Visionary Elon Musk’s most prominent company has cultivated several successes that have put it ahead of other private companies that have entered the aerospace industry. NASA has already signed contracts with this company, obtaining favorable results. SpaceX adds a new achievement by signing a new deal, but now with the Department of Defense of the United States of America, in a project that involves the use of its own applied satellites for weapons systems and technology.
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A trusted company
SpaceX has shown the US government its commitment and efficiency as we could see in the article SpaceX and ULA win contract to launch security satellites in the US, once again, the government of that country has placed its trust in the company founded by Elon Musk to work together with L3 Harris, closing a contract with both companies for more than 149 million dollars to develop the first stage of the project that the Space Development Agency SDA (Space Development Agency) has named: National Defense Space Architecture NDSA (National Defense Space Architecture).
The sum of money must fully finance the development and construction of 8 satellites that will inaugurate the NDSA program, the program will have multiple layers of satellites, these will function as an anti-missile shield, capable of even detecting and neutralizing supersonic missiles, which today, are capable of breaching any missile shield, given the speed they can reach (more than 5,000 km/hr). The delivery time agreed with SpaceX and L3 Harris for the satellites is the year 2022, to immediately put them into orbit.
Role of the first 8 satellites of the NDSA
The NDSA will be made up of different layers of antimissile satellites, these first 8 satellites entrusted to SpaceX and L3 Harris will be part of the first layer of the architecture, the tracking or tracking layer, the task of the satellites in this layer will be in words From Derek Tournear, SDA Director: “Provide detection, tracking, and firing control for hypersonic vehicles, ballistic missiles … Any of those kinds of threats.” Once the missile is detected, the satellites of the tracking layer will transmit the information to the “transport layer”, the latter will collect the tracking information and calculate a firing solution.
Characteristics of the satellites
The satellites in charge of this first layer will be based on the technology of the Starlink satellites of SpaceX, very similar to those presented in the article SpaceX launches more than 50 additional satellites into space for its Starlink project, which represents great efficiency at “low cost”. To fulfill the missile detection, tracking and tracking function, each satellite will be equipped with an airborne persistent infrared sensor with a wide field of view, thus having the ability to detect missiles from low Earth orbit. For intercommunication with the entire defense architecture, they will have optical cross-links to send the data to other relay satellites.
What do you think of Space X? Do you know the diversity of projects in which Elon Musk’s most important company is involved?
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Image by Kelly Michals via Flickr under Creative Commons license.
