Beyond the Board: Orbital High Ground—Why Space Superiority Is Slipping Away
Defense Speak Interpreted: Is There Still a CHIPS Act?
The Government Circuit: Trump’s Trade War Disrupts the Electronics Ecosystem
DARPA Selects SpaceLink to Participate in its Program to Connect the Proliferated Space Domain
August 22, 2022 | PRNewswireEstimated reading time: 1 minute
SpaceLink, a company that provides secure data from any orbit, any time, announced it was selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office (STO) for a contract award. SpaceLink will participate in the Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node (Space-BACN) program designed to connect the proliferated space domain.
SpaceLink is building a constellation of relay satellites in MEO that use optical intersatellite links to speed communications between spacecraft on orbit and users on the ground. Along with other contributors, SpaceLink will assist DARPA in studying and developing protocols for how commercial communications constellations will interact with Department of Defense (DoD) systems in a Space-to-Space interconnected future.
"DARPA's Space-BACN program is well-aligned with our mission to provide continuous high capacity, real-time links to deliver data from space to the warfighter," said David Nemeth, Senior Vice President of Systems Engineering at SpaceLink. "DARPA's vision of interoperability will unlock the value of the proliferating commercial remote sensing constellations for U.S. government agencies. We are gratified to share our technical insights with regard to command and control and API development."
SpaceLink will contribute its technical insights in the development of the application program interface (API) and algorithms included in Space-BACN Technical Area 3 (TA3). SpaceLink will also have the opportunity to support the simulation and testing that informs the deployment and utilization of Space-BACN reconfigurable optical communications terminals.
SpaceLink is partnering with Parsons Corporation (NYSE: PSN) on a technical approach to support the Space-BACN program by combining Parsons' existing enterprise scheduling and tasking software with the SpaceLink optical relay network. Together they will enable space-to-space optical communications terminals that can be dynamically modified on-orbit to adapt and talk across various optical standards used by different satellite systems.
The Space-BACN contract award marks an important milestone in the SpaceLink roadmap. The company also recently announced it has entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Technical Center (SMDTC) in Redstone Arsenal, Alabama.
In March 2022 SpaceLink was the recipient of the Chairman's Award for Outstanding Innovation from the MSUA.
Share on:
Suggested Items
I-Connect007 Editor’s Choice: Five Must-Reads for the Week
06/06/2025 | Nolan Johnson, I-Connect007Maybe you’ve noticed that I’ve been taking to social media lately to about my five must-reads of the week. It’s just another way we’re sharing our curated content with you. I pay special attention to what’s happening in our industry, and I can help you know what’s most important to read about each week. Follow me (and I-Connect007) on LinkedIn to see these and other updates.
INEMI Interim Report: Interconnection Modeling and Simulation Results for Low-Temp Materials in First-Level Interconnect
05/30/2025 | iNEMIOne of the greatest challenges of integrating different types of silicon, memory, and other extended processing units (XPUs) in a single package is in attaching these various types of chips in a reliable way.
Siemens Leverages AI to Close Industry’s IC Verification Productivity Gap in New Questa One Smart Verification Solution
05/13/2025 | SiemensSiemens Digital Industries Software announced the Questa™ One smart verification software portfolio, combining connectivity, a data driven approach and scalability with AI to push the boundaries of the Integrated Circuit (IC) verification process and make engineering teams more productive.
Cadence Unveils Millennium M2000 Supercomputer with NVIDIA Blackwell Systems
05/08/2025 | Cadence Design SystemsAt its annual flagship user event, CadenceLIVE Silicon Valley 2025, Cadence announced a major expansion of its Cadence® Millennium™ Enterprise Platform with the introduction of the new Millennium M2000 Supercomputer featuring NVIDIA Blackwell systems, which delivers AI-accelerated simulation at unprecedented speed and scale across engineering and drug design workloads.
DARPA Selects Cerebras to Deliver Next Generation, Real-Time Compute Platform for Advanced Military and Commercial Applications
04/08/2025 | RanovusCerebras Systems, the pioneer in accelerating generative AI, has been awarded a new contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for the development of a state-of-the-art high-performance computing system. The Cerebras system will combine the power of Cerebras’ wafer scale technology and Ranovus’ wafer scale co-packaged optics to deliver several orders of magnitude better compute performance at a fraction of the power draw.