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Troubled SBIRS satellite poised for 1st launch

If the first in a new line of infrared-sensing missile warning satellites makes it to orbit in May as planned, the event could mark a turning point in the program’s 15-year history of engineering mistakes, delays and congressional reviews.

The saga of the Space Based Infrared System, or SBIRS, already has forced the Air Force to overhaul its system engineering approach for satellites and hire a contractor to start work on a backup plan. Now, the Air Force must show that it can deliver the first SBIRS geosynchronous satellite to orbit 22,000 miles above Earth, and that the satellite can do its job of spotting the heat of missile launches to help target anti-missile rockets.

The Air Force hopes the launch of GEO-1 will shift attention away from the project’s troubled past, which can be traced to decisions near the start of the program in 1995. The program’s anticipated cost has spiked by 268 percent and the delay in completion of the infrared warning constellation is at seven years and counting. Over the years, engineers have had to disassemble and redesign sections of the satellite and completely rework its flight software. With GEO-1 nearly ready for launch, the service wants to shift the focus to what one official described as a “phenomenal” step forward in missile defense that could be at hand. GEO-1 was delivered to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on March 3 aboard an Air Force C-5 transport plane from Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, Calif.

The country’s existing Defense Support Program satellites, the first of which was launched in 1970, have served as alarm bells from the Cold War through the 1991 Persian Gulf War to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Their infrared readings are meant to wake up other sensors that would target anti-missile rockets. The SBIRS readings, by contrast, would sound the alarm and help target anti-missile rockets.

“After being the brunt of everybody’s favorite acquisition joke, perseverance and persistence has paid off,” said Air Force Col. Roger Teague, who heads infrared work at the Space and Missile Systems Center.

Teague, who will become vice commander of the center if his promotion to brigadier general is confirmed, said there is no immediate “national security imperative” for the May launch. But critics in Congress and the missile defense punditry are not so sure. In 2007, the Air Force launched the last of the DSP satellites in the production pipeline, and then the spacecraft promptly failed in orbit. The last working satellite to join the constellation was launched in 2004.

The military is counting on the SBIRS satellites to gradually replace the DSP satellites and enhance the ability of theater commanders to respond to missile or rocket launches. So far, two SBIRS infrared sensors have been launched as payloads on National Reconnaissance Office satellites flying in highly elliptical orbits. Satellites in elliptical orbits dip lower into the atmosphere than would be possible for circular orbits, giving them a better look at objects on the ground. They then make extended arcs into space to maximize collection time over specific regions, such as the poles.

The SBIRS highly elliptical orbit payloads are helpful, but what U.S. missile defenders really want is to surround Earth with geosynchronous spacecraft whose speed and distance from Earth make them appear to hover over specific regions. From their perches 22,000 miles in space, these satellites would watch for evidence of missile launches by North Korea, Iran or others. The May launch of GEO-1 would mark the first launch in that long-delayed plan.

Adding to the drama: The Air Force has only a 10-day window beginning May 4 to launch GEO-1 on an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. After that, the service is supposed to turn the launch pad over to NASA in preparation for a space probe launch toward Jupiter in August and a flight to Mars in November. The Air Force and its launch contractor, United Launch Alliance, will have little room to solve last-minute technical glitches with the satellite or rocket, or to work around bad weather.

After launch, GEO-1 will go into a position over the U.S. to conduct a series of commands that will turn the satellite on and check its functions, according to the Space and Missile Systems Center. After a successful checkout, its final operational orbit will be determined by U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Functional Component Command for Space.

Job One

Some defense analysts suggest the missile warning job should take precedence over the NASA launches. SBIRS is already seven years late, said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute think tank in Arlington, Va. The U.S. needs to begin deploying the SBIRS constellation not simply because current missile warning satellites are well beyond their advertised life spans, but because the new spacecraft will provide far more capability than its predecessors, he said. In addition to spotting enemy missiles, SBIRS is designed to feed data on the location of those missiles to weapons designed to knock them off course.

“The more eyes you have up there, the better,” said Riki Ellison, chairman of the nonprofit Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. DSP remains reliable, but the SBIRS sensors offer superior performance in missile tracking and discrimination, he added.

There is no emergency, but Teague said he is eager to launch GEO-1 to evaluate its performance. Once Air Force officials tie GEO-1 into their operational network, they can begin making plans to launch GEO-2 and GEO-3.

Prime contractor Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Sunnyvale, is working under Air Force contracts to build four SBIRS geosynchronous satellites. Northrop Grumman, which built the DSP satellites going back to its days as TRW, provides the infrared sensors. Contractors expect the Air Force by the end of the year to announce plans to buy two more SBIRS satellites.

Lockheed Martin engineers recently finished building GEO-2 and equipping it with two infrared sensors built by Northrop’s Electronic Systems unit of Linthicum, Md. GEO-2 is scheduled to undergo about a year of electrical and environmental testing. Once that testing is complete, U.S. Strategic Command will schedule its launch based on national security space priorities, Teague said.

