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GA-ASI says that Gray Eagle is the only U.S. Army UAS capable of leveraging Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations for secure, adaptable and resilient inflight communication, navigation and data management.
GA-ASI (General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc.) announced on Mar. 12, 2025, the testing in January of the Gray Eagle Extended Range UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) in a series of trials using a PLEO (Proliferated Low Earth Orbit) satellite constellation to remotely control the aircraft. The tests were contracted by the U.S. Army.
This initial testing focused on “flight-critical operations, including core aircraft control functions as well as sensor and communications systems,” with “two GE-ER flights and a series of ground test events using PLEO” conducted to date. The firm is now planning more extensive tests and “operations across the full flight regime,” the statement added.
GA-ASI has specifically identified the aircraft being tested as the GE 25M (Gray Eagle 25M), of which the U.S. Army National Guard ordered 12 units in June 2024. The GE 25M is a modernized model of the Gray Eagle specifically designed to meet the U.S. Army’s needs for Multi-Domain Operations capability, with upgrades focused on the internal components for a new degree of power, interoperability, and combat capability.
The PLEO is part of the Space Force’s PWSA (Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture), involving hundreds of small deeply networked satellites, providing everything from communication, data transfer, optical reconnaissance to missile tracking for all U.S. military assets.
GA-ASI conducts first flight test series of Gray Eagle Extended Range #UAS using a Proliferated Low Earth Orbit satellite constellation for aircraft communications.
Read more: https://t.co/Fz7IyVqZfA #UAV #UCAV pic.twitter.com/NNdbTPDRHk
— General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc (GA-ASI) (@GenAtomics_ASI) March 12, 2025
Gray Eagle and Gray Eagle 25M
The GE 25M, compared to the standard Gray Eagle ER, has a new 200 horsepower heavy fuel engine, dubbed the Heavy Fuel Engine (HFE) 2.0. The engine is also being considered as a replacement for the current 180 horsepower engine used on the Gray Eagle Extended Range.
It will also carry the Eagle Eye multi-mode radar that can provide moving target indication and conduct what the Army calls Detection, Identification, Location, and Reporting (DILR) roles, as well as AI-ML (Artificial Intelligence-Machine Learning) capability for further improvement.
The upgraded UAS will be controlled from a laptop-based Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) ground station, reducing material footprint while dramatically improving transportability, as well as enabling expeditionary operations. The MOSA has also enabled rapid integration of the PLEO constellation.
Traditionally, a UAS collects intelligence, transmits it to human operators or another central location, and then commanders task the aircraft to respond accordingly; with the 25M upgrade much of that collection, assessment, and action can take place onboard the aircraft in real-time, with what is being called the onboard “edge processing” capability.
PLEO and Gray Eagle 25M
In its statement, GA-ASI adde that the Gray Eagle is also the only U.S. Army UAS “capable of leveraging Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO), Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and PLEO constellations for secure, inflight adaptable and resilient communication, navigation and data management.” PLEO will therefore be a baseline system for the GE 25M, says the company.
Our Gray Eagle Extended Range delivers long-endurance #UAS surveillance, communications relay and weapons delivery missions in support of the warfighter. Featuring an automatic takeoff and landing system, the aircraft can be launched and recovered without operator interaction to… pic.twitter.com/U4ODa26uFB
— General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc (GA-ASI) (@GenAtomics_ASI) March 14, 2025
The compatibility between the PLEO and GE 25M is enabled by the MOSA of the Gray Eagle family of UAS, including standardized interfaces and protocols that enable rapid integration of the PLEO constellation and other significant capabilities without major technical efforts or extended timelines for integration and testing. Other features mentioned are ground systems, advanced and modular datalinks, and an upgraded propulsion system.
“The PLEO integration and flight testing continue to show that the current GE-ER open architecture is real” and “will prove critical to the platform’s survivability and mission success in Multi-Domain Operations,” GA-ASI’s Vice President of Army Programs Don Cattell said in the statement.
GE 25M “takes MOSA to the next level with a government-owned, government-controlled open architecture that enables plug-and-play capabilities to ensure the platform’s rapid, low-cost adaptability.” These features “provide resilience to electronic threats, and deliver expeditionary employment to austere locations.”
The GE 25M’s MOSA architecture enables use of the higher data rates available on the PLEO system and supports flight operations across the globe. The longer-range sensors, anti-jam navigation, and expeditionary ground control systems allow the Gray Eagles to operate outside the threat weapons envelope, but deliver effects hundreds of kilometers beyond the Forward Line of Own Troops (FLOT), making GE 25M the most survivable aircraft in the Army inventory.
Proliferated Low Earth Orbit satellites
The PLEO constellation was conceived as an alternative to the prevalent and expensive GEO (Geosynchronous Orbit) satellite network, offering high bandwidth and low latency, with greater redundancy and flexibility. According to Defense Scoop, LEO constellations provide “orders of magnitude more bandwidth than traditional program-of-record SATCOM capabilities, where forces would have to aggregate connections together to achieve 12 megabytes.”
Troops can “have up to 200 megabytes or more […] allowing unprecedented connectivity and data.” Additionally, an adversary would have to expend greater kinetic and non-kinetic satellite killing weapons like ASAT (Anti-Satellite Missiles), directed energy lasers, microwaves or electronic warfare jamming to disable a large LEO constellation.
The U.S. Space Force further calls it the PWSA (Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture), which consists of a Transport and a Tracking Layer. The Transport Layer provides a resilient, low-latency communications relay network, while the Tracking Layer detects and tracks missiles.
The Tranche 1 alone will have 158 satellites, with 126 in the Transport Layer, 28 missile warning satellites and four missile demonstration spacecraft. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and start-up York Space Systems all won shares of a $1.8 billion contract award in Feb. 2022.
The program has however been delayed, as Breaking Defense reported on Mar. 5 that the Space Defense Agency (SDA) “again postponed” the launch of the Tranche 1 network, after the first time it was postponed in Sep. 2024. One of the issues was scaling up the manufacturing of OCTs (Optical Communications Terminals), and vendor difficulties in getting approvals for encryption devices, from the NSA (National Security Agency).
