GoKawiilThe Space Development Agency was established in 2019 to help speed up the deployment of US military space systems by sidestepping the Pentagon’s traditional sluggish bureaucracy.
Seven years later, SDA is finally launching its first batches of operational satellites, just as the Pentagon plans to shutter the semi-autonomous agency and fold it back into the Space Force’s procurement pipeline, newly reorganized under several program acquisition executives in a bid to streamline weapons buying.
SDA’s fate is not a surprise, and lawmakers in both houses of Congress have backed the agency’s closure in drafts of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act.
The Space Development Agency’s primary mission has been to develop a constellation of several hundred missile warning and data relay satellites in low-Earth orbit designed to detect, track, and target ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The military calls the constellation the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA). The Pentagon currently has a small fleet of legacy missile warning satellites in much higher geosynchronous orbits. These satellites are expensive and vulnerable to attack, and their distance from Earth makes them less sensitive to smaller, dimmer missiles.
The idea was to rapidly procure, develop, and field new generations, or tranches, of tracking and data “transport” satellites every two years. SDA’s strategy was to cast a wide net across the US space industry, using satellites and sensors developed by many companies. Launches of SDA’s new satellites were supposed to occur at a cadence of about once per month.
Rough waters
Much of SDA’s mission will continue under a different banner within the US Space Force. The missile-warning and data-relay satellites will eventually be part of the Pentagon’s planned Golden Dome missile shield, one of the Trump administration’s top priorities for the Space Force.