WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency (SDA) is restarting launch of it first-generation Tranche 1 Transport Layer satellites following what the agency called a “strategic pause” designed to fix technical problems discovered in the initial 42 birds lofted last year, according to the agency’s top official.
The agency is planning to launch 21 Tranche 1 Transport Layer birds built by York Space Systems Thursday on a SpaceX Falcon 9, Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo, SDA director and Space Force portfolio acquisition executive for missile warning and tracking, told reporters.
“We have seven more launches in Tranche 1,” he said, for a total of 158 satellites in low Earth orbit ― 126 in the Transport Layer, 28 missile warning/tracking satellites for SDA’s Tracking Layer and four birds equipped with precise sensors to provide fire control data to missile defense interceptors.
Those include three more Tranche 1 Transport Layer launches, which will carry satellites built by Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. York, Northrop and Lockheed in February 2022 won shares in a $1.8 billion contract award to produce 42 satellites each, creating a constellation that will be able to provide limited region-by-region coverage.
The other four launches will carry the Tranche 1 Tracking Layer missile warning and tracking satellites, Sandhoo said. The agency in July 2022 awarded L3Harris and Northrop Grumman contracts worth a total of $1.3 billion to develop the Tranche 1 Tracking Layer satellites, with each company to build 14 satellites.
Sandhoo was frank about the problems SDA faced with the first 42 Tranche 1 Transport Layer satellites built by York and Lockheed Martin, launched last September and October respectively after a year delay, that caused the agency to put the rest of the Tranche 1 launches on hold and piqued criticism from the Government Accountability Office.
“We did see software and hardware issues on the ones on orbit right now. That’s why we kind of delayed and took a pause to make sure we fix at least the known issues,” he said. “We still quite haven’t finished some of those checkouts.”
Technical issues included wonky thermal modeling that, in the end, meant the rest of the satellites needed to be fitted with “additional thermal mitigation,” Sandhoo said.
There also were problems with the electric propulsion motors designed to push the satellites from their insertion orbit to their designated plane of operations, he added, that have yet to be fully resolved.
“They’re functioning. They’re working. They’re not in ideal plane where we would like them to be, just because of the orbit raising issues,” he said.
Sandhoo said SDA expects the check-out process to go more quickly for the rest of the Tranche 1 satellites thanks to the work done by the agency and its vendors over the past six months.
However, he acknowledged that the agency has yet to able to demonstrate that it can create its envisioned “mesh network,” due to difficulties with development and production cadence of optical intersatellite links necessary to allowing the Tranche 1 Transport Layer satellites to cross-talk and rapidly pass data. Such laser links are foundational to SDA’s entire Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, as well as the Pentagon’s wider Golden Dome initiative.
Further, Sandhoo said SDA is still awaiting Federal Aviation Administration authority to test using Link 16 to squirt targeting data to legacy military platforms over the continental United States — a battle it has been fighting for almost six years.
“[O]n the spectrum approvals and authorizations, we are working that process. That’s not a short or a simple process. It’s a long and arduous process,” he said. “We have some approvals to do some testing … with our allies and partners. We have got some approvals to do some open ocean testing, and we’re working our way towards getting the approval to be able to do CONUS testing. … We expect to get those approvals, hopefully soon.”
The ability to use Link 16 is critical to the capability of the Transport Layer constellation to integrate with the Space Force’s emergent Space Data Network (SDN). The umbrella SDN concept effectively has overtaken the Transport Layer’s initial mission to provide a global satellite communications (SATCOM) network that can quickly move data between sensors and shooters. In turn, the SDN (which also will rely on laser cross and ground links) is at the heart of the Golden Dome architecture.
Nonetheless, Sandhoo is optimistic that the Tranche 1 program is now back on track, allowing SDA to finally begin Transport Layer operations.
“We are looking forward to the launch on the on the 16th, and by the end of this launch, we’ll have half our our Transport constellation on orbit. And once you have three planes up, we’re starting to talk real capability for the warfighter — some real time, some real capability — and we plan to start delivering that,” he said.
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