The Space Development Agency’s Tranche 2 Transport Layer constellation is designed to provide high volume, low latency data communications around the globe. (Artist’s rendering via Northrop Grumman)
WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency (SDA) has tapped Northrop Grumman Corporation to build 38 data transport satellites for the latest iteration of the agency’s low Earth orbit high volume, low-latency data relay network, the company announced today.
The contract, worth up to $732 million, is to fill out the Tranche 2 Transport Layer – Alpha (T2TL-Alpha) constellation being designed to provide global access for warfighters on the ground — and serve as the backbone for the Pentagon’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) network of networks. SDA late last month awarded York Space Systems a contract worth over $615 million for another 62 T2TL Alpha birds.
Northrop Grumman’s contract includes supporting ground elements, as well as five years of operations and sustainment. The satellites scheduled to launch starting December 2026, according to the press release.
SDA’s Tranche 2 Transport Layer eventually will total 216 satellites configured into three separate but interoperable models called Alpha, Beta and Gamma. Somewhat oddly, the Beta bird will launch first starting in September 2026, with the other models to follow on a monthly basis through September 2027. The Tranche 2 constellation follows two earlier Transport Layer constellations: Tranche 0, with 19 test satellites already on orbit; and Tranche 1, 126 satellites which will provide regional coverage, with launches starting in September 2024.
SDA’s acquisition strategy is modeled after commercial software development, rolling out a set of increasingly capable satellite versions every few years.
The Transport Layer is part of SDA’s overarching Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), designed to utilize LEO for various on-orbit missions, including missile warning/tracking, in order to flummox enemy attacks on the satellites by making targeting much more difficult through the tyranny of numbers. The various PWSA constellations will use common data standards and optical inter-satellite links to allow the different models made by different contracts
Northrop has been one of the big winners in SDA’s PWSA program, having nabbed a $733 million award in August for 36 of the Tranche 2 Transport Layer Beta variants. The space and defense behemoth in February 2022 won a Tranche 1 Transport Layer contract for 42 satellites, worth about $692 million.
The company also was awarded a contract worth about $617 million in June 2022 to build 14 satellites in SDA’s Tranche 1 Tracking Layer, which is being optimized for keeping tabs on hypersonic missiles.
