From Strategy Page:The U.S. Air Force recently announced that the long anticipated new generation of military communications satellites, planned for first launch in 2013, would be delayed another six years. The problem is a common one. The TSAT (Transformational Communications Satellite System) depends on a lot of new (some not yet invented) technologies, and lots of unwritten software. That produces uncertainty, and more delays.
For the last decade, the U.S. Department of Defense has been trying to design, build and put into orbit a new generation more powerful military communications satellites. This has not gone well. Four years ago the Department of Defense came up with TSAT. This was basically a satellite based military Internet. It was optimized for speed. Right now, it takes about two minutes to get a UAV image to another user via satellite. TSAT would do that in a second or two. This kind of speed is needed if all the air, land and sea weapons are linked together, to act as observers and shooters for each other. The only drawbacks with TSAT is that such a system will cost nearly $20 billion, and take over a decade, to build. While this has many of the brass ready to sign on, others are casting about for cheaper and faster solutions, using existing technology to work up to the TSAT gold standard year by year.
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My Comment: Delayed by six years. Waiting for technologies that have yet to be developed. The software has not even been written yet. What a boonbogle .... and a $20 billion dollar price tag is probably low balling it.