NASA Space Communications and Navigation: One Network Evolution

Abstract

The NASA Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Program is responsible for providing the essential connectivity to robotic and human space explorers. The missions relying on SCaN range from suborbital and balloon missions to those traveling beyond the edge of the solar system. The demands for communications and navigation services enabled by SCaN (and its affiliated partners) are projected to increase and outpace the current network capacity. At the same time, the Agency finds itself surrounded by a burgeoning commercial space marketplace, technological advancement, and other government agencies that share common interests in space resiliency, robustness, and performance. As a result, SCaN has begun pivoting toward commercial services and collaborating with partners to close capacity and capability gaps. Given these growing demands of the Agency there is increasing need for multi-network solutions. Future mission concepts will rely on both government and commercial capabilities, both Near Space Network capacity and Deep Space Network capacity. Integrating these diverse support services together from a technical, programmatic and implementation standpoint will be key to meet the growing needs of the future. To accomplish this, a more substantive shift is required, and SCaN is reshaping itself to be a customer-centric, service-oriented, high-performance leader in the space communications community. This paper outlines the SCaN One Team, One Mission, One Network approach, and provides a vision for future mission community experience that includes streamlined mission commitment interfaces and clear processes, dynamic network scheduling and load balancing, and higher efficiency data transport and delivery through the integration of cloud infrastructure and services.