Northrop Grumman Corporation has successfully completed a delta Critical Design Review (dCDR) with the U.S. Space Force for the Enhanced Polar System Recapitalization (EPS-R) Control and Planning Segment (CAPS) program, the Falls Church, VA-based company announced August 4.
“The successful completion of this milestone demonstrates our team’s commitment to agile processes,” said Rob Fleming, vice president, strategic force programs, Northrop Grumman. “Extensive collaboration between the Northrop Grumman and customer teams was a large part of the design review success. The final design review content was shaped in cross functional working group meetings in the preceding weeks leading up to and resulting in a high quality dCDR event that met 100 percent of the exit criteria within 13 months of the contract’s authority to proceed.”
With the completion of dCDR the program is now ready to move to the development, integration and test phase.
EPS-R CAPS facilitates military satellite communications in the Earth’s North Polar Region by providing continuous coverage for secure, jam-resistant, strategic and tactical communications. CAPS is the ground segment providing command and control, and mission planning for all four of the EPS/EPS-R payloads with a single software baseline.
In addition to the ground segment, EPS-R will also include two eXtended Data Rate (XDR) payloads developed by Northrop Grumman which will serve to provide coverage in the region until the Protected Tactical SATCOM and Evolved Strategic SATCOM polar variants become operational in the 2030s.
Source: Northrop Grumman
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