WASHINGTON — United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket is scheduled to launch its first national security mission, USSF-106, on Aug. 12 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The classified mission will mark the vehicle’s debut for the U.S. Space Force’s National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program and will include a high-profile experimental payload — Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3).
The launch window is between 7:59 and 8:59 p.m. Eastern.
NTS-3, built by L3Harris Technologies for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), is a $250 million, 1,250-kilogram geostationary mission designed to demonstrate advanced positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) technologies. While billed as experimental, the spacecraft represents a decade of AFRL work.
The lab has been working on this mission for about a decade, said Joanna Hicks, senior research aerospace engineer at AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate, during an Aug. 11 briefing.
Originally scheduled for launch years earlier, NTS-3 has been waiting for Vulcan to finish development, complete its certification flights and secure Space Force approval to fly national security missions. USSF-106 is one of 25 missions awarded to ULA under the NSSL Phase 2 contract, for which ULA and SpaceX were selected in 2020.
Over the last several years, NSSL flights have primarily been performed by SpaceX. Col. Jim Horne, mission director at Space Systems Command, said the Space Force is eager for Vulcan to begin launching national security missions. He stressed the Space Force always wants to have two launch providers to assure access to space.
For this mission, Vulcan will fly with four solid rocket boosters — a first for the vehicle — to provide the performance needed to deliver NTS-3 directly to geostationary orbit.
New technologies in NTS-3
Although GPS satellites operate in medium Earth orbit, NTS-3 will test PNT capabilities from much higher altitude at GEO. The satellite will broadcast reprogrammable signals in the L1 and L2 frequency bands, supporting legacy GPS users while also trialing new, more flexible waveforms. Onboard, a reprogrammable digital signal generator will allow the Space Force to update signals after launch to counter new threats.
One of those signals will be Chimera — short for Chips Message Robust Authentication — intended to protect civilian users from GPS spoofing by making falsified signals easier to detect. NTS-3’s six electronically steerable array panels can focus signal power on specific regions, potentially improving coverage in areas where GPS is weak or contested, such as mountainous terrain or jammed environments.
Beyond its signal tests, NTS-3 will also support research into experimental antennas, automated operations, secure communications, and the use of commercial ground control systems.
These efforts tie directly into the Space Force’s Resilient-GPS (R-GPS) procurement effort, which seeks lower-cost ways to augment the existing GPS constellation. Andrew Builta, L3Harris vice president for strategy and business development in Space and Airborne Systems, said the mission’s innovations will inform the R-GPS program.
In 2019, the Air Force named NTS-3 a “vanguard” program, reflecting its potential to influence future space system architectures. The one-year demonstration is expected to inform GPS modernization planning and assess whether GEO-based augmentation could play a role in future PNT architectures.
If Vulcan’s launch succeeds, it will not only begin clearing ULA’s backlog of NSSL missions but also give the Space Force an opportunity to test next-generation navigation technologies in orbit for the first time in decades.