During the COVID-19 pandemic, shortages of electronic components slowed down development of satellites headed to the Space Development Agency. But it’s not only parts and subcomponents that affect the timeline of satellite delivery, said the agency’s director.
“Even though it takes a while to get the hardware and the supply chain built up to actually build the satellites, it doesn’t matter what you see on the schedule on day one, I’ll tell you right now … software is always on your critical path, mostly because you can’t start a lot of the software until you have some of the hardware,” said Derek Tournear, speaking Saturday at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California.
The SDA is building the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, which will eventually include hundreds of satellites, delivered in tranches every two years, with each tranche providing more capability than the last.
The network of hundreds of optically connected satellites will deliver two primary capabilities to warfighters on the ground. The first is beyond line-of-sight targeting for ground and maritime time-sensitive targets, which includes mobile missiles and ships, for instance. The system will provide the ability to detect those targets, track them, calculate a fire control solution and deliver that solution down to a weapons platform so the target can be destroyed. The second capability is similar to the first but for enemy missiles already in flight.
Right now, Tournear said, Tranche 0 of the PWSA is already in orbit. That includes about 27 satellites. Tranche 1 will come in a few months, he said, which means about 160 satellites in space by next year to provide operational capability to service members on the ground.
The Tranche 0 satellites, he said, launched about seven months late due to supply chain issues that resulted from COVID-19, including, among other things, an inability to buy resistors.
Tranche 1’s launch will be delayed as well, he said, also due to supply chain issues. But now, he said, it’s not resistors, but much more complex parts.
“We can buy resistors all day long now, but there’s a difference between being able to manufacture an optical terminal or a reaction wheel on the order of single digits versus being able to ramp that up to where I need 100 of them,” he said. “And obviously people were a little optimistic in how long it would take them to ramp up their manufacturing lines. And we pushed them. We pushed them pretty strongly on that.”
Now, he said, the supply chain for parts needed to make satellites has caught up to what’s needed by SDA. But it’s not only parts that satellites need, Tournear said, its software as well.
“Supply chain is not only supply chain in the hardware and being able to build things, but we also need a robust industrial base that can create software, test software, get the software ready to go, and build that capability up,” he said.
Right now, Tournear said, much of the industrial base relies on foreign entities to produce software. It’s something he said he’d like to see change.
“It’s one of the things that we’ve kind of said we’re worried about that at the Space Development Agency,” he said. “We want our flight software on our satellites to be written in the U.S., because that’s one of the supply chain interdiction things that I’m worried about. And so that’s been a bottleneck.”
Tournear was also clear that he looks to America’s “industrial base” to build the PWSA, not just the defense industrial base.
“I want people to also … stop thinking about the defense industrial base,” he said. “We don’t look at the defense industrial base. We look at the entire industrial base. And by the way, if you happen to do defense as part of that industrial base, more power to you. But we want to leverage the commercial side of that: hardware and software, because those are both critical.”
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