fade”). While prized by militaries worldwide, such capabilities are especially strategic in the harsh Arctic.
The Norwegian Armed Forces will likely use its X-band instrument onboard ASBM-1 and ASBM-2 for tracking surface targets across the increasingly navigable Arctic Ocean and communicating with each other and allied forces in the Arctic.
ASBM’s Enhanced Polar Systems-Recapitalization instruments for the U.S. military
The U.S. is placing a great deal of trust in Norway by placing its Enhanced Polar Systems-Recapitalization (EPS-R) instrument onboard ASBM. EPS-R, which is an Extremely High Frequency (EHF) MILSATCOM system, will be “the first operational U.S. military payload hosted on a commercial space vehicle operated by an international partner,” according to SpaceNews.
William A. Leach, associate director, Global Partnerships at The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, helped negotiate the U.S.-Norway Arctic MILSATCOM agreement that set the terms for the U.S. to put its EPS-R payload on Norwegian-operated satellites.
In an article in 2021 published by the U.S. Space Systems Command, Leach observed, “The U.S. is cooperating with Norway due to emerging threats and the need for strategic and protected tactical SATCOM for the joint warfighter. There is a mutual desire to improve their SATCOM capabilities through the application of emerging technology.”
In the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine the following year, that desire has no doubt strengthened as attested by the opening of an American presence post in Tromsø, the biggest city in northern Norway, in October 2023.
EPS-R will provide round-the-clock secure communication with a low probability of interception and detection across the Arctic. It will provide continuation between the original EPS program that began operating in 2019 and its follow-on, which is not expected until the 2030s. By the next decade, the U.S. Department of Defense hopes to have fielded a new satellite constellation called Protected Tactical SATCOM and Evolved Strategic SATCOM.
To overcome the gap between EPS and the next generation of secure satellite connections in the Arctic, General John W. Raymond, the Space Force’s Chief of Space Operations, recounted in 2022, “Norway was already building satellites, and so we asked if we could put our payloads on their satellites.” The request saved the U.S. $900 million and will get the EPS-R instruments into space three years earlier than if the country had gone it alone. The success of the joint mission underscores why it benefits the U.S. for multiple allied nations to develop their space sectors.
EPS: Closing the satellite coverage gap following post-Cold War military restructuring
The original EPS was designed in response to changes to the U.S. MILSATCOM program in 1992. Restructuring meant it was no longer obligated it to provide polar coverage. This gap, however, despite the end of the Cold War and a more peaceful Arctic region, was undesirable to the Department of Defense, which began investigating cost-effective solutions.
A little over a decade later in 2013, Northrop Grumman delivered the two instruments that comprise EPS. They are believed to have been launched on two classified satellites in 2017 and 2018 and provide “secure, jam-resistant, strategic and tactical communications to support peacetime, contingency, homeland defense, humanitarian assistance and wartime operations.” EPS’ users in the north include “submarines, naval carriers, and other Department of Defense personnel.”
You might be wondering how submarines connect to satellites. The answer may entail a solution developed by U.S. military contractor Raytheon, which involves “raising a mast-mounted antenna above the ocean’s surface, while the submarine remains submerged at periscope depth where the boat is difficult to detect.”
Speaking about the need for EPS and secure satellite communications, in 2019, First Lieutenant Scott Podlogar, 4th Space Operations Squadron EPS contracting officer representative, remarked, “If we want to place assets near the Arctic Circle, we need to make sure our information is protected and there’s no stopping or intercepting our communications, this helps promote the safety of our mission.”
While EPS may be jam-resistant, that doesn’t mean it’s bug-free. During testing in 2019, the U.S. government reported that “both ship and submarine communicators had difficulty configuring their Navy equipment properly to get it to work over EPS. However, EPS worked well once the operators properly configured their equipment.”
Help desk support for EPS communicators was also inconsistent or unavailable, and operators lacked troubleshooting guides and flowcharts. The same problems you or I might encounter at work frustrate the world’s most powerful military, too. Hopefully, EPS-R will come with better troubleshooting guides and IT support.
Breaking ground in Alaska to support EPS-R
Communicating with satellites in space requires terminals on Earth. To link up with ASBM, new SATCOM gateway terminals have been built at Clear Space Force Station in Alaska, which sits on land that has been used by the federal government since 1949.
Meanwhile across Norway, three new antenna have been built to receive ABSM’s signals. All of this new construction is a reminder that developments in orbital space impact land on Earth.
When will ASBM launch?
ASBM was scheduled to launch in July 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in southern California. However, the rocket – the workhorse of the space industry – exploded unexpectedly an hour after a launch on July 11, leading the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to ground it. While the grounding was finally lifted today (July 26), the two-week backlog has delayed various launches including ASBM, which has now been rescheduled for late August.
Given that ASBM has been in development for years, its engineers will be keeping their fingers crossed that the launch goes off without a hitch. Should all go well for Space Norway and its partners, the Norwegian company’s next project will involve specifying, procuring, and testing a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite for ocean surveillance – perhaps something akin to China’s Ice Pathfinder satellite launched in 2019.
U.S. and Norwegian space cooperation is also set to expand. Earlier this year, the U.S. Space Development Agency signed two new agreements with Norway to build two new antennas in the north of the country. The first will downlink data from Low Earth orbit satellites in the agency’s Tranche 1 Tracking Layer, the first of which will launch in September. The second antenna will conduct near-term testing.
Finally, California — the state home to Silicon Valley, military contractors like Northrop Grumman, and Vandenberg Space Force Base — will likely continue to reap the benefits of the development of orbital space and Arctic internet connectivity. The next time a submarine logs onto the internet from the edge of the polar ice cap, they may have a satellite engineered and launched from the Golden State to thank.
