Global Lightning Program Contract Awarded to L3Harris
The U.S. Air Force awarded L3Harris Technologies an $81 million contract to deliver a new multi-orbit, multi-waveform satellite communications (SATCOM) capability for its Global Lightning program.
“Our goal is to extend seamless data connection to a wide variety of manned and unmanned airborne platforms, ground and surface platforms, and other operating locations utilizing low-Earth orbit and other satellites.”
Brendan O’Connell, L3Harris
The Air Force’s Strategic Development and Planning office is overseeing the contract as part of its ongoing Global Lightning program to develop deployable systems that connect military satellites, protected waveform infrastructure and new commercial space internet satellite constellations into a single network. L3Harris will leverage its Rapidly Adaptable Standards-compliant Open Radio (RASOR) to deliver resilient, protected, high-bandwidth, high-availability communications and data-sharing capabilities.
“Our goal is to extend seamless data connection to a wide variety of manned and unmanned airborne platforms, ground and surface platforms, and other operating locations utilizing low-Earth orbit and other satellites,” said Brendan O’Connell, President, Broadband Communications, L3Harris. “These capabilities leverage our L3Harris open-systems approach to drive reusability, affordability and the rapid adoption of path-agnostic communications. RASOR has led and will continue to lead the resilient and advanced capability needs of our customer’s missions.”
L3Harris Continues Support of Global Lightning Program
This award continues L3Harris’ support of the ongoing Global Lightning program, which puts communications terminals aboard military aircraft to evaluate their capability to share data with ground terminals. RASOR is designed to meet mission requirements across the breadth of U.S. military applications. The RASOR chassis, known as RARE (Rapidly Adaptable Ruggedized Enclosure), brings a highly innovative additive manufacturing approach leveraging various advanced-manufacturing technologies. RARE can scale from three to 12 slots with customized modules, which include L3Harris-proprietary technology as well as third-party solutions. The individual modules provide a wide breadth of cross-domain capabilities with multi-level security, from resilient line-of-sight and beyond-line-of-sight communications to Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, Command and Control, Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing and Electronic Warfare.
In 2020, the Air Force awarded contracts that successfully established multi-orbit SATCOM terminals for multiple aerial platforms. The company has showcased RASOR in a series of military and industry demonstrations since its 2021 launch, including flight demonstrations with the Air Force and General Atomics. Earlier this year, L3Harris deployed two RASOR multifunctional processors to support Beyond-Line-Of-Sight command-and-control and data-movement capabilities. One processor housed the transceiver card and the other controlled a BLOS active electronically scanned array.
(Source: L3Harris news release. Images provided)