Space Development Agency Director Derek Tournear. (DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando)
WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency is planning to have the ground system for its first set of operational data transport and missile warning/tracking satellites up and running next spring, in advance of the planned September 2024 launch of the satellites themselves — to comport with guidance from the Air Force’s space acquisition czar Frank Calvelli.
“We’re building out the ops centers at Grand Forks and Redstone… so that we’ll be able to start testing that ahead of the launch, so that we can meet one of Secretary Calvelli’s tenets: to make sure that you get the ground ready before the satellites,” SDA Director Derek Tournear told the Potomac Officers Club 2023 Air Force Summit today. “Right now, everything is tracking to have all of the ground components in place and operational by next spring, I believe the late April-May timeframe.”
SDA in May 2022 awarded a team led by General Dynamics and Iridium $324.5 million to develop the main ground operations centers at Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota and Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, along with 19 ground stations housing antennas to collect satellite data and feed it into those centers.
Tournear said the only possible glitch he can foresee is that siting some of the ground antennas planned for outside of the United States may take more time to stand up than currently hoped.
“The only thing that may hold us up is that we have some international ground entry point locations, so actual antennas … [that] may not be ready in time,” he said. “That’s the only long pole right now. Everything that’s being done in the US, and our ops centers in Grand Forks and Redstone, are all on track.”
Tournear explained that the plan is to have antennas “around the globe” so that the 166 inter-linked satellites making up Tranche 1 of SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture in low Earth orbit can downlink their data from as many places as possible. If any of the antennas abroad are delayed, “we’ll have limited coverage over those portions of the globe.” Nonetheless, he said, “we’ll still be able to launch and operate.”
SDA is building out its planned architecture in two-year increments called tranches, with Tranche 1 including both missile warning/tracking satellites and high-volume data relay satellites — the latter of which are providing a key node in the Pentagon’s ambitious Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept to link all military sensors to all shooters in near-real time.
During his tour-de-table on the status of SDA’s development programs, Tournear also acknowledged that SDA’s schedule for its second launch of its current iteration of satellites, called Tranche 0 and designed to allow operators to test out operational concepts, has been delayed from the original June date to late August.
The upside, however, is that the agency has at least partially ironed out the months-long spat with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) over using the Link 16 data link (commonly used by military aircraft) to downlink data from the Tranche 0 satellites. While SDA is still negotiating with FAA over its concerns about potential interference with civil aviators that could arise from using Link 16 over US-based training ranges, Tournear said a deal has been struck to allow the satellites to broadcast to aircraft flying over the oceans.
He also shed some more light on SDA’s plans to develop new satellites to provide “fire control” quality missile tracking under the secretive and recently announced program called FOO Fighter, for “Fire-Control On Orbit-Support-To-The-War Fighter.”
The eight camera-carrying satellites now being planned will be “experimental” in nature, Tournear said, and are aimed at tracking a “handful” of threats that “are not being addressed” by SDA’s currently planned Tracking Layer.
The Tracking Layer eventually will comprise hundreds of satellites, carrying both wide- and medium-field-of-view cameras, to provide missile defense weapon systems on the ground with tracking data with enough fidelity to precisely target ballistic and hypersonic missiles.
“So, FOO Fighter is to look at: what would be the next generation of these tracking constellations?” he said.
If successful, he added, the technologies tested under the FOO Fighter effort would be integrated with Tranche 3 and 4 of the Tracking Layer — satellites that are not slated for launch until, at the earliest, 2028 and 2030 respectively.
However, Tournear would not be drawn on details about the threats the program is anticipating or the nature of technologies being developed — telling reporters after his presentation “that’s where it gets classified.”
He did stress that SDA is working “closely” with the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) on both current and future plans for Tracking Layer. (House lawmakers have expressed some concern about how well the two agencies are playing together.)
“We’re working with MDA to make sure that we get their requirements folded in,” he said, noting that while Space Force and SDA are building and operating all the satellites for “missile warning, missile tracking, missile defense missions,” it is MDA that “owns that overall mission space.”
“So, we need to make sure that all of the requirements that that are feeding back into their weapons systems are folded into what we’re building to do with sensing,” he said.
