Breakthroughs in satellites’ capabilities have grabbed headlines across the decades — sending a TV signal from Point A to Point B, providing reliable navigation for warships, moving a data bundle — but only by expanding the reach of these technological leaps have the orbiting spacecraft achieved life-changing advances here on Earth.
Telstar, the first telecommunications satellite, was designed to connect a point in New York with a point in Maine when it launched in 1962. Subsequent Telstar missions connected more points, and today, their successors have supplanted landlines to link all corners of the globe. Similar expansions in GPS, dating to a Pentagon network deployed in 1978, and high-speed internet, which traces to 1996 and the home dishes of DirecPC, have made these services ubiquitous, too.
Scaling up, in fact, to spread coverage and ensure redundancy often starts at the drawing board when it comes to developing satellites for both military and civilian use. These include spacecraft used in communication, navigation, Earth observation, weather and reconnaissance, at low Earth, high Earth, geosynchronous, polar and other orbits. SpaceX, an heir to that DirecPC internet system, now operates more than 7,000 satellites in low Earth orbit as it works toward the 12,000 planned for its first constellation phase. Competitors plan constellations just as large.
The first military surveillance satellite, launched in 1959, dropped film canisters by parachute back to Earth. More than six decades later, the U.S. Space Force operates more than 100 satellites and plans to rely upon a fast-growing commercial space sector to expand in the face of rapid advances by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
At a pace of nearly a launch a month throughout 2025, new U.S. military satellites will be placed in orbit to move data quickly and provide missile tracking and warning through the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) network of the Space Force’s Satellite Development Agency (SDA). The low Earth orbit (LEO) network, with some 30 satellites launched so far, will “mesh” 300 to 400 satellites by the time it is projected for buildout in 2027.
PWSA accounts for one of the five missile tracking and warning systems the U.S. Space Force is developing and expanding for deployment across orbits to provide complete and timely coverage. Another is Next-Gen OPIR — two satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO), rotating with the planet to provide coverage over midlatitudes, and two satellites in highly elliptical orbit, ranging from low to high altitudes for coverage over the upper latitudes. OPIR, for Overhead Persistent Infrared program, will use heat signatures to detect ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles and other emerging threats, contractor Lockheed Martin said at its website. The program replaces the Space Based Infrared System — a group of eight satellites launched from 2008 to 2018. The first of the Next Gen OPIR satellites in GEO is scheduled for launch in 2026 and the first polar satellite in 2028.
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is updating its capabilities, too, launching a seventh batch of satellites in January 2025 for a proliferated constellation of its own, part of a plan to orbit hundreds of spacecraft through 2028. Nearly 100 were launched in 2024 alone, to improve the agency’s highly secretive intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. NRO and the Space Force are working together on the Silent Barker mission, made up of satellites that will track objects and potentially aggressive moves by adversaries within GEO. The Space Force expects the satellites to be fully operational by 2026, replacing the Space-Based Space Surveillance System, which reaches the end of its lifespan in 2028. Monitoring objects and behaviors in space is a growing priority for the Space Force and U.S. Space Command. Space-based sensors allow for tracking of smaller objects than the ground-based systems where this responsibility largely falls today, Defense News reported in December 2024.
In the coming years, the Space Force also plans to replace the communications network known as AEHF, for Advanced Extremely High Frequency system, SpaceNews reported. Currently, Milstar and AEHF satellites provide jam-resistant military communications for both strategic and tactical users, from the president on down, and across all services and mission areas. These include land, air and naval warfare, special operations, strategic nuclear operations, strategic defense, theater missile defense, and space operations and intelligence. The last of six AEHF satellites was launched in March 2020. The GEO system was designed to add flexibility and capacity to the older Milstar constellation, consisting of five satellites orbited from 1994 to 2003. AEHF also provides secure communications for partners Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The AEHF satellites provide higher data rates and capacity to both strategic and tactical users with capabilities not available on the Milstar satellites. Over the past year, the Space Force conducted operations to reposition the AEHF satellites in space to provide optimized worldwide coverage in preparation for modernization efforts aimed to take advantage of the additional AEHF capabilities as the Milstar satellites reach their end of life.
Supplementing and eventually replacing AEHF will be Evolved Strategic SATCOM (ESS), a program consisting of at least six satellites that will extend coverage to the North Pole region. Space Force is expected to orbit ESS by 2030 at a cost of about $8 billion, SpaceNews reported. Boeing and Northrop Grumman have been developing prototypes under government contract, but the production contract will be subject to open bidding. “Assured strategic satellite communications is at the foundation of deterrence,” Northrop Grumman said at its ESS webpage. “This is the one mission where, no matter what, the data must get through.”
Tactical users also rely on the Wideband Global SATCOM system (WGS), a network of 10 GEO satellites providing high-capacity communication services for U.S. military operations. The first WGS satellite launched in 2007, and WGS-11 and WGS-12 are scheduled for launch over the next two years. The two new satellites will enable Japan and Poland to join as the system’s newest international partners. Both AEHF and WGS also provide satellite communications support to the NATO military alliance.
The GPS system that was first developed for military navigation has expanded in the past three decades to provide services that enable many aspects of modern military and civilian life, from withdrawing cash at an ATM machine to targeting enemy tanks. Efforts are underway to upgrade and secure the system, with the delivery of a new ground component projected by the end of 2025 and 24 new satellites through the 2030s, SpaceNews reported in September 2024. Thirty-one satellites make up the current system. The U.S. program inspired the orbiting of similar global navigation satellite systems by the CCP, Russia and the European Union.
For more than two decades, the Department of Defense (DOD) has worked to modernize GPS with a more secure, jam-resistant, military-specific signal known as M-code, according to a September 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Since 2022, the DOD has implemented eight of nine GAO recommendations for improving the modernization process.
The Space Force also has begun replacing the satellites that provide critical weather information to strategic and tactical combat units worldwide, known as the Defense Meteorological Support Program (DMSP). The first DMSP satellite was launched in 1962 and the most recent in 2014. Six operational DMSP satellites now survey the entire Earth four times a day, equipped with sensors that provide land, sea and space environment data. The first of the program’s replacements, the Weather System Follow-on-Microwave satellite, launched in April 2024 and will measure ocean surface winds, tropical cyclone intensity, sea ice, soil moisture, and snow depth, as well as energetic charged particles in LEO.
The Space Force, through its Space Systems Command (SSC), is turning more to the commercial sector to fulfill its mission of delivering capabilities to counter the ever-evolving threat to U.S. and allied interests in space, the SSC said in a December 2024 report at its website. This includes U.S. and international firms, from huge companies that are household names to nontraditional small businesses working for the first time in the aerospace and defense sector. “The connections that we make through all our commercial partnerships are critical to achieving our goals with great power competition,” said Space Force Capt. Cliff Cooke, program manager of SSC’s Space Enterprise Consortium. “Our competitive advantage relies on these relationships, which are foundational for our technological growth.”
During the early years of the Space Age, the only customers for space services worldwide were government agencies such as NASA and the military. Now, the array of customers is growing by leaps and bounds, including those working in meteorology, climatology, farming, fishing, industrial mining, wildlife conservation, forestry services, natural disaster response, financial markets and communications. The satellite industry is growing and innovating to answer the demand, and Pentagon agencies are taking advantage.