Acting SDA chief Sandhoo told reporters at Space Symposium that Tranche 1 Transport Layer launches will restart within weeks as the agency resets cadence and hands off transport work to a new program office.
Tranche 1 Transport Layer launches will resume in May or June, Dr. Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo, acting director of the Space Development Agency (SDA), told reporters at Space Symposium 2026 in Colorado Springs. The restart follows a months-long pause to work through technical issues surfaced during on-orbit checkout of the first two planes, and it lands as the U.S. Space Force reorganizes acquisition around new Program Acquisition Executives (PAEs) and shifts transport work toward what Sandhoo called the Space Data Network.
SDA, which sits inside the Space Force, briefed the press on the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) during an on-the-record roundtable led by the agency’s director of strategic engagement. Sandhoo said the delay gave the agency time to fold fixes back into the program before the next plane goes up. “As we launched the first two planes of Tranche 1, as the vendors went through their checkout, as they were going through the process, I won’t go on technical details, but there were things that we realized that we need to fix for the next one so we don’t have that long a checkout for the next plane of launches,” Sandhoo said. Software corrections and reconciling predicted versus observed on-orbit behavior drove the past several months of work, he added: “Once we do get back on the cadence here in the next month or two, we’ll be back on a good cadence after that.”
Once we do get back on the cadence here in the next month or two, we’ll be back on a good cadence after that.
Delivery obligations for Tranche 1 and Tranche 2 Transport Layer satellites stay with SDA even as the Space Force consolidates acquisition, Sandhoo said. Tranche 3 transport may ultimately move to a different organization, with SDA writing the requirements and a new office executing. The Space Data Network, he argued, will absorb what SDA has already built on the transport side. “So what we have done with the transport layer will be part of the space data network,” Sandhoo said.
So what we have done with the transport layer will be part of the space data network.
On the Tracking Layer, Sandhoo put the missile defense emphasis in sharp numbers. “If you look at our Tranche 3 track, half the satellites, 36, are missile defense satellites, which means that the goal is to be able to produce an onboard fire control quality track to deal with those threats,” he said. Hypersonic threats are pushing fire-control computation off the ground and onto the spacecraft, because the response windows are too short to keep that work on the ground.
Coverage ramps tranche by tranche. Tranche 1 delivers regional coverage on the communications side, Tranche 2 adds persistence, and Tranche 3 expands capacity while replacing aging Tranche 1 satellites, Sandhoo said in response to a question from Defense News. “By the end of Tranche 3, you should have global persistent coverage on the tactical and operational communication link side,” he said. For the Tracking Layer, Sandhoo offered figures he flagged as from memory — “I don’t know the numbers off my head” — saying Tranche 1 reaches roughly 88 to 90 percent coverage over the poles with less along the equator, Tranche 2 climbs into the 90s, and the combination of Tranche 2 and Tranche 3 approaches “100%, 99% coverage of sensing capabilities.”
Supply chain pressure is easing but not gone. A consistent demand signal remains critical, Sandhoo said, and SDA has identified a handful of persistent choke points since scaling up proliferated production — optical communications terminals, connectors and propellant tanks among them, echoing a recent Aerospace Industries Association report. Industry has worked through the scaling challenge, though not at the pace SDA first expected, and spreading work across multiple vendors builds resilience: “Monocultures just don’t survive,” he said.
SDA has already awarded Tranche 3 contracts and will begin defining Tranche 4 minimum viable capability requirements within the next few months, Sandhoo said, holding to a two-year-per-tranche cadence. Organizational calls about which PAE owns which mission area remain open on the Space Force side. “We look forward to more exciting news from SDA coming soon,” the director of strategic engagement said in closing. “We’re looking forward to getting restarted on Tranche 1 launches.”
