Naomi Cooper
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has named the teams that will work on a program that aims to develop an intersatellite optical communications terminal for enabling satellite constellations to communicate in space.
Eleven teams from academia and the commercial industry received other transaction agreements to perform phase 1 research and development work for the three technical areas under the Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node program, DARPA said Wednesday.
Space-BACN’s primary focus is to develop an infrastructure capable of facilitating space-to-space communication between commercial communications constellations and military systems.
The selected teams are:
- II-VI Aerospace and Defense
- Amazon’s Kuiper Government Solutions subsidiary
- Arizona State University
- CACI
- Intel Federal
- Mbryonics
- Mynaric
- SpaceLink
- SpaceX
- Telesat
- Viasat
Space- BACN will run for 14 months and end with a preliminary design review for the first two technical areas and a connectivity demonstration for the third technical area.
DARPA will select the teams to develop engineering design units of the reconfigurable optical terminal components during phase 2 of the Space- BACN program.
