“Building on proven experience, our team is developing an industry leading solution to support critical and complex missions for Australia’s next generation space programs.”
Northrop Grumman Australia announced the space technology capabilities its team will offer the Commonwealth for JP9102, the Australian Defence Force’s Satellite Communication System project.
Global and Australian leaders in space communications — Northrop Grumman, Inmarsat, L3Harris, AECOM, Blacktree Technologies, EM Solutions and Vocus — will draw their collective experience to invest in and grow an Australian sovereign satellite communications capability, increase resiliency of military satellite communications for the future battlespace and create jobs across Australia.
“The Northrop Grumman Australia team brings together technologies and capabilities that will significantly increase Australia’s sovereign space capability,” said Christine Zeitz, general manager, Northrop Grumman Asia Pacific. “Building on proven experience, our team is developing an industry leading solution to support critical and complex missions for Australia’s next generation space programs.”
Northrop Grumman will integrate its high capacity and high mobility satellites through a flexible, scalable and agile growth architecture, and provide sustainment of the mission system including the state-of-the-art Parallax Labs facility opened in Australia during 2021. Combined with sovereign, on-demand access to the Inmarsat Global Express satellites, the Australian Defence Force will gain the capability to assign sovereign capacity and coverage immediately as the mission requires.
AECOM’s support will include designing Satellite Ground Stations and Satellite Operations Centers, while L3 Harris will manufacture Wombat terminals locally. This will boost sovereign manufacturing and technical know-how for a sovereign satellite industry in Australia to create up to 100 additional jobs for supporting small to medium enterprises.
Blacktree Technologies will leverage 20 years of Australian expertise to provide the High Mobility UHF ground segment to the solution offering. Joining them will be Australian design and manufacturing company EM Solutions to offer certification services to the team.
Vocus, an Australian sovereign terrestrial communications infrastructure provider who owns and operates a 30,000km fiber network, will provide robust communications links, ensuring additional high reliability, secure and high performance connectivity beyond the Defence Terrestrial Communications Network (DTCN).