Contractor Lockheed Martin says its second Milstar communications satellite now has surpassed its 10-year design life. The company’s first one has been in orbit for more than 11 years. USAF launched the first one built by the Lockheed team on Feb. 7, 1994, and the second on Nov. 6, 1995.
The Space Force is playing midwife to a new ecosystem of commercial satellite constellations providing alternatives to the service’s own Global Positioning Service from much closer to the Earth, making their signals more accurate and harder to jam.
