Countries are increasingly open to international collaboration to save money and still build capability. “There are efforts afoot for countries to come together to meet requirements as a coalition,” notes Skot Butler, vice president of satellite networks and space systems for Intelsat General. Butler leads Intelsat General’s work with the DoD, NATO, various civil agencies, and commercial enterprises in the U.S. and Europe. “I’m aware of a number of initiatives where one country has a requirement but not enough to justify a program on their own and we bring them together with an ally in the region to host their requirements on a commercial satellite,” he says.
Examples of the U.S. government working together with others include the DoD’s successful move to sign partners for both WGS and more recently, Advanced EHF.
Five years ago, Australia agreed to pay for a sixth WGS payload and, in exchange, gained access to the entire WGS constellation. Since then, Canada, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and New Zealand have become participants on the worldwide Ka-band system. The U.S. government’s marketing of WGS to international partners underscores their openness to sharing a capability as a way to bring down costs early and still get a global military capability into orbit.
“It increased the robustness of the WGS constellation and gave Australia something they couldn’t buy on their own — global coverage on a worldwide constellation,” explains Todd Harrison, senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).
Approximately 30 percent of iDirect’s overall business today is government related and international — a number Griffler expects will grow in the future. “The foreign militaries are becoming a bigger percentage of our business,” he says.