SALT LAKE CITY — Space is going to become a much busier place in the next few years.

At the start of 2019, the United Nations Register of Objects Launched into Outer Space reported there were about 5,000 registered “objects” in Earth’s orbit. But just one U.S. company, SpaceX, is planning on putting tens of thousands of small satellites into orbit over the next few years and just last week announced the launch of 60 of those devices, part of what will be a global network of low-earth-orbit satellites providing internet service.

Space is also the venue from which increasingly high-tech military operations around the world are being coordinated via government and military-operated satellites that currently represent about half of the functional satellites orbiting the planet.

And now, L3Harris Technologies in Salt Lake City is set to play a major role in ensuring communications between the U.S. military and its own growing network of orbiting assets are safe from interference from those looking to disrupt or obstruct those operations.

The U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center has awarded L3Harris a five-year, $500 million contract for the Air Force and Army Anti-jam Modem. The so-called A3M device will provide the Air Force and Army with a secure, wideband, anti-jam satellite communications modem for “tactical satellite communication operations.” According to L3Harris, the agreement has a $500 million ceiling, and is an “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” contract with an initial delivery order of $30.6 million.

A significant portion of the work involved with developing the next generation modem, which will have the ability to sense attempts at jamming or disruption and make changes to thwart those attempts, will take place at L3Harris’ facility near the Salt Lake City International Airport. The company employs some 3,000 at a growing campus that includes 12 buildings and over 1 million square feet of operational space.

Dan Gelston, president of L3Harris’ Broadband Communications Systems, said the ability of potential U.S. adversaries to interrupt communications that travel through the electromagnetic spectrum between satellites and ground or air-based U.S. military units is advancing and the new modems will help build resilience as spaced-based military assets continue to grow.

“Right now, communication systems are vulnerable to jamming and other manipulations from more advanced adversaries,” Gelston said. “(U.S. Space Force’s) Space and Missile Systems Center has new satellites going up that have the capability to utilize this protected waveform technology.”

The satellites of the future, for both commercial applications like SpaceX’s satellite internet service and military operations, will look quite different from those currently in use.

Gelston said so-called low-Earth-orbit satellites, small vehicles launched in large networks, provide faster communications and are less vulnerable than traditional ones thanks to the redundancy of scale and the ability to “heal” by moving network units in the event of system failures or attack.

Aerotech News reported on a recent U.S. Army forum on space and integrated air and missile defense that, according to Dr. Mark Lewis, director of the Defense Research and Engineering Modernization office, larger geosynchronous satellites are both very expensive and vulnerable to attack.

“Right now many of our space assets are not only targets, they are juicy targets,” Lewis said, adding that he was echoing the words of Air Force Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The smaller and cheaper low-Earth-orbit satellites will present less of a target, Lewis said, partly because they move at faster speeds and because they will orbit in large numbers.

“More is better for the purpose of confounding a prospective adversary,” he said.

Gelston said the vulnerabilities of the U.S. legacy military satellite systems and attendant communications equipment have been brought into sharper relief as the U.S. moves away from a national defense strategy that has been very focused on international terror threats to rising concerns over potential state-level adversaries like Russia and China.

“Russia and China have been standing back and analyzing our use of electromagnetic (communication) for the last 20 years as we’ve fought international terrorism,” Gelston said. “They’ve been working to figure out how to jam or intercept those communications and turn our domination of the electromagnetic space into a weakness.

“This program specifically addresses that contested envelope.”

Gelston said L3Harris anticipated the need for enhanced security for the U.S. military space operations communication systems and began developing ideas for the new modems years ago.

L3Harris was created through a $33.5 billion merger in 2019 that combined L3 Technologies and Harris Companies, both of which have long specialized in high-tech, high-security systems for aerospace, national security and defense applications.