Lockheed Martin announced Tuesday that it has delivered the first advanced extremely high frequency communications satellite to Cape Canaveral AFS, Fla., from where it is expected to be launched into orbit on July 30 aboard an Atlas V rocket. “Lockheed Martin is extremely proud of this significant program milestone,” said Mike Davis, the company’s AEHF vice president. AEHF satellites will succeed the five-satellite Milstar constellation, providing secure and protected communications to military users. A single AEHF satellite will provide greater total capacity than the entire Milstar constellation. Lockheed Martin is already under contract to supply three AEHF satellites. AEHF-2 and AEHF-3 are in various stages of testing and are scheduled for launch in 2011. The company is also under contract to procure long-lead-time components for AEHF-4, and the Air Force intends to keep buying more of them.
The defense intelligence community has tried three times in the past decade to build a “common intelligence picture”—a single data stream providing the information that commanders need to make decisions about the battlefield. The first two attempts failed. But officials say things are different today.