News

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.

WASHINGTON – A U.S. Naval Research Laboratory research group will use its background in space system development to help ensure future satellites have the capability to work together.

Announced Aug. 31, NRL’s work supports the Space Development Agency’s two multi-million dollar contract awards for the development of the first generation of the Transport Layer, representing the first major and highly-visible step toward developing the National Defense Space Architecture’s inaugural tranche, entitled Tranche Zero.