Pituffik Space Base commander Col. Susan Meyers was removed from command “for loss of confidence in her ability to lead,” the Space Force said in a statement Thursday evening.

“Commanders are expected to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, especially as it relates to remaining nonpartisan in the performance of their duties,” the Space Force said.

Military.com reported Thursday that Meyers sent an email to Pituffik personnel on March 31, days after Vance’s visit to the base, that seemed intended to foster solidarity between U.S. service members and personnel stationed there from other countries, including Denmark and Greenland.

“I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the U.S. administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base,” Meyers reportedly wrote.

Meyers also reportedly wrote that over the weekend, she thought a great deal about “the actions taken, the words spoken [during Vance’s visit], and how it must have affected each of you.”

Meyers pledged in the message that as long as she is in charge of the base, “all of our flags will fly proudly — together.”

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell retweeted Military.com’s story on the email and added a screenshot of the announcement of Meyers’ firing.

“Actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated at the Department of Defense,” Parnell wrote on X.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has intensified his desire to take control of Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory partially governed by Denmark. Greenland is strategically located, and has significant resource reserves including oil, natural gas, minerals and rare earth elements.

In his March 28 visit to Pituffik, Vance rankled Danish allies by alleging “Denmark hasn’t done a good job at keeping Greenland safe.”

“Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance said. “You have underinvested in the people of Greenland and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful landmass filled with incredible people. That has to change.”

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen made his displeasure with Vance’s comments known in a video on social media later that day.

“We are open to criticism,” Rasmussen said. “But … we do not appreciate the tone in which it’s being delivered. This is not how you speak to your close allies, and I still consider Denmark and the United States to be close allies.”

Rasmussen said Denmark and Greenland remain open to discussing a greater U.S. military presence in Greenland.

Meyers became commander of the installation and the 821st Space Base Group in July 2024.

Col. Shawn Lee is now in command of the base, the service said. Meyers was fired by Col. Kenneth Klock, commander of Space Base Delta 1 at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado.

Developed for the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program, HBTSS, the L3Harris satellite has been on orbit since February 2024. According to MDA, the spacecraft is providing important test data and imagery of hypersonic test events.

Speaking with reporters April 9 at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Ed Zoiss, president of space and airborne systems at L3Harris, said the company is ready to start producing the HBTSS sensor in high volumes.

“The sensor has proven itself out, and we need to start full-rate production,” he said. “We’re ready to do it now.”

In an executive order signed just one week into his second term, President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon to start making plans for a Golden Dome missile defense capability made up of advanced sensors and interceptors designed to track and neutralize both traditional and high-end missile threats.

In response, the Space Force, Missile Defense Agency, National Reconnaissance Office and other Defense Department agencies have been crafting options for achieving that vision. They’ve also reached out to the defense industry for ideas.

Zoiss said L3Harris proposed increased HBTSS production as part of its response to DOD’s call for input.

“We put in an architecture that we recommend for HBTSS and how we would see it to have global coverage,” he said. “We’re waiting to see what comes back.”

Space Development Agency launches study on Trump’s Iron Dome order

An increase in HBTSS production would be a shift in how DOD officials have envisioned the sensor’s role in space-based missile defense — at least publicly. MDA launched the capability in partnership with the Space Development Agency, which is building out a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit that can detect and track hypersonic and ballistic missile threats.

That constellation will include tracking satellites equipped with wide-field-view sensors — built by L3Harris, Northrop Grumman and Sierra Space — and a smaller number of medium-field-of-view sensors like HBTSS, designed to track dimmer targets and send data to interceptors.

SDA is buying the tracking satellites in batches, or tranches, and has awarded contracts for Tranche 0, 1 and 2. Zoiss said the medium-field-of-view sensors SDA is buying for Tranche 1 and 2 are essentially copies of the HBTSS capability.

In a speech Wednesday at the symposium, MDA Deputy Director Maj. Gen. Jason Cothern said the agency looks forward to the capability being “operationalized” by the Space Force and integrated into SDA’s architecture.

Cothern said HBTSS has, to date, demonstrated “remarkable capability essential for missile defense.” MDA has used the satellite to track two separate hypersonic test flights and the sensor has collected more than 650,000 images of tailored test events and “interesting real-world events,” he added.

Missile Defense Agency satellites track first hypersonic launch

As DOD considers how HBTSS might fit into its Golden Dome strategy, MDA has begun work on a follow-on capability, a Discriminating Space Sensor, or DSS.

Whereas HBTSS was designed to track dimmer targets than traditional missile-warning sensors, DSS will help the Defense Department distinguish missile targets from enemy countermeasures, which are meant to make their advanced weapons harder to identify.

