US Air Force committed to communications satellites

By Andrea Shalal-Esa

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado, April 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. Air Force remains committed to providing protected satellite communications to the military, even if the Obama administration cuts funding for the Transformational Satellite program, a top Air Force official said on Thursday.

Gary Payton, deputy undersecretary for space, said early versions of the fiscal 2010 budget proposal included funding for a pared-down version of the TSAT satellite program, for which Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) and Boeing Co (BA.N) are competing.

But he said the worsening U.S. recession had affected budget planning and he was not certain if the "very expensive" TSAT program would survive the final budget deliberations.

"A lot of things have changed in the last few months. In all honesty, I don't know if TSAT's in the program," Payton told reporters at the annual National Space Symposium.

But he said the Air Force would still have to continue building satellites to provide protected communications if the program was scrapped, as many analysts predict.

That would mean continuation in some form of the Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite program run by Lockheed, as well as Boeing's Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS), Payton said.

"If TSAT as an entity is not in the budget, we are not going to get out of the business of protected communications," Payton said. He gave no details on the cost of TSAT.

Officials at Lockheed and Boeing said this week they were already exploring ways to transfer technologies developed under early work contracts on TSAT, which amount to $1.2 billion over the past years, to the earlier-generation satellites.