SDA Pushes Satellite Manufacturers, Suppliers to Adapt to Faster Development Cycles

The Space Development Agency’s (SDA) rapid pace is driving strategic business lessons for the satellite industry, experts said in a discussion on Monday at SATELLITE 2025.

Paula Trimble, the policy cell director for the SDA, explained that when the SDA was created almost six years ago, it was intended to be a constructive disruptor. “Not just for space, but for the entire Department of Defense, to look at how things could be acquired differently on different time scales and in different architectures.”

The vision for the future, Trimble added, is about proliferating a network of hundreds of small satellites, taking advantage of all the gains made in the commercial sector through low cost launch as well as small satellite manufacturing, then continually refreshing those capabilities on two-year timelines. That’s the SDA model — to rapidly acquire and deploy space-based capabilities, delivering capabilities every two years in stages.

“At the end of the day, what it is all about is delivering that capability to the warfighter,” she said. “Because too little too late would not be good enough.”

The SDA has launched 27 Transport and Tracking satellites, and conducted demonstrations that have proved the model. The agency is targeting an optical mesh network in space. “We're demonstrating those optical connections as we speak,” Trimble said.

The SDA is also working on delivering missile warning and missile tracking data to the warfighter with new sensors on orbit from the satellites.

Col. Dean Bellamy, the executive vice president of National Security Space, said that one of the big accomplishments of the SDA is developing resilience against threats. "A lot of folks in the room here know the adversary, and the pace of the adversary is continuing in space, and this model by the SDA actually is showing an ability to offer capabilities to the warfighter.”

Not only is the SDA pushing the front of speed to orbit, according to Paul Wloszek, general manager of Missile Defense for L3Harris, they’re also pushing the front of firm-fixed price contracts in an industry that is typically a cost-plus type environment. “They're pushing the front of getting some very new and novel capabilities through a system of systems architecture to proliferate more space architecture, but they're also removing roadblocks,” he said.

Jon Estridge, vice president of Operations for York Space Systems said his company is looking to develop state-of-the-art build capabilities and prove mass production and economies of scale.

In October of 2023, the SDA awarded York Space a $615 million contract for 62 Alpha satellites for the Tranche 2 Transport Layer. York is currently the SDA’s largest supplier of satellites.

SDA offers a kind of build-to-spec approach that helps out York, Estridge said. “The SDA does a tremendous job of putting out specifications like the automobile industry does. Then you build to the detailed specification and quality that's needed.”

York is looking at building five different constellations this year. “We're building 100 satellites. In one year, we're going to launch 45 satellites,” Estridge said. “The threat is such that we have no other choice. This is what we have to do. We have to be able to deliver capabilities at scale. We see that using commercial off the shelf components is really going to enable our ability to go fast.”

Wloszek said that the future for the SDA tracking mission is about completing the entire missile defeat-kill chain missile warning system. “Did you see a launch occur? That’s missile tracking. Do you know where it's at through the atmosphere? That’s missile defeat. Are you enabling a kill chain? Are you getting a sensor-to-sensor shooter latency timeline down enough that you can enable the missile defeat-kill chain? We're building upon those capabilities,” he said.

The entire SDA model is a learning experience, said Trimble. “When you're doing prototyping on a continuous basis, the whole idea is to rapidly iterate and rapidly incorporate lessons learned,” she said. “What we're all learning is that getting from the place of a nascent market that can build at scale to a mature market that can deliver at scale is going to take some time, and it's going to take SDA continuing to push, continuing to provide that demand signal to tell us that this is what we're going to buy. Here's the timeline. So industry, get ready right now. Start thinking about the investments that you need to make to be there when we acquire them.”

The importance of the industrial base is more critical now because there is sustained capability now.

“We have to have resilience,” Trimble said. “We have to have the numbers of satellites, we have to have the numbers of sensors, and we have to have the ability to replenish on a fairly consistent basis. So making sure that the industrial base is healthy is really the future focus of SDA.” VS