Brenda Marie Rivers
L3Harris Technologies has passed a preliminary design assessment for spacecraft being developed as part of a U.S. Air Foce project that aims to increase resiliency of military positioning, navigation and timing systems.
The company said Wednesday it collaborated with the Space and Missile Systems Center, Air Force Research Laboratory and U.S. Space Force to integrate antennas, deploy automation and implement commercial command-and-control technologies for the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 program.
In 2018, the Space Enterprise Consortium awarded the now-former Harris a prime position on a potential $84M contract to design, build and test NTS-3 along with its ground mission components.
“We have moved from contract award to finishing an early design review in under one year, which is an amazing accomplishment for a satellite development program that normally takes twice that amount of time,†said Ed Zoiss, president of L3Harris’ space and airborne systems business.
The NTS-3 experimental platform is intended to support PNT technology development activities for USAF’s follow-on GPS III satellites.
L3Harris noted it will move to the next phase of the program the service branch redesignated as “vanguard” in September of last year.
