Air Force Magazine:

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.

With all going according to plan so far, SDA expects to launch five technology-demonstration satellites this year to test the feasibility of the National Defense Space Architecture plan. SDA Director Derek Tournear updated the Washington Space Business Roundtable on the SDA’s flagship program April 14.

The envisioned mesh-networked constellation, communicating among itself with lasers, would be widely sourced to prevent a single manufacturer from adversely affecting the whole thing and frequently refreshed with new satellites to upgrade the functionality.

In terms of the fiscal 2022 federal budget request, expected in May, Tournear has “no reason to believe that there’s going to be any significant reshuffling to say, ‘No, this is not the road we want to go on now,’” he said. “Nothing has changed within the department that I can tell as far as priorities and needs and this kind of overarching plan”…



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