“Requirements in the market are changing dramatically thanks to Elon Musk and SpaceX,” Aaron Brosnan, president of Thales subsidiary Tampa Microwave, said in an interview
Call it a Musk effect: the success of constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink and Starshield has the Pentagon hungry for satellite communications (SATCOM) solutions with more capabilities, prompting firms like the French company Thales to shift their approach and even acquire new businesses, according to company executives.
“Requirements in the market are changing dramatically thanks to Elon Musk and SpaceX,” Aaron Brosnan, president of Thales subsidiary Tampa Microwave, said in an interview earlier this month on the sidelines of the SOF Week conference in Tampa. “Really now what the [US Defence Department] wants is terminals that can do any orbit, any network, any band, on the move.”
A response by Thales to that desire is to pitch the Ka-band Milli Sling Blade antenna manufactured by the Israeli company Get SAT. Thales acquired Get SAT in part for the rights to products like the Milli Sling Blade, which uses electronically steered phased array antenna technology.
“Thales confirms the acquisition of GET Sat,” a Thales official told Breaking Defence. “Get SAT will complement Thales’s existing global SATCOM business and enhance our secure satellite communications offering and leading position in communications integration.”
As opposed to when geostationary (GEO) satellites ruled the day, users now demand “lower latency, higher throughput, global coverage. And unfortunately, GEO can’t do that,” Brosnan said. “So that’s why Elon Musk picked LEO [low Earth orbit] and others have picked MEO [medium Earth orbit].”
A corresponding change is the desire for antennas that can communicate with more of those constellations, whether commercial or military. When users relied mostly on GEO satellites, Brosnan explained, GEO-focused parabolic antennas could easily connect to those satellites since they remained in a mostly fixed position. But fast-moving MEO and LEO birds require electronically steered arrays that can track those satellites, creating a need for a different kind of communications tech.
So, Thales is moving to field antennas that can meet the needs of satellites across multiple orbits. The company’s modernised outlook “moves us away from what was traditionally GEO-only parabolics towards electronically steered arrays, which is flat panel technology,” Brosnan said, pointing to the Milli Sling Blade on display at Thales Defence & Security’s SOF Week booth. SPACE