Pentagon taps Viasat and Intelsat for $438M anti-jam satellite deal

The contract, announced May 22, covers the procurement of space vehicles in support of the PTS-G program. Work is expected to be completed by March 19, 2029, with $150 million in fiscal year 2026 research, development, test and evaluation funds obligated at the time of award. The award followed a competitive process in which five offers were received. Two companies cleared the final cut; three did not.

Viasat, the Carlsbad, California-based satellite communications firm trading on Nasdaq, and Intelsat General Communications, the U.S. government arm of Luxembourg-headquartered SES, will each build two satellites for what the Space Force calls “Swarm 1” — the first production batch under the program. The satellites are scheduled for delivery by March 2029. The announcement did not disclose the precise split of funds between the two companies.

For decades, the military has relied on large, multi-ton satellites for global communications from geostationary orbit, a prime location roughly 35,000 kilometers above Earth that provides unique advantages for connectivity and security. Those satellites cost enormous sums to build and launch, take years to produce, and present adversaries with a finite set of high-value targets. The Space Force launched PTS-G last March as a new tier in its Protected Anti-Jam Tactical SATCOM family of systems, in hopes of starting operations in 2028. The core idea is to replace one enormous, expensive, and conspicuous satellite with a cluster of smaller ones that can absorb a hit — literal or electronic — without collapsing an entire communications network.

PTS-G is an effort to distribute communications capability across multiple smaller satellites operating together in what the Space Force refers to as a “swarm” architecture. The concept is designed to improve resilience by ensuring that the loss or disruption of a single satellite does not cripple coverage across an entire region. It is a fundamentally different philosophy from the legacy approach — survivability through proliferation rather than hardening.

The satellites will operate from geostationary orbit and support two frequency bands: X-band and military Ka-band. Both are standard for military communications. The PTS-G program aims to provide military users with resilient, anti-jam capabilities utilizing small satellites in geostationary orbit, leveraging commercial products for enhanced speed and efficiency. That last point is deliberate policy, not an accident of procurement. The PTS-G approach is a hybrid model — government-owned satellites built using commercially derived technologies and manufacturing processes, differing from a purely commercial service model in which the military leases capacity from privately owned constellations. Space Systems Command’s senior materiel leader for tactical satellite communications, Erin Carper, has said the program’s goal is to maximize cost efficiencies by using commercial bus designs to the fullest extent possible.

Viasat brings established credentials to this contract. Under its initial design phase award, the company’s Space and Mission Systems team matured a design for a dual-band X/Ka-band satellite and anchor station architecture. A Viasat executive previously told SpaceNews that the company’s PTS-G satellite design draws on technology derived from its Viasat-3 commercial broadband constellation — meaning the military is getting hardware rooted in a proven commercial lineage, not a government-only development program built from scratch.

Intelsat General Communications arrives at this contract with significant corporate history behind it. Luxembourg-based SES completed its acquisition of Intelsat in July 2025, creating a combined satellite operator with a fleet of approximately 120 satellites across geostationary and medium Earth orbits. Intelsat General Communications operates as SES’s dedicated U.S. government division, focused exclusively on serving American military and federal customers. The company competed for PTS-G under the Intelsat General name, which it retains for contracting purposes even under SES ownership.

The path to this production award runs through a design competition the Space Force launched last summer. Space Systems Command awarded initial contracts to five companies in July 2025 — Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Viasat, Astranis, and Intelsat General — with those initial awards totaling $37.5 million. Each company was tasked with maturing a design and providing demonstrations based on its established commercial product lines. The results of that phase directly informed which companies received the follow-on production award. Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Astranis did not advance to production in this round. The overall PTS-G contract vehicle carries a ceiling value of up to $4 billion, leaving room for substantial additional orders.

The broader program context underscores how seriously the Space Force is taking the jamming threat. PTS-G is one element of a larger family of programs, each addressing a different tier of the problem. Space Force officials have characterized PTS-G as serving as an interim service, bridging current commercial state of the art and the future high-end capabilities being developed under a separate program called PTS-Resilient, which targets even more demanding threat environments. The encrypted signal standard underpinning all of these programs is called the Protected Tactical Waveform, a communications protocol engineered specifically to resist jamming and electronic warfare interference. Without a waveform that works even under attack, none of the hardware matters.

The Space Force requested approximately $240 million in fiscal year 2026 for PTS-G research, development, testing and evaluation. The $437.7 million production award announced this week draws on a portion of those funds, with $150 million obligated immediately. Pentagon budget documents also show plans for a second procurement round in 2028 involving four additional PTS-G satellites, with deployment planned for 2031, meaning the constellation is designed to grow as threat environments evolve.