- Sustainment would cover up to 56 systems deployed worldwide
- Envisioned period runs for one base year plus five options
- The Potomac Officers Club will host the 2027 Defense R&D Summit on Feb. 4
The U.S. Space Force is gathering industry input for a contract to sustain the Meadowlands satellite jamming fleet, a requirement that could cover up to 56 systems deployed worldwide.
Space Systems Command’s Space Domain Awareness and Combat Power Directorate posted a sources sought notice Thursday on SAM.gov, seeking statements of capability to inform its acquisition strategy. The work would span technical, logistical, software and hardware support for the Meadowlands Counter Communications System. The command envisioned a period of performance of roughly six years, one base year plus five options, and said the place of performance is flexible. Responses are due Nov. 18.
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What Is Meadowlands?
Meadowlands is a ground-based system designed to reversibly deny, disrupt and degrade adversary satellite communications. Built from commercial and government off-the-shelf radio frequency equipment packed into transit cases, the system can move by C-130 or larger aircraft and travel on paved or unpaved roads.
The system operates across ultra-high frequency, L, C, Ku and Ka bands through a frequency conversion system that uses a proprietary photonics design. Its base configuration includes three independent bidirectional antenna polarization paths and supports a large multiband antenna alongside a 1.2-meter L-band antenna. Production used components from the earlier Block 10.2 systems as government-furnished equipment, including antennas, power distribution units and environmental control units.
L3Harris Technologies built Meadowlands under a $72 million contract awarded in 2020 and delivered the first production unit in December 2025. Space Force Combat Forces Command accepted the system for operational use in June. Space Operations Command said the system allows one operator to boost simultaneous remote mission management by 300 percent.
What Would the Meadowlands Sustainment Contract Cover?
The command asked industry to address maintenance at the organizational, intermediate and depot levels; field service support; reach-back engineering; transportation; and repair-cycle management. Systems will be deployed in U.S. Central Command and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command areas, with support also required across European Command, Southern Command and Northern Command.
Other support areas cover spares forecasting, obsolescence management for commercial components, and management of proprietary or sole-source parts, including the photonics-based frequency conversion system. The notice asked respondents to identify what technical data, source code, licenses and intellectual property rights they would need from the government or from the incumbent, and how their approach would reduce dependency on a single vendor.
The command estimates workload distribution at 65 percent controlled unclassified information, 15 percent secret, 15 percent top secret with sensitive compartmented information and 5 percent special access program.
How Might the Meadowlands Contract Be Structured?
The command is weighing a firm-fixed-price arrangement with performance incentives, focused on systems being mission-effective when operationally required rather than remaining continuously operational. It asks industry to recommend units of measurement, how to treat contractor-controlled versus government-controlled downtime and safeguards against optimizing a metric without improving mission outcomes.
The command is using weapon system sustainment operations and maintenance appropriations, which expire at the end of the fiscal year for which they are appropriated, and said incentive fees earned after Sept. 30 may have to wait for the next year’s funding.
