Orbital Gains Phase Two Contract from DARPA

Orbital Sciences Corporation, a developer and manufacturer of small- and medium-class rockets and space systems for commercial, military and civil government customers, has reportedly signed a Phase 2 contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency based in Arlington, Va., to develop the final design for “System F6” -  the Future Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft.

 

The contract is valued at $74.6 million over a one-year period of performance.

 

“System F6 has the potential to be a game-changing innovation in the way space systems are designed, built and operated in much the same way as the DARPA-developed Internet has changed many aspects of our daily lives,” Gregg Burgess, vice president for national security systems in the company’s advanced programs group at Orbital, said in a statement. “System F6 is not just an incremental improvement in technology, but rather a fundamental transformation of the entire space community. Fractionated and networked architectures could be the answer to recurring problems that debilitate the space sector, including significant cost increases, late deliveries, launch mishaps and on-orbit failures.”

 

This contract is said to have come as a result of a down-select by DARPA from among several companies that participated in the program’s Phase 1 study contracts in 2008 and 2009.

 

The company also said the objective of the System F6 program is to develop and demonstrate the basic building blocks of a radically new space architecture in which traditional large, multi-functional monolithic spacecraft are replaced by clusters of wirelessly interconnected spacecraft modules. Each of these modules are said to perform a subset of the tasks performed by a large classical spacecraft and works together in a cluster to provide the same overall effective mission capability.

 

Key benefits of such a system include; reduced overall risk, budgetary and planning flexibility, faster initial deployment, and ultimately greater survivability, including selective replacement of damaged or obsolete elements of a complex spacecraft.

 

Under the second phase contract of the System F6 program, Orbital will be responsible for the detailed design and ground testing of the new technologies, architectures and programmatic concepts required to successfully fractionate a space system. These include wireless data communications, cluster flight operations, distributed spacecraft computing systems, rapidly re-locatable ground systems, and value-centric design methodologies.

 

DARPA is said to have selected Orbital out of four Phase 1 contractors to continue work on Phase 2 of the program, leading to a planned flight demonstration in 2013.