Space Force takes ownership of first Meadowlands satellite jammer

L3Harris’s Meadowlands jamming system overhauls the Space Force’s legacy Counter Communication System. (Photo: L3Harris)

SPACE SYMPOSIUM 2025 — The Space Force has formally accepted delivery of the first mobile Meadowlands satellite jammer from prime contractor L3Harris, according to a senior Space Systems Command (SSC) officer.

“[W]e signed for the acceptance, which means it is now ours to really move forward into the formal government testing process, our developmental testing and operational testing. We’ve had good success with the contractor testing, and that’s moving forward,” Col. Bryan McClain, SSC’s program executive for Space Domain Awareness and Combat Power, told reporters today at the annual Space Foundation Space Symposium in Colorado Spring, Colo.

The delivery is about six months earlier than had been previously planned.

Erik Ballard, L3Harris general manager for antennas and structures, told Breaking Defense in an interview here on Wednesday that deliveries previously were expected to start in December.

“We’ve been able to pull that in substantially. That’s a win-win for both of us,” he said.

Meadowlands is a major upgrade to the Space Force’s first acknowledged offensive counterspace system, the Counter Communication System (CCS), which has been operational since 2004. L3Harris has performed a series of upgrades to CCS over the years, with the last iteration, called CCS 10.2, completed in March 2020. 

Meadowlands technically is another upgrade, with L3Harris winning a contract in January 2019 for development of five units through December 2025. Further, a production contract was signed in October 2021 and runs through January 2028 for “20-plus units including training systems,” Ballard said.

However, he said that Meadowlands is more than a routine CCS upgrade.

“So, one of the reasons that the name ‘Meadowlands’ was chosen is because we didn’t want it to appear or feel like an incremental upgrade, because it’s not … What Meadowlands offers is a step change in capability for the warfighter,” he said.

While the Space Force has been a bit cagey about the technical parameters of Meadowlands, McClain confirmed that the program was designed to both to increase mobility and improve the jamming capabilities of CCS, to include providing multi-frequency jamming in S-band and X-band.

Ballard said that each Meadowlands unit is significantly smaller than the 16 existing CCS units.

“A good analogy would be previously … you had a bus of equipment and you hooked up an antenna behind it. Now you can put it in your SUV and hook up the antenna behind it,” he said.

McClain stressed that another important change for the Space Force is the fact that unlike the older versions of CCS, command and control of Meadowlands can be done remotely.

“Having a system that we can reduce the number of people that are physically sitting by the antenna, turning knobs and pushing buttons, the farther we can separate that, that gives us a lot of flexibility for the warfighter. It gives us the ability to centralize how we do business. … [T]hat I think is really the huge aspect, and the huge benefit to the warfighter for Meadowlands,” he said.