SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH — On-orbit checkouts of the Tranche 1 Space Development Agency (SDA) satellites launched in July are progressing much faster than previous plane launches, SDA Director Dr. Gurpartap ‘GP’ Sandhoo said Monday.
The July mission launched 21 data transport satellites built by York Space Systems, the second plane of satellites built by York in Tranche 1 of the SDA constellation.
“The difference between York’s first plane launch and the second plane launch in July [was that] on average, they were able to get things done two to three times faster than everything they did in the first plane,” Sandhoo said. “What they learned from the first plane was critical to go into the second plane. The more you do, the better you get.”
Sandhoo spoke Monday during the opening keynote at the Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. He said SDA hopes to launch the next plane in Tranche 1 Transport Layer, built by Northrop Grumman, “in the next couple of weeks, maybe by September.”
The SDA’s original plan was to maintain a monthly launch cadence for the entire T1 constellation, but the agency halted launches in a “strategic pause” to correct issues found during in-space checkout of the satellites. Sandhoo spoke about many of the fixes addressed during the pause before the July launch.
The SDA’s original schedule intentions were “very aspirational,” Sandhoo said, targeting fixed-price, three-year contracts from start to delivery. “We have not met any of those times,” he added. The largest challenges have been supply chain including optical terminals and focal plane arrays, as well as scaling up manufacturing to a proliferated model.
Tranche 2 satellites are in post-critical design review (CDR) except for one vendor, which Sandhoo did not name. He said that Tranche 3 vendors are at system requirements review (SRR) and preliminary design review (PDR) stages.
Looking to the future, Sandhoo said his dual role as Space Force Portfolio Acquisition Executive (PAE) for Missile Warning and Tracking requires him to consider missile warnings from every orbital regime. “SDA was focused on the LEO aspect of things, and now we’ll have to look at every oval regime. LEO, MEO, HEO, and GEO — it’s the whole stack of all missile warning sensors under one umbrella and that’s kind of where every service is heading in that direction from a mission-focused PAE.”
This brings up questions about on-orbit data fusion between orbits and designing a multi-orbit architecture that is “fully survivable in every possible scenario,” Sandhoo said.
“We fuse [data] on the ground right now, but in five years from now, is that still going to be fast enough? Probably not,” Sandhoo said. “So we have to start doing this data fusion on orbit, on-orbit compute.”
