New Vulcan Rocket to Launch With Experimental Satellite That Could Boost Future GPS

The Space Force hopes to soon celebrate a pair of major milestones with a single mission: its first launch with the new Vulcan Centaur rocket, and the first launch of an experimental navigation satellite in nearly 50 years. 

USSF-106 is set to launch the evening of Aug. 12 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla. In an Aug. 11 media roundtable, Space Force and industry officials touted the mission as a momentous two-step for the service. 

“Pretty historic point in our program history,” mission director Col. Jim Horne III said. “We officially end our reliance on Russian-made main engines with this launch, and we continue to maintain our assured access to space with at least two independent rocket service companies that we can leverage to get our capabilities on orbit.” 

One of the payloads on the launch is the Navigation Technology Satellite 3, or NTS-3, which has been waiting for several years now for Vulcan to be certified for National Security Space Launch missions. 

“I can’t tell you how excited I am to see it finally launched and finally start the on-orbit experimental mission,” said Joanna Hicks, a senior research aerospace engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory. 

Officials declined to comment on any of the other payloads on the mission, which suggests they are classified. 

Watch the launch of USSF-106 here starting at 7:39 p.m. Eastern Time on Aug. 12:

Vulcan Centaur 

After years of development, delays and certification processes, the Space Force and contractor United Launch Alliance are finally ready to send the new Vulcan Centaur rocket to orbit with government payloads onboard. The launch vehicle has flown twice before as part of the certification process, overcoming an anomaly with one of its solid rocket boosters on the second launch. 

ULA officials are projecting confidence that they have resolved the second launch’s issues and that the Aug. 12 flight is set up for success. For this mission, the rocket will have four boosters attached to help it reach geosynchronous orbit some 22,000 miles up, compared to two boosters on each of its previous two flights. 

“The team over the last few months has been going through in excruciating detail, validating our analyses and predictions to support this flight, leveraging the data from the previous two missions to ensure mission success,” said Gary Wentz, vice president for government and commercial missions at ULA. 

Still, Horne noted: “This is a tough business. It takes a million things to go right, one thing to go wrong.” 

The stakes are high for ULA because USSF-106 is the first of 25 ordered launches on Vulcan Centaur, and a backlog has built up during the development and certification process. 

“We’re ready and postured to launch as quickly as we can as we work through that backlog,” Wentz said. 

The stakes are high for the Space Force given that officials have stressed the need for more launch providers to ensure access to space. There’s only one other company with a certified rocket, SpaceX, and any hiccups with Vulcan could leave the service completely reliant on the Elon Musk-run contractor. 

NTS-3 

The NTS-3 spacecraft is “DOD’s first experimental navigation satellite in 48 years,” Hicks said. “The last one was NTS-2, launched in 1977, so at the lab, we think that we are overdue for an experiment in this area.” 

It’s an expensive experiment—the Air Force Research Lab and the Pentagon have spent roughly $250 million developing and building the spacecraft and its associated ground systems, Hicks said.  

It’s been in the works for a long time too—Hicks said she has spent the better part of 10 years on the program, and back in 2019, the Air Force designated it as one of four “vanguard” programs that received an influx of cash and attention. The satellite was set at one point to launch in 2022 before delays to Vulcan scrambled those plans. 

Hicks said her team has spent the additional time on the ground preparing and trying to squeeze more value out of the satellite. 

“We’ve been able to do continued work, integration and testing, adding some new capabilities, new experimental signals,” she said. “The team has been able to collect a lot more data on the ground than we originally anticipated. So we’ve really been able to take advantage of that and make sure that we are ready for the best possible experimental mission on orbit.” 

From geosynchronous orbit, NTS-3 will conduct more than 100 different experiments related to position, navigation, and timing, Hicks said. Some of the biggest will include tests with: 

A new electronically steerable phased array antenna, to beam high-powered PNT signals to specific areas of the globe where electronic warfare and jamming are particularly fierce;
New advanced signals to guard against PNT spoofing, when adversaries try to imitate the signal;
Reprogrammable equipment that can be updated on orbit to respond to new threats;
And receivers that can help navigate the satellite with less contact from ground operators.

NTS-3 is the first in a coming wave of experiments and prototypes meant to bolster the Space Force’s Global Positioning System constellation. GPS has become an essential utility for military and civilian users around the globe, but officials have increasingly sounded the alarm that the Pentagon—and the entire global economy—is overly reliant on the system and that backups and alternatives are necessary. 

“PNT supports our nation’s warfighters in every single domain and has become more critical to their success,” said Andrew Builta, an executive at L3Harris, which built NTS-3. “That makes it a prime target for ever more audacious, frequent, and sophisticated jamming and spoofing attacks. We need technology as a nation to be responsive and flexible enough to ensure available, stable, and accurate PNT in GPS-disrupted, -denied or -degraded environments.” 

Indeed, while NTS-3 has been in the works for years, many of its technologies and objectives dovetail with what the Space Force says it needs for future operations: agile software that can be reprogrammed on the fly, anti-jamming signals, more autonomous operations, and resiliency across orbits. 

“One of the things that NTS-3 is testing is the multi-orbit constellation concept,” Hicks said. “So can we receive signals from NTS-3 at GEO as well as GPS at [medium Earth orbit], and take advantage of all of them? Maybe in the future, we’ll be able to put some of these technologies in [low Earth orbit], for example. We don’t currently have that as a planned mission, but that’s something that that could conceivably happen in the future.” 

Space Systems Command, the Space Force’s acquisition branch, is working on a Resilient GPS program of smaller, cheaper satellites to complement GPS. The Space Development Agency wants to embed PNT signals in its array of commercial satellites in low-Earth orbit. 

AFRL is discussing the future of PNT with Space Force organizations like the Space Development Agency and the Space Warfighting Analysis Center, Hicks said.  

For now, however, there are no plans for an NTS-4. The NTS-3 bird will launch, go through the usual checkout and early operations process, and run its experiments over the course of a year. Some of those tests will be more lab-focused, while others will include users in the field. 

After that, “if the spacecraft still has additional life, we will work with Space Force partners and find someone who’s interested in taking it over as a test asset,” Hicks said. “We don’t at this time anticipate operationalizing it, but we are working with some organizations to talk about how they might use the leftover capabilities for testing.”