The Space Development Agency’s experimental satellite program just kicked off with a record-fast shift into full operating mode, offering what officials see as a promising start for an ambitious military space strategy.
The Dragoon spacecraft, launched June 23, is the first of 12 planned satellites developed as part of SDA’s Tranche 1 Demonstration and Experimentation System, or T1DES. With Dragoon, the program aims to demonstrate the mission viability of what’s slated to encompass a constellation of hundreds of low-Earth orbit military satellites.
But first, SDA Director Derek Tournear said he’s looking to Dragoon for two primary missions: proving the design and capacity of the York satellite bus transporting the spacecraft, then serving as a pathfinder for Tranche 1 satellites launching later this summer.
“In internal reviews, people were saying, ‘You guys are doing great work, but you really need to make sure that you burn down some of your tech risk before you do your large tranches.’ We said, ‘You know, that’s a good idea.’ So that was one of the things we did on Dragoon,” Tournear said June 26 at the Defense One Tech Summit in Arlington, Va. “The beauty of this model is we do a demonstration…and that technology will feed directly into Tranche 2, and that’s how we continue to do this firewall.”
A Tranche 2 beta mission of tactical communications satellites for theater operations is set to follow, as SDA builds out its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. The interconnected expanse of networked satellites is designed to provide a transport layer for resilient warfighter support.
The Dragoon model works so well, Tournear emphasized, that the agency was able to shift the satellite from safe mode to operate mode in four days—a process that previously would take about four months.
“This is why I’m such a believer in this spiral development model: you launch, you learn while you’re building the next ones,” Tournear said. “That’s what we keep pushing.”
Despite initially getting off to a late start, T1DES is breaking down barriers in more than launch and operations. The acquisition process is moving quickly too, with order-to-orbit timelines for SDA’s prototype Tranche 0 falling between 27 months to 40 months.
Traditionally, comparable Defense Department acquisitions would take closer to eight years, Tournear said.
Picking up the space pace
Faster acquisition better aligns with companies that are now building satellites at a clip that far outpaces legacy contracting processes. The technological payloads SDA and other agencies are looking to equip satellites with are moving even faster. Case in point: the autonomous, self-healing network of AI-enabled satellites Tournear envisions.
“We’re going to fly hundreds of satellites that are all connected optically with laser crossing, so we’ll have near-instantaneous communication amongst them. That enables us to put processors on all of our transport layer satellites,” Tournear said. “We have a battle management command and control processor. It’s a very sophisticated processor with a lot of compute activity and capabilities, and we can essentially then treat our entire transport layer as a federated cloud computer in space, and we can do computations across that. The key thing we want to do with that is we want to be able to have this network actually heal itself autonomously. So that’s a crawl, walk, run.”
The ability to process and fuse data onboard, in orbit, is how AI capabilities and some autonomous operations will become possible. So far, these capabilities are relatively nascent, but they’re advancing rapidly in commercial space.
“As you get more and more of this disaggregated compute in space, the commercial providers are putting that up there…if you need to burst from a defense system cloud in space to a commercial system cloud in space, you’ll be able to laser link to those comms satellites and do that,” said Bill Vass, CTO at Booz Allen Hamilton. “The other thing that’s very exciting about computing space, to me, is you can have really ‘dumb,’ cheap sensors on the ground, and you could have just a camera that’s $20 with a little phased array and a solar panel, and it can have all the power…by connecting into space. I think that’s going to change the way sensors work.”
Vass and Tournear both pointed to the proliferation of low-cost unmanned aerial systems with similarly expanded capacities as precedent. Increasingly networked, connected, and capable of processing more data faster, and in turn, harnessing autonomy and AI, “cheap drones” become layered components in new mission sets.
A stratified U.S. military satellite stance
The latest news on T1DES, and with it an update on PWSA progress, provides more of a glimpse into more layers of U.S. space operations.
Tournear noted that SDA is planning for a few different uses for the initial batch of 12 prototype satellites, including tactical communications and missile tracking. Those capabilities are part of a broader PWSA backbone for operational and tactical warfighting functions aided by high-speed data links, beyond-line-of-sight targeting, advanced detection and tracking, and resilient comms, including specifically for previously unfulfilled support to more than 10,000 radios currently fielded to deployed troops.
The LEO constellation will eventually join other U.S. military satellite constellations supporting warfighters and national security missions—including those in other orbits beyond LEO.
The Wideband Global SATCOM system, or WGS, constellation first launched into geostationary orbit in 2007, providing high-capacity broadband communications for U.S. forces and allies. The estimated $4 billion geostationary orbit system’s WGS-11 and WGS-12 are slated for 2025 and 2027 launches, respectively. Meanwhile, in medium Earth orbit, Space Force is currently building out its Resilient Missile Warning/Tracking constellation.
“Resilient” is the key word when it comes to the array of U.S. military systems operating throughout space, Tournear said.
“Space is now a contested domain, and one of the ways that you can assure that you can provide that capability to the warfighter is to proliferate,” he said. “From LEO, you get missile warning, missile tracking, and missile defense. From MEO, you get missile warning and missile tracking, and from GEO and the higher orbits, you get the missile warning. With the three of those together, you get just an incredible amount of resiliency, so you can provide that capacity and capability to the warfighter.”
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