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Wow. Good luck with that. Thanks to the British government, the RAF, Royal Navy, and British army now have a new communications platform to talk between branches of the military. Apparently, it’s a secure, high-bandwidth platform used to relay communications for both UK and Allied forces (US, NATO, etc.). Designed to help improve data flow across the command centers of all branches of military operations, it’s supposed to have around 5 times the performance of it’s predecessor. The name? Skynet.
Now, it’s great that our soldiers can talk to each other easier and all, but this kind of thing isn’t exactly the best way to calm paranoid nerves. I’m sure a politician was sitting in Parliament saying, “Huh, that’s a cool thing to name our satellite,” but in reality, observers are giving each other nervous looks. However, shameless fear-mongering aside, the satellite system itself is really a neat platform. The Skynet-series models are successive groupings of information satellites that the British government has been launching since the late 1960s to assist with communications and transmissions for the military.
The Skynet 5 series-model has a bunch of upgrades over it’s predecessors, including four separate antennas that can be ordered to focus on specific areas of the planet it is orbiting over, thus increasing available bandwidth to central nervous systems for military/civillian operations. It also boasts high-tech antennas and equipment which select out specific signals and resist attempts by other parties to jam the Skynet satellite; but the equipment also has high security in the opposite direction: attempts to eavesdrop on secure transmissions between the satellite and the ground will be met with failure.
3 total “Skynet 5″ series satellites are planned to be in orbit by 2008. One, launched yesterday, has already started transmitting telemetry data back to ground stations and receiving and executing commands from ground control. The other two plan to be launched in 2007 and 2008, respectively. Now, here’s hoping John Connor doesn’t show up.
Photo credit: Agence France-Presse
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