By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews
The Space Development Agency’s first missile tracking satellites won’t launch this year.
“I was hoping sometime this year we’ll get our first launch up, but doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen,” SDA Director Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo said Wednesday, opening the MilSat Symposium at Silicon Valley Space Week. He now expects the first tracking satellites to launch next spring.
Tracking is the half of SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture built to follow hypersonic weapons and other dim, fast-moving threats. Every Tranche 1 plane in orbit today is a transport plane.
84 up, hundreds to go
All three Tranche 1 transport vendors now have at least one plane up. Northrop Grumman’s Oct. 10 launch was the fourth. “We have 84 on orbit right now,” Sandhoo said. Checkouts are moving slower than he’d like.
“It’s one thing to launch one or two satellites. It’s a whole different ball of wax when you launch 21 or 42 and try to get them all to working and operating,” he said.
Then he laid out the queue:
- Six more Tranche 1 launches.
- Tranche 2, with 190 transport satellites and 54 tracking satellites over about 18 launches.
- Tranche 3: no transport at all, only tracking.
- Another 36 accelerated missile defense satellites tied to Golden Dome.
By the end of Tranche 3, Sandhoo said, that comes to about 474 satellites. The next round has started, too. SDA’s request for information for Tranche 4 is out, looking at next-generation sensors, compute, processing and fusion.
One executive for missile warning
Sandhoo wears a second hat as the Space Force’s portfolio acquisition executive for missile warning and tracking. That puts SDA’s proliferated LEO work under the same executive as the Space Force’s MEO, HEO and GEO sensing programs and its early-warning radars. The new PAE organizations stand up “in the next month or two,” he said, though “in the short term, it’s not going to change anything.”
Data transport goes the other way, to a separate executive for space-based sensing and targeting that runs the Space Data Network. SDA will still field the Tranche 1 and Tranche 2 transport satellites before handing them off.
With hundreds of satellites on the way, Sandhoo expects the ground to become the bottleneck. More autonomy and on-orbit compute will ease that in later tranches, he said, but for the first ones, ground is where SDA has to get it right.
His message to vendors: SDA will buy on a modest demo. A “C+, B-” result on one or two satellites, he said, can be “good enough for us to go out and buy a plane or a Tranche of those.”
About the Author
A storyteller at heart, Nick David covers space policy, satellite markets, defense, and the technologies reshaping how humanity operates beyond Earth. With a background in creative direction, brand strategy, and editorial storytelling, he brings a modern lens to complex subjects and a relentless curiosity about what comes next.
