14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at the Boeing Corporation said today, August 23, that the company has been awarded $182 million in funding by the US Air Force, in order to begin work on the seventh WGS satellite.
The Wideband Global SATCOM constellation has already proven its worth on countless occasions, and so Boeing was the natural choice for the WGS Block II follow-on contract.
According to the technical sheets that accompany the instruments, there are the highest-capacity communications satellites that the US Department of Defense (DOD) employs today.
The goal of the new system is to provide a pathway for carrying a host of signals, ranging from full-motion video streams captured by air drones to TV, e-mails, radio, and other services.
The service is destined to US troops fighting overseas, which have notoriously-difficult access to the Internet and afferent services.
The third WGS satellite, which was recently commissioned by the USAF, has already added more land to the covered area.
The first two members of the constellation were located over the Middle East, and over the Pacific Ocean, respectively, while the third is now located over the Atlantic Ocean.
Officials at Boeing say that the contract between the corporation and the USAF could be extended to include as much as six WGS satellites.
“In a time of budgetary pressures, the award of this contract signifies the high-priority need of US warfighters around the world for responsive and robust wideband communications,” explains the WGS Group Commander, USAF Col Don Robbins.
“It also recognizes the outstanding service being provided to our warfighters every day by the three on-orbit WGS Block I satellites already fielded by the Air Force and Boeing team,” he adds.
The new satellites commissioned under the Block II contract are to be launched by 2012-2013.
“It is imperative that we address the warfighter’s continuing need for high-capacity communications in a timely, cost-effective manner,” says the vice president and general manager of Boeing Space & Intelligence Systems, Craig Cooning.
“WGS is a battle-tested solution that can evolve, using cost-effective methods, to meet emerging warfighter requirements such as communications-on-the-move for small mobile users, as well as airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data-relay capabilities,” he concludes.