The Space Development Agency is set to launch 21 Tranche 1 data transport satellites on Oct. 5—its fourth Tranche 1 mission since last fall and the first to carry Northrop Grumman-built satellites.
The launch is scheduled for 1:15 a.m. local time from Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Once in orbit, the 21 spacecraft will join 63 Tranche 1 satellites built by York Space Systems and Lockheed Martin.
The mission represents a few firsts for Northrop. It’s not only the contractor’s inaugural Tranche 1 launch—the company is on the hook for another batch of 21 Tranche 1 Transport satellites and 14 missile tracking spacecraft—but it’s also the firm’s first time delivering and operating such a large quantity of satellites. SDA Director Gurpartap Sandhoo told reporters during an Oct. 1 prelaunch call that based on some of the challenges other providers have had with scaling, he expects there will be some challenges.
“It’s one thing to go through launch and early ops of one, two, maybe even three or four satellites. Twenty-one is a completely different ball of wax,” said Sandhoo, who is also the Space Force’s portfolio acquisition executive for missile warning, tracking, and defense. “We’ll see some issues, but I’m confident the team at Northrop … the issues that pop up, any patches, any updates we have to do, they’re ready to go.”
Since SDA started in 2019 to build out a proliferated constellation of data transport and missile warning satellites in low Earth orbit, the agency has faced setbacks that have delayed launches and fielding timelines. While it had hoped to have all 154 of its Tranche 1 satellites in low-Earth orbit by this summer, supply chain issues and technical challenges on the ground and in orbit disrupted those plans. Sandhoo has attributed many of those slowdowns to the challenges that come with building and launching satellites in large numbers.
“The issue has not been the capability of the system,” Sandhoo told reporters. “The issue has been building them at scale, getting them tested at scale, launching them at scale, doing the launch and early ops at scale. It’s the volume of these things that has been a challenge.”
Following the launch of York and Lockheed’s first spacecraft last year, initial on-orbit checkout and testing took much longer than the four to six months SDA expected. The agency ended up taking a nine-month pause to sort out issues on orbit and make changes on the ground to ensure its next satellites didn’t run into the same hiccups.
In July, SDA resumed Tranche 1 launches, flying York’s last 21 transport satellites. Checkout of those spacecraft went much smoother, Sandhoo said. Since then, the agency has moved control of York’s satellites into its operations center and started doing some limited experimentation. SDA has had some issues transferring Lockheed’s spacecraft to the operations center. To date, it’s only been able to move four, and Sandhoo said the company and SDA are working through the engineering issues to understand the cause and make sure it’s addressed before Lockheed launches more satellites.
“As we get the rest of the architecture, the rest of the planes up, it’s going to get more complicated,” he said. “We need to make sure the understanding is there, the behavior, and the dependability. Being able to get them in the ops and working properly is critical.”
While the agency isn’t out of the woods yet in terms of schedule and scaling woes, Sandhoo told reporters he expects that as companies and their suppliers get used to building and flying larger numbers of satellites, their performance will improve. But for now, he said, he’s not satisfied with the time it’s taken to get to this point.
Asked what SDA could have done differently to avoid these setbacks, Sandhoo said it’s possible that for the early tranches of satellites, the agency could have required more insight into the companies’ processes rather than opt for the more hands-off approach it took in its contracting strategy.
“We are trying to get to a place where we can have a capability-driven architecture. We tell them what the system needs to do, and our vendors and our industrial base builds that out to that spec with minimal oversight,” he said. “Maybe we should have, for the first tranche, been probably more intrusive in that process than we were.”
Following the Oct. 5 launch, SDA is eyeing its first Tranche 1 tracking layer mission either in December or early next year. Beyond that flight, it’s hoping to finish the last four launches and have all Tranche 1 satellites in orbit by late spring 2027.