The U.S. Air Force is about to formally embark on a multibillion-dollar space communications project in which it hopes to avoid past troubles in developing such systems, but critics charge that the strategy is fraught with risk. The transformational communications military satellite communications system (TCM- also referred to as TCS or TSAT) is intended to provide the communications backbone to pass massive amounts of data on the future battlefield and alleviate today's bandwidth constraints. The program, expected to cost more than $12 billion in the next few years, would initially involve two satellite development teams.
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