Tough lessons

When the Air Force started the SBIRS program in 1995, service officials advertised plans to deploy a constellation of four geosynchronous satellites, one spare satellite on the ground, two sensors in highly elliptical orbits and a ground network to process and distribute the data. The Air Force decided to use a philosophy called “total system performance responsibility,” in which the government tells contractors the performance it wants and gives them wide latitude to choose technologies. The approach was supposed to save money by reducing the number of government engineers required to look over the shoulders of industry engineers. Instead, design decisions made in the 1990s on SBIRS manifested themselves as test failures in the 2000s. The program’s costs ballooned.

In 1995, the Air Force estimated the entire constellation would be completed in 2004 at a cost of $4.1 billion. Current estimates put the SBIRS price somewhere between $11 billion and $12 billion, and service officials decline to hazard a guess as to when four satellites will be in orbit. The Air Force calculates the cost per satellite at about $1.3 billion.

The way some see it, the SBIRS troubles were inevitable. The Defense Department failed to provide contractors with clear, well-documented requirements, and industry team leaders exhibited lax oversight of vendors and subcontractors, according to reviews of the program. As a result, requirements were shifted, designs changed and costs climbed. Some of the initial design assumptions and architecture assumptions were flawed.

Multiple reviews by the Government Accountability Office and Pentagon review boards called the SBIRS plan excessively optimistic.

“When you start on an incorrect vector, it’s really hard to recover,” Teague said.

In the 1990s, when SBIRS was designed, defense companies were encouraged to use commercial off-the-shelf technology to trim costs. The initial SBIRS design relied heavily on Lockheed Martin’s commercial satellite technology, but the strategy backfired. After firing up one of the satellites in ground tests, Air Force officials discovered its commercially based flight software was incompatible with SBIRS. The spacecraft could not reliably place itself in “safe hold” mode, a setting that gives controllers time to model performance problems and send new commands or updated software. A multibillion-dollar satellite might be lost even though an easy solution could be devised.

In 2008, the Air Force began issuing public mea culpas that at times echoed critics. The choice of commercial flight software “quite frankly was not flowed down through the engineering design and requirements,” then-Lt. Gen. Michael Hamel told reporters at the National Space Symposium in Colorado. “If you don’t do the work right upfront — for the detail and the rigor and the engineering design — and you only discover the problems at the back end of the problem, that’s the absolute worst time.“ Hamel and other Air Force officials declared that the Air Force would use a new philosophy, called Back to Basics, in which government engineers would participate in system engineering the way they had before the start of total system performance responsibility.

A reporter suggested to Hamel, “No offense, but you sound a lot like the GAO.” Hamel’s answer: “That’s exactly right.” Despite the Air Force epiphany, the damage was done. Lockheed Martin scrapped the original software package and rewrote it, a move that cost an estimated $750 million.

While the service will continue to use commercial products for certain applications, there will be a lot more emphasis on conducting rigorous systems engineering work at the outset of a program to ensure that any commercial products used are up to the task, Hamel said.

Pentagon officials also recognize that some of the SBIRS problems stem from the way the military buys satellites. Instead of placing a single order for five or six satellites, the Air Force typically buys spacecraft in lots of one or two. The National Security Space Strategy unveiled in February calls for a change in that approach. Buying satellites in blocks instead of one or two at a time could save money, strengthen the space industrial base and make better use of the industry’s work force, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn said during a Feb. 4 briefing for reporters.

Lockheed Martin built GEO-1 and GEO-2 years before the Air Force gave it money to buy parts for GEO-3 and GEO-4. By the time Lockheed Martin had funding to build the second pair of satellites, some of the parts used GEO-1 and GEO-2 were obsolete and some vendors had gone out of business, said Jeff Smith, vice president and SBIRS program manager for Lockheed Martin.

It will probably take the Air Force 18 months after GEO-1 is launched to prove the new sensors can be trusted to offer U.S. commanders reliable missile warning data, but the new satellite could provide infrared imagery to the intelligence community by the end of the year, Teague said.

As soon as Air Force officials are confident GEO-1 is working and properly oriented, they will begin feeding data to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in Bethesda, Md., and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. “Those folks can’t wait to see the data,” Teague said.

The intelligence community already is privy to data from the SBIRS elliptical sensors. Each SBIRS geostationary satellite will carry a similar scanning sensor in addition to a second staring sensor designed to hone in on specific regions to pick up more faint or fleeting infrared signatures.

“That staring component is going to allow theater commanders to stare at localized regions of the Earth, areas that might be in close proximity to them,” Teague said. “It will help them understand from an infrared perspective what threats might be in their area.”

In 2009, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency officials certified the first SBIRS sensor for use in technical intelligence. While details of that sensor’s performance are classified, Teague said members of Congress were pleased enough to add $15 million to the Air Force’s $2.3 billion 2009 SBIRS budget to exploit capabilities of those elliptical sensors. In 2010, congressional appropriators added another $13.8 million to the SBIRS budget for the elliptical sensors. “We’ve got a whole lot of capability here we never even contemplated or realized,” Teague said. “We are trying to understand what the military utility of those capabilities are and how can we process and disseminate that [data].”

This article is from the April issue of C4ISR Journal.