WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency has set its sights on an ambitious launch schedule for 2024 following two successful launches this 12 months that marked regular progress for the fledgling U.S. Space Force agency.
“Starting next September, it’s an 11-launch campaign over 11 months, one launch a month,” SDA Director Derek Tournear said Dec. 7 at a National Security Space Association online forum.
SDA is developing a network of satellites referred to as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture — a big constellation of lower-cost, mass-produced satellites in low Earth orbit. That is different from the standard DoD approach of using small numbers of pricey, highly-customized satellites.
The constellation is designed to offer capabilities like advanced missile warning, tracking and targeting of hypersonic weapons, space asset defense, and battlefield awareness and targeting.
Two launches in 2023
SDA’s first 23 satellites launched in 2023 on SpaceX rockets are demonstration spacecraft referred to as Tranche 0. There are still 4 Tranche 0 missile-tracking satellites that were delayed and haven’t yet launched.
Tournear said SDA’s immediate priority early next 12 months will probably be to launch these 4 L3Harris missile-tracking satellites. They’re scheduled to fly to orbit alongside other Missile Defense Agency satellites on the USSF-124 Space Force mission but no launch date has yet been announced.
Later in 2024, SDA expects to initiate launches for the primary operational satellites that can comprise Tranche 1 of the proliferated low Earth orbit architecture.
Starting in September next 12 months, the goal is to get 161 satellites into orbit in lower than a 12 months, Tournear said.
These include 126 Tranche 1 Transport Layer communications satellites made by York Space Systems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman; and 35 missile-tracking sensor satellites made by L3Harris, Northrop Grumman and RTX.
Tournear noted that each one 126 transport satellites could have Link 16 tactical data communications terminals “that can give us full global persistence.”
Expanding the military’s global Link 16 network to space is a critical goal for SDA, he said. “What we’re concentrating on is primarily with the ability to support terrestrial warfighters from space.”
Impact on industrial base
Tournear said he has been impressed seeing recent space corporations like York Space Systems maturing rapidly, while established defense giants like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman upping their game by partnering with business suppliers.
SDA chosen SpaceX in 2020 to produce satellites when the corporate was just starting to supply spacecraft. When SDA chosen York as a satellite supplier, the corporate was a newcomer, Tournear said. “At the moment they were relatively unknown. So it was really high risk to award those contracts to them.”
SDA also picked Lockheed Martin, which Tournear viewed as “really odd” since the agency billed itself as a “constructive disrupter” imagined to be doing things in another way than the standard defense programs.
“But I’ll inform you, it’s worked out rather well for us,” he said. “I even have so much more confidence in plenty of these recent space corporations.”
Tournear said at one point he feared that Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, each established aerospace and defense corporations, “would operate under their big classical aerospace and defense mentality on these programs. We’ve actually seen the other.”
To get prices down and speed up production, these corporations teamed with business vendors. Lockheed Martin works with Terran Orbital, which is a brand new space company based on a business model that’s attempting to sell those buses as a commodity product, he said. “In order that they’ve really capitalized on that.”
Northrop Grumman is just not constructing buses but buying them from Airbus’ OneWeb production line.
“And what we’re seeing is that the bigs should not acting like they do on large cost-plus contracts,” Tournear added. “We’ve got them on fixed-price contracts, they’re relying so much on their recent space partners to have the opportunity to offer the speed and the efficiency in order that they’ll hit our price points.”
“It seems that there are recent space corporations in there, they simply have a Lockheed or Northrop wrapper on top of it.”