SMI’s Post

Shout out to Derek Tournear, director of the Space Development Agency, for an illuminating conversation this week at AIAA's ASCEND in Las Vegas on how the five-year-old agency is breaking the mold in space acquisition. With the initial launches of constellations of small communications and missile warning satellites in low-Earth orbit, SDA has proven that the Pentagon can adopt more commercial models. But now come some different challenges: ensuring a sustained supply chain to meet the demand for new and improved satellites every two years, and leveraging these new capabilities in military operations. Tournear struck a cautiously optimistic tone that the growing number of SDA contactors and bidders - including Lockheed Martin, York Space Systems LLC, SpaceX, L3 Technologies, Northrop Grumman, Ball Aerospace, and General Dynamics - is a positive sign that industry is in it for the long haul. He said one major focus now is considering additional steps to ensure sufficient payload processing facilities to meet the agency's ambitious launch schedule. And through the agency's Warfighter Integration Cell, SDA is beginning to demonstrate how these new capabilities can influence the fight. Bottom line: Tournear is confident but also acutely aware that the next few years will be crucial in proving whether the model can really work long term. As a recent assessment from The Aerospace Corporation concluded: "Congress and United States Department of Defense leadership have been supportive of the agency and have given it tremendous budgetary and acquisition flexibility. Whether SDA continues to receive flexibility may depend on its operational success as it pursues quantities and time frames never before achieved in defense space acquisition." Read the Aerospace report here: https://lnkd.in/eqYiuKsq