NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—The Space Development Agency wants to wrap up its Tranche 1 launch campaign by the end of spring 2027, flying six more batches of satellites to build out its tracking and data transport constellations, according to Director Gurpartap Sandhoo.
The agency is aiming to complete two of those launches by the end of 2026—one in the next month or so and the second in December, Sandhoo told reporters Sept. 15 at AFA’s Air, Space, and Cyber Conference.
“The focus in the next six to eight months is trying to get those up there,” Sandhoo said.
SDA was created in 2019 to disrupt the Pentagon’s traditional practice of buying small numbers of exquisite satellites and taking years to field them. Central to its approach is to regularly refresh its constellation with new tranches of satellites as technology advances and requirements evolve, a concept called spiral development.
Supply chain issues, technical challenges, and last year’s historically long government shutdown have slowed down those plans; the agency had hoped to have all 154 of its first operational satellites, dubbed Tranche 1, on orbit by this summer. To date, it has fielded 63.
Sandhoo said the agency has addressed some of the challenges that contributed to earlier delays. After its first two launches, SDA and its vendors struggled to make contact with all of their satellites and confirm they were operating as intended—an issue that contributed to a monthslong launch pause that stretched from last October to this July. The latest batch of satellites that launched in mid-July, the second Tranche 1 “plane” built by York Space Systems, moved through that process much faster, he said, due to hardware and software upgrades.
“The time it took to check out the second plane was two or three times faster,” Sandhoo said. “The teams learned. They got things done much, much quicker. And I do expect the same as we do multiple launches as we go forward.”
But some of those old hurdles have persisted—namely, supply chain hindrances. SDA vendors and their suppliers have struggled to scale things like focal plane arrays and optical communications terminals, or OCTs, which use laser links to transmit data.
Sandhoo said that while there’s been some improvement in the supply chain, manufacturing throughput is still an issue, particularly for capabilities like OCTs that were not previously produced in large numbers. He also cited quality control issues with those same components.
That means staying on schedule will likely still be a challenge for SDA, and Sandhoo said there’s some risk that the first missile tracking satellites, slated to fly in December, could get pushed to early next year. He told Air & Space Forces Magazine the risk is linked to flight software issues and OCT delays.
These delays have been a setback to SDA’s goal of demonstrating a mesh network on orbit, which Sandhoo previously said he expected to accomplish by the end of September. Now, he’s aiming for the end of the year, naming it as a top priority for the agency over the next three to four months.
“We should be there already, but I push on the team every week that the next step is to get that done,” he said.
