Space Force managers take a secret for new heights before the launch of the key rocket
The Vulcan rocket checks several important boxes for spatial force. First, it is fully based on rocket engines made in the United States. The Atlas V rocket that it replaces uses main engines built in Russian, and given refrigerated relations between the two powers, US officials want to use Russian engines for a long time to fuel pentagon satellites in orbit. Second, ULA says that the Vulcan rocket will eventually provide a washing launch capacity at a lower cost than the heavy rocket Delta IV now retired from the company.
Thirdly, Vulcan provides spatial force an alternative to Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy of SpaceX, which were the only rockets of their class available for the army since the launch of the last national security mission on a Atlas V rocket a year ago.
Colonel Jim Horne, mission director for the launch of the USSF-106, said that this flight marks a “fairly historic point in the history of our program. We officially finish our dependence on the main Russian manufacturing engines with this launch, and we continue to maintain our assured access to space with at least two independent rocket service companies that we can operate to obtain our orbit capacities. “”
What’s on board?
Spatial force only recognized one of the satellites aboard the USSF-106 mission, but there are more useful charges coconted inside the Vulcan rocket.
The $ 250 million mission of which managers are ready to speak is called Navigation Technology Satellite-3 or NTS-3. This experimental spacecraft will test new satellite navigation technologies which could possibly find their way on new generation GPS satellites. A key objective for engineers who have designed and exploited the NTS-3 satellite is to seek means to overcome the scrambling and the usurpation of GPS, which can degrade the satellite navigation signals used by military forces, commercial lines and civil drivers.
“We are going to do, we are planning, more than 100 different experiences,” said Joanna Hinks, aerospace engineer for senior research at the Air Force research laboratory, which manages the NTS-3 mission. “Some of the main areas we are looking for – we have an electronic phase network antenna so that we can provide higher power to reach interference at the location of which it is necessary.”
Arlen Bieersgreen, then director of the program for the Satellite NTS-3 mission at the Air Force research laboratory, presents a model at the scale of a third of the NTS-3 spacecraft to an audience in 2022.
Credit: US Air Force / Andrea Rael
GPS jamming is particularly a problem in and near war areas. Investigators were accidentally proven Flight 8243 of flight 8243 last December determined last December the GPS jamming, probably by the Russian military forces which try to counter a strike of Ukrainian drone, interfered with the navigation of the plane as it approaches its destination in the Russian Republic of Chechné. Officials of the Azerbaijani government blamed a Russian air surface missile for having harmed the plane, which finally led to an accident in neighboring Kazakhstan who killed 38 people.
“We have a number of different advanced signals that we have designed,” said Hinks. “One of them is Chimera’s anti-USteric signal … to protect civilian users from the usurpation that affects so many aircraft in the world today, as well as ships.”
The NTS-3 spacecraft, developed by L3harris and Northrop Grumman, takes only fraction of the capacity of the Vulcan rocket. The satellite weighs less than 3,000 pounds (approximately 1,250 kilograms), about a quarter of what this version of the Vulcan rocket can deliver to geosynchronous orbit.
