Air Force seeks path forward for troubled GPS III program.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

The Air Force is being forced to restructure or cancel the troubled ground control segment of its GPS III program, putting the next generation timing and navigation system at risk.

The program to develop the next generation operational control system, better known as OCX, began with a contract award to Raytheon Co. in 2010.

Six years later, it has failed to deliver the first two software blocks, and the rising costs of the program has triggered a Nunn-McCurdy breach, which requires the Defense Department to either sign off on continuing the program or restarting it.

"Factors that led to the critical Nunn-McCurdy breach include inadequate systems engineering at program inception, Block 0 software with high defect rates, and Block 1 designs requiring significant rework," the Air Force said in a press statement.

Before the Nunn-McCurdy breach was announced, members of Congress were already expressing their ire with the program. The Senate Appropriations Committee in its 2017 defense spending package called for $260 million to be cut from the $393 million the administration requested.

The contract was worth some $1.5 billion when awarded in 2010. The Air Force now estimates that it needs an additional $3.7 billion to complete the project, the 2017 budget request revealed.

GPS III has three components--the spacecraft, the ground control system, and GPS enabled equipment. All are on different development timelines, which is made all the more complicated by the OCX delay, according to the latest Government Accountability office report on the program, which was released September 2015.

The current GPS network is functioning fine and is expected to do so for a number of years. A minimum of 24 spacecraft are needed, but because some of the older models have exceeded their life expectancy and new ones continue to be launched, there are now 40 in orbit, with eight of them being spares, it said.

GPS III is expected to provide capability beyond the current system, and the OCX system is essential if the GPS III satellites are to deliver new capabilities. Those include: advanced cybersecurity; signal boosting and spot beams capabilities that can power through enemy jamming; and use of the M-code, which provides encrypted and more precise navigation data exclusive to the military and government users.

The M-code will not be available until the Block 0 and Block 1 software are functioning. There is a Block 2, which will deliver further improvements, but it...