WASHINGTON — Aalyria, a startup spun off from Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced Feb. 12 it successfully demonstrated its software platform to manage a mesh network of communications satellites.
The Dec. 7 demonstration at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., was funded by the Defense Innovation Unit as part of a larger effort to create a multi-layered satellite architecture of different vendors and orbits.
Aalyria, based in Livermore, California, is working under an $8.7 million contract from DIU to implement its Spacetime software in support of a hybrid space architecture.
The Defense Innovation Unit, or DIU, is a Pentagon agency that works with the private sector and identifies commercial technologies that can fill military needs. It started the hybrid network project in 2022 to help fill a military demand for global communications regardless of terrestrial infrastructure limitations or disruptions.
“This demonstration validated Aalyria’s capability to enable a hybrid network in space, connecting satellites across different orbits and providers,” said Chris Taylor, Aalyria’s founder and chief executive officer.
The military needs a dynamic network of multiple constellations that is not susceptible to single points of failure and offers redundancy against threats, Taylor told SpaceNews. The combination of satellites in low, medium and much higher geostationary orbits, he noted, provides wider coverage and lower latency, crucial for time-sensitive intelligence and defense operations.
The demonstration at NRL, Taylor said, was attended by more than 150 officials from U.S. government and defense agencies, and from the European Space Agency. The mesh network included about 630 satellites from three commercial satellite operators: OneWeb, Viasat and Intelsat. They used terminals from OneWeb, Kymeta, Viasat and Comtech. Fixed and mobile ground terminals were placed in four sites in two continents….
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