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home > February 2008 issue > article
Swarms of small satellites could provide an edge
By Brian Robinson
Special to Defense Systems
If the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has anything
to do with it, the U.S. military’s space future will be built around
small, fast and agile satellite systems rather than the big, slow and
ponderous systems it now relies on.
DARPA is looking for industry ideas for its Tiny, Independent,
Coordinating Spacecraft (TICS) initiative, which envisions swarms of
small, 1- to 4-kilogram satellites that could combine in space into larger
systems to perform various sensing and servicing missions, and be
launched from regular aircraft.
These minimal mass satellites would, as an aggregate, be able to
mimic the capabilities of current, much larger satellites through communications
links and other shared resources and would be reconfigurable
to perform new missions as the need arises.
All of this would also, DARPA said in a recent notice, remove most
of the integration and test activities that now have to be carried out and
that make designing and launching satellites such a drawn-out affair.
Each of the TICS “would be lofted into orbit via advanced boosters
which will look a lot less like conventional rockets and a lot more
like tactical munitions,” such as AIM-7s or HARMs, said Lt. Col. Fred
Kennedy, a program manager at DARPA’s Virtual Space Office.
“They’d be fired off the rails of stock fighter aircraft, much like their
conventional cousins.”
TICS could be launched in any direction, without relying on
expensive ranges, and whenever the need arises, in hours rather than
months or years, he told a DARPATech conference earlier this year.
Although TICS has been in development for several years, the successful
destruction in January 2007 by China of one of its own low-
Earth-orbit satellites “was a wake-up call,” Kennedy said.
There are other, similar programs under way at DARPA, such as
the System F6 initiative that seeks to develop virtual satellites from
free-flying spacecraft that would act as the components of a satellite
and link with one another wirelessly.
The TICS program differs from this because F6 seeks to “fractionate
spacecraft by function, while TICS would be all the same,”
Kennedy said. “Think of TICS as an army, launched individually and
then quickly closing ranks to protect our assets.”
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