News

Date: January 12, 2022 | Outlet: Air Force Magazine | By: Amanda Miller A satellite constellation specially suited to tracking hypersonic missiles could be up and running by 2025. Director of the Space Development Agency Derek M. Tournear laid out the advantages of the Tracking Layer of SDA’s still-envisioned National Security Space Architecture in a…

Date: December 6, 2021 | Outlet: SpaceNews | By: SpaceNews Staff SPACE DEVELOPMENT AGENCY When the Pentagon created the Space Development Agency in 2019 to stake out a new satellite architecture for the military, SDA chose as its motto Semper Citius, Latin for “always faster.” In less than three years since its inception, the SDA has launched…

Date: August 11, 2021 | Outlet: Defense News | By: Nathan Strout WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency launched another experimental satellite Aug. 10 as it tries to reduce risk for its first satellites on orbit, set to begin launch in fall 2022. Carried into orbit aboard the Cygnus NG-16 spacecraft during its Commercial Resupply…

Date: June 23, 2021 | Outlet: DOD News | By: C. Todd Lopez The Falcon 9 mission will include five SDA satellites. These include a pair of “Mandrake II” satellites; two “Laser Interconnect Networking Communications System,” or LINCS, satellites; and a satellite carrying the SDA’s Prototype On-orbit Experimental Testbed, or POET, experiment. The SDA is…

Date: June 2021 | Outlet: Via Satellite | By: Vivienne Machi U.S. Defense Department agencies are working with a who’s-who of military contractors, commercial satellite operators, and technology companies to finally demonstrate the feasibility of a proliferated constellation of satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO). The concept of using hundreds of small satellites spread out across…

Date: May 7, 2021 | Outlet: DOD News | By: C. Todd Lopez Cost, performance and delivery drive acquisition across the Defense Department, typically in equal measure. But the Space Development Agency has prioritized delivery above all else in its effort to get satellites into space that will deliver non-line-of-sight targeting to warfighters across the…

Date: April 28, 2021 | Outlet: Defense News | By: Tate Nurkin It has been an active start to 2021 for the Department of Defense’s space activities as the Pentagon seeks to build agility, capability and resilience in this increasingly important domain. Increased concentration on space is welcome. However, Pentagon decisions about future priorities, activities…

Date: April 16, 2021 | Outlet: Air Force Magazine Online | By: Amanda Miller The Defense Department’s Space Development Agency wants to blanket Earth with a constellation of low-cost, open-architecture data-relay and missile-tracking satellites whose sheer numbers, along with their 1,000-kilometer-high orbits, would theoretically thwart some modes of interference—but not all.