AVIATION WEEK AEROSPACE DAILY & DEFENSE REPORT

March 26, 2021

Vol. 275        Issue 58

NASA's Commercial Partnering To Include Space Communications

Mark Carreau, mark.carreau@gmail.com

HOUSTON--NASA's nearly two-decade-long push to establish game-changing commercial partnerships in low Earth orbit operations to expand human exploration and scientific research and grow the economy is broadening its scope to include a new role for private sector communications and navigation assets and services.

In short, NASA is looking to the private sector for more than launch services and cargo deliveries as it makes its way to the Moon and beyond.

As with the agency's pursuit of commercial cargo and crew transportation services to the International Space Station (ISS), which began in 2005, establishing a business environment with multiple vendors in which NASA is one of many users of ground-based receivers and space relay services is likely to evolve, requiring perhaps a decade to mature.

"Our large mission is to create an interoperable and resilient space and ground communication and navigation infrastructure. That's our job, and some of our goals are obviously to enable higher speeds. There's always a push from the agency for more bandwidth, and then doing all of that in a robust, secure and cost-effective way,"  Gregory Heckler, engineering manager for NASA's Space Communications and Navigation Program (SCaN), told a March 17 Future in Space Operations (FISO) virtual forum. "One of the main tiers we are standing up is actually in the near-Earth and the lunar domain to leverage those capabilities more than we have historically."

SCaN, funded at about $500 million annually, oversees NASA's Space Network, Near Earth Network and Deep Space Network (DSN). They are a global collection of ground- and space-based assets and services supporting around-the-clock communications with the ISS, Earth observation satellites and planetary probes. The probes are as distant as Voyagers 1 and 2, launched in 1977 and now respectively more than 14.1 billion and nearly 12 billion mi. from Earth. More than 100 missions are supported overall.

SCaN's future plan is to expand its services through commercial partnerships to support private sector successors to the ISS, while creating a network of global assets at the Moon. Those assets will support human exploration activities at the lunar south pole, the destination of NASA's Artemis missions, and human and robotic activities on the Moon's far and near sides, according to NASA's Andy Petro and Heckler. Petro is leading the development of a lunar communications and navigation network for the agency's Human Exploration and Operations Directorate.

The effort faces some major challenges. They include acceptance of standard interfaces, a supportive radio frequency regulatory framework, and compliance with federal security requirements, Petro and Heckler said.

NASA has assigned Glenn Research Center initial responsibility for demonstrating and planning for the acquisition of future commercial resources for the Space Network. Its assets now include the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRS) that supports ISS communications. While NASA no longer plans to build and deploy TDRS satellites, the current TDRS assets are expected to remain functional into the early 2030s.

SCaN's early transition to orbital commercial services will be focused on new users.

Meanwhile, Goddard Space Flight Center has been assigned responsibility for a more rapid transition to commercially operated ground stations for its direct-to-Earth communications with existing and new deep-space missions. The goal is by 2023.

"As part of the larger low Earth orbit space economy you may have heard of that we are trying to engender, we took a hard look at ourselves. And we understood that commonality of spacecraft without communications with the ground and the ability to navigate, we often call that space junk," Heckler told the forum. "So, there is an opportunity cost that is burdened every day, where if we were not aware of and participating in and leveraging the emerging commercial capabilities not only for putting up mass or executing things in space with spacecraft, but also emerging commercial services in this domain, we would not be doing right by the agency. And we would not be doing right by our users, if we didn't push into this area also fairly aggressively."

At the Moon, SCaN looks to implement commercial Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) support for NASA's Artemis human exploration activities at the lunar south pole and lunar far side robotic missions by 2024, Petro said.

As part of the lunar support, the SCaN initiative looks to limit DSN ground antennas to 18 m in diameter and smaller in order to reserve the existing 34-m antennas for missions already underway or currently in development.

"What's really new and different that we will be looking at and where we are placing our attention right now is orbital relays out around the Moon providing capabilities to line lunar users back to Earth," Petro said.

And while NASA has plans to launch a lunar-orbiting Gateway that could provide some relay capability and temporary crew quarters for astronauts shuttling to and from the Moon's surface, a greater communications need is anticipated.

As currently envisioned, the Artemis initiative includes a lunar south pole base camp. Depending on where the settlement is established, ensuring a continuous line-of-sight, direct-to-Earth communications capability could be limited. Lunar surface exploration activities also may lead to regions where constant communications with Earth would not be possible without lunar orbital relay assets beyond those supportable by Gateway, Petro said.

To support anticipated missions across the lunar landscape, including the Moon's far side, SCaN also is looking at establishing lunar surface communications assets, supporting global coverage in 2024-2028. As NASA establishes a sustained human lunar presence toward the end of the 2020s, the lunar communications infrastructure is expected to continue to evolve by incorporating new technologies, including optical communications.

"Overall, we see the communications and navigation infrastructure lowering the barriers for new missions and capabilities," Petro said. "That will support expanding robotic and human activities at the Moon, and in that sense it's a viral cycle in which having the capacity will enable more missions to be proposed and undertaken at a lower cost than otherwise would be possible if each individual mission has to provide its own communication infrastructure."