Space News:

As SpaceX’s Starlink continues to gain military customers, the Pentagon worries that the company’s use of proprietary technology will make it difficult to integrate into a hybrid architecture that DoD hopes to build.

This is becoming an issue for the Defense Innovation Unit, which is leading a project to develop a hybrid space architecture, integrating satellite communications systems across low, medium and geostationary orbits.

Speaking Oct. 13 at the MilSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, Rogan Shimmin, program manager of DIU’s space portfolio, said it will be difficult to build a hybrid architecture if the largest commercial satellite internet constellation is not interoperable with other providers.

Without mentioning Starlink by name, Shimmin said “there is a particular commercial satellite provider in low Earth orbit, for example, that is several years ahead of the rest of the field. They do tend to try to establish interfaces, proprietary interfaces, that don’t necessarily want to play well with others.”

DIU’s hybrid space architecture would use commercial communication systems as transport pipes to move data collected by imaging satellites and deliver it quickly to government users. The concept assumes that commercial satellites will talk to each other via interoperable links.

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