The Vulcan rocket checks various important boxes for the Space Force. Firstly, it fully trusts rocket engines made by the US. The Atlas V Rocket It replaces the use of Russian -built main engines, and given the cooled relationships between the two powers, American officials have long desirable to stop using Russian engines to convert the satellites of the Pentagon into a job. Secondly, ULA says that the Vulcan Rocket will eventually offer a heavy launch at lower costs than the now retired Delta IV Heavy Rocket of the company.
Thirdly, Vulcan de Space Force offers an alternative to SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, which are the only missiles in their class available for the army since the last national security mission was launched on an Atlas V Rocket a year ago.
Colonel Jim Horne, mission director for the launch of the USSF-106, said that this flight marks a “pretty historic point in the history of our program. We officially end our dependence on Russian main engines with this launch, and we will continue to maintain our insured access to space with at least two independent rocket services that we can use to get our options on the track. “
What is on board?
The Space Force has only recognized one of the satellites on board the USSF-106 mission, but there are more payloads in the Kuip of the Vulcan Rocket.
The mission of $ 250 million that officials want to talk about is called navigation technology satellite-3 or NTS-3. This experimental spacecraft will test new satellite navigation technologies that can eventually find their way on the next generation of GPS satellites. An important focus for engineers who have designed and exploit the NTS-3 satellite is to look at ways to overcome GPS-Jamming and Spoofing that can deteriorate satellite navigation signals used by military arms, commercial airlines and civil administrators.
“We are going to do it, we expect, more than 100 different experiments,” says Joanna Hinks, senior research engineer in the space travel of the Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate, which manages the NTS-3 mission. “Some of the most important areas we look at – we have an electronically controlled phased Array antenna so that we can supply higher capacity to come through interference to the location needed.”
Arlen Biergreen, then program manager for the NTS-3 satellite mission at the Air Force Research Laboratory, presents a third scale model of the NTS-3 spacecraft to an audience in 2022.
Credit: US Air Force/Andrea Rael
GPS Jammen is primarily a problem in and near war zones. Researchers who immerse the crash of Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 Last December, GPS -Jamming, probably by Russian forces trying to combat a Ukrainian drone strike, was involved in the navigation of the plane when approaching his destination in the Russian Republic of Chechenia. Azerbaijani government officials blamed a Russian surface-to-air rocket for damaging the plane, which eventually led to a crash in nearby Kazakhstan in which 38 people were killed.
“We have a number of different advanced signals that we have designed,” said Hinks. “One is the Chimera anti-spoofing signal … to protect civil users against Spoofing that today affects so many aircraft worldwide, as well as ships.”
The NTS-3 spacecraft, developed by L3HARRIS and Northrop Grumman, only takes up a fraction of the capacity of the Vulcan Rocket. The satellite weighs less than 3000 pounds (about 1,250 kilograms), about a quarter of what this version of the Vulcan Rocket can deliver to the Geosynchronous course.
