DARPA, which is affiliated with the US Department of Defense and develops new technologies for the US army, has recently been on the agenda with the Space-BACN project. The aim of this project is to develop a fast and secure network, namely the space internet in a simplified form, so that the satellites can communicate with each other!
Based on steerable lasers, this network needs a next-generation super-optical modem to run smoothly. DARPA entrusted the first stage in the design of this modem to Intel. The components in this network, where satellites will exchange data at almost the speed of light, must be low-cost and, more importantly, reprogrammable.
Different satellites will communicate with each other with Space-BACN
“We say space, how will it be low-cost?” You might say, but DARPA is referring here to complex, expensive, and inaccessible hardware currently used in space.
Greg Kuperman, director of the SPACE-BACN program, said in a statement on the subject, using the expressions “Systems in space have a single protocol, a single language to speak”, emphasizing that at the moment, satellites in various constellations only communicate with each other.
In other words, Amazon satellites Amazon, SpaceX satellites can only communicate with SpaceX satellites. With SPACE-BACN, if the parties agree, NASA and SDA satellites will be able to communicate with the systems of companies such as SpaceX and Amazon.
As DARPA conducts studies for the US military, when the project is implemented, it will first be used to communicate between SDA, NASA and US government satellites. Technically speaking, there is no obstacle for a satellite belonging to the USA to communicate with satellites belonging to other countries and companies.
Although it is difficult to reduce the cost while increasing the capabilities, the goal of the project is the terminals that provide communication. It’s about to be around $100,000. We will see together whether the target of 100 thousand dollars can be achieved, since the cost of the systems used at the moment is in the level of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
– What do you think about the Space-BACN project?
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