DOD Announces New Contract Awards for Its 'Internet in Space' Effort - Nextgov

Microsoft, SpiderOak and Amazon are among the companies that person been awarded contracts to assistance the national authorities make a hybrid communications web of civil, commercialized and subject satellites, according to an announcement from the Defense Department’s Defense Innovation Unit—or DIU—on Wednesday. 

DIU is moving with the U.S. Space Force, the Space Warfighting Analysis Center and the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate to make an interoperable “hybrid abstraction architecture”—or HSA—that volition let for the unafraid travel of information crossed divers communications networks. 

In a blog post, Jason Zander—executive vice president of Microsoft’s strategical missions and technologies team—said the HSA “will beryllium built successful portion upon Microsoft Azure and volition leverage cardinal capabilities from our suite of Azure Space solutions.”

“The HSA is fundamentally DOD’s effort to physique an net successful abstraction and volition enactment the department’s extremity of establishing accusation vantage for nationalist security,” Zander wrote. “By collaborating with commercialized partners, HSA vastly expands its scope of outer and abstraction systems crossed divers orbits, crushed stations and connection paths.”

In a press release announcing the awarding of 4 second-phase contracts to SpiderOak Mission Systems, Amazon Web Services, Amazon's Project Kuiper and Microsoft Azure Space, DIU said that the HSA volition “link aggregate crushed communications systems with divers outer networks, utilizing each disposable links including, but not constricted to, the electromagnetic vigor frequence spectrum, optical inter-satellite links, subject tactical information links and bequest and aboriginal crushed conception wired networks.” 

The bureau said this volition let for the integration of commercialized and authorities capabilities needed to “preserve operational and informational information portion enabling collaboration betwixt services, arsenic good arsenic with our allies and partners.”

“This task volition prosecute the goals of an agile and resilient communications architecture that volition beryllium capable to determination information done commercial, subject and allied assets, portion integrating multi-domain unreality based retention and analytics,” Dr. Rogan Shimmin, DIU programme manager for HSA, said successful a statement. “It's clip for the net to determination off-planet.” 

DIU announced successful July that it awarded archetypal contracts for the HSA task to Aalyria Technologies, Anduril, Atlas Space Operations and Enveil to assistance “​​demonstrate a web architecture that leverages some commercialized and authorities abstraction assets crossed divers orbits to supply secure, assured and low-latency information communications anyplace connected and disconnected Earth.”

In a press release, SpiderOak said the declaration volition alteration it “to present the company's OrbitSecure zero-trust protocol on-orbit,” thereby helping to fulfill the HSA project’s extremity of enabling end-to-end cybersecurity crossed the hybrid network. 

"We are thrilled to beryllium selected by DIU and [the Space Warfighting Analysis Center] and partnered with York Space Systems to unafraid this mission, and we are precise overmuch looking guardant to moving with the different companies selected to enactment the full hybrid abstraction architecture into the future,” John Moberly, SpiderOak’s elder vice president for space, said successful a statement. “Jointly, we are enabling a foundational furniture of commercialized manufacture and allied capabilities to guarantee our nationalist information is protected from the crushed and from space."