Department of Defense:

I know we have people in the room who don’t normally follow us so I’ll give a little more background about SDA. SDA was created in 2019 to field a completely new way for doing space architecture for the Department of Defense. And it was an architecture based on two pillars. Number one was proliferation, hundreds and hundreds of satellites to be able to — to get the — to get the capabilities we need; and — and pillar number two was spiral development. Every two years, we would go out and — and field new capabilities, and that’s — that’s what we’re here to talk about today.

So that was in 2019, and in 2019, Space Development Agency put together a plan that would show how we would get capabilities to enable beyond-line-of-sight targeting for our warfighters, to be able to get data for targets to them directly into theater anywhere in the world, number one; and number two, be able to do that same mission except for advanced missiles in flight. So we’re talking about the new hypersonic glide vehicles that you see developed and — and discussed a lot in the news, be able to detect them, track them and then eventually, calculate an actual targeting solution for those advanced missiles and send that down to an interceptor directly in flight.

We call it our spirals tranches. Tranche Zero launches in — in just 10 weeks, first launch of Tranche 0, and then Tranche 1 will launch in 2024, Tranche 2, 2026, et cetera. And we put together that plan and that outline, and that’s what we’re here to talk about today, is the — how that plan has come together with this newest award. And this award is for our tracking satellites, so “tracking” means missile tracking. So these are the satellites that are able to actually do that advanced missile detection and tracking mission. And we’re talking about Tranche 1, so these satellites will launch as part of that Tranche 1 constellation.

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