New acting SDA head William Blauser, who came to Air Force RCO last July from Systems Technology and Research LLC in Arlington, Va., has had a long career in Defense Department acquisition, including of space systems at the National Reconnaissance Office.
According to several sources involved, Tournear allegedly stepped afoul of DoD contracting procedures when awarding two prototype agreements worth approximately $424 million.
“I describe PWSA, the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, as the Android model,” said Space Development Agency director Derek Tournear. “If we get vendor lock, if only one works, or if they can't talk to each other, that falls apart pretty quickly.”
“On their aircraft and their ground units, they'll be able to talk directly to us with Link 16 to our Tranche 0 satellites that are on orbit now," Derek Tournear said at the 2024 Space Symposium.
The Space Development Agency has won International Telecommunication Union approval to test the Transport Layer birds over international waters and the territory of an unnamed allied nation.
"Here's the beauty of the spiral development program. I don't know what Tranche 3 looks like. All I know is it's more of what was on Tranche 2, and it is most likely going to be new capabilities," SDA Director Derek Tournear said Thursday. "I don't want to define what those capabilities are now."
Consolidate network monitoring, performance management, and fault isolation into a single, comprehensive solution.
SDA will decide next March whether the UHF- and SHF-band payloads being tested by T1DES should be integrated into its next iteration of Transport Layer data relay satellites.
Under the $324.5 million contract, the team will develop the "ground Operations and Integration (O&I) segment for Tranche 1 of the National Defense Space Architecture."
Chuck Beames, York's executive chair, told Breaking Defense that once up and running, the Tranche 1 constellation "will be used in direct support" of the Combatant Commands.
Military operators will be able (at least virtually) to ill be able to (at least virtually) "sit side-by-side, elbow-to-elbow with the SDA test team" as the various satellite "layers" are put through their paces.
Blending superior optics, advanced stabilization and AI-powered autonomy in a compact and rugged system, ASELFLIR 600 delivers unmatched intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities.
""Where will the money for this program come from, and will it means less money for the Space Force and all the existing space programs of record?" asks Secure World Foundation's Brian Weeden.