MDA plans to launch a prototype by the end of the decade, though Cothern said budget deliberations — which will be informed by the department’s Golden Dome approach — could shorten that timeline.

“The whole intent is to, like HBTSS, do an on-orbit demonstration of these discriminating capabilities to inform the future space-based architectures and what we need for next-generation missile defense,” he said.

MDA Director Heath Collins said last year DSS had completed ground concept testing and was ready to move into the on-orbit demonstration phase. The agency requested funds for DSS in its fiscal 2025 budget, but the documents don’t specify how much it asked for.

Like HBTSS, the agency will lead prototype development and then work with the Space Force to transition DSS for operational use.

“The military-to-military relationships, especially with my counterparts that I deal with on a routine basis …it’s business as usual,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told reporters during a briefing at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “We’re still discussing the same challenges we had. … We’re still working the same basic collaborative issues that we’ve been working.”

Saltzman’s comments come as U.S. aid for Kiev’s defense has slowed and the Defense Department is moving troops away from a Ukraine support hub in Poland. In early March, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency temporarily froze Ukraine’s access to key satellite imagery amid a broader DOD pause on military aid to the country.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also urged Europe to invest more domestic funding in national security and rely less on U.S. support. At the same time, U.S. officials have said they want the European Union to continue to buy weapons from American companies.

Saltzman noted that much of the Space Force’s engagement with European partners comes through NATO and the service’s commitment to information sharing with allied nations. Broader decisions around support for Ukraine and U.S. troop levels in Europe are outside of the Space Force’s scope or responsibility.

In the same briefing, Air Marshal Paul Godfrey, the Space Force’s assistant chief of space operations for future concepts and partnerships, said the service and its partners recognize Space Force support to allied nations with nascent military space capabilities and organizations is crucial.

“If we just cut ties, let Europe get on with it, then they’re going to have to spend significant amounts of money, potentially go down dead-ends, developing the sort of capabilities that the U.S. has put together over decades,” he said.

That message undergirds a new international partnerships strategy the Space Force expects to roll out in the coming weeks. Saltzman previewed the document Wednesday during a speech at the symposium.

“Our international partnership strategy is built on one key concept: Coalition operations will be far more successful if we work together well before those contingency operations become necessary,” he said. “We’re not tightly coupled in our training, if we’re not reconciling our operational concepts, if we’re not integrating our capabilities, we will have a very steep learning curve when called upon in crisis or conflict.”

The strategy’s three main goals are to leverage individual nations’ unique expertise, improve information sharing and interoperability and integrate across the spectrum of operations — from force design to employment of capabilities.

Saltzman said the Space Force wants to embed more allies into its planning processes and acquisition strategies, expand joint exercises and coordinate personnel exchanges that allow partners to learn from one another.

He also emphasized that the strategy does not view partnership in space as a one-way street, but instead recognizes that all nations have something to contribute.

“The trick is in focusing on areas where we have a comparative advantage,” he said. “Maybe it’s space domain awareness or hosted payloads. Maybe it’s launch capacity or even simple geography for a ground station. I firmly believe that every contribution can make a meaningful impact on space security.”

Saltzman and Godfrey told reporters they’ve been floating the draft strategy to foreign partners this week at Space Symposium and will discuss it in greater depth Thursday as Saltzman hosts a gathering of international space chiefs representing around 20 different nations.

Then on Friday, the 10 nations who are members of the Space Force’s Combined Space Operations initiative will meet to discuss partnership opportunities for the coming year.

The command recently produced its first-ever strategies for experimentation and AI and machine learning, Gen. Stephen Whiting said Tuesday — a step toward addressing operational needs by trying out capabilities that are available today from both traditional defense companies and new entrants to the market. The experimentation strategy was completed in December 2024 and the AI strategy was just signed out in March.

Both strategies prioritize missions like missile defeat, enhanced battlespace awareness, cyber defense and space control — a term the Defense Department uses to encompass the offensive and defensive capabilities needed to ensure the U.S. and its allies can safely operate in space.

Speaking at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Whiting highlighted a slew of recent efforts — including one by Space Command’s Marine Corps component designed to fast-track commercial space domain awareness capabilities. The component found an off-the-shelf capability and, through rapid experimentation that was coupled with funding and testing, helped inform a plan to field a military-tailored solution by 2027.

That capability, Whiting said, will help Space Command better track missile threats from China.

Space Command is also using Palantir’s Maven Smart System to operationalize space combat concepts. It has integrated the AI platform — which integrates software with advanced digital capabilities to help operators distill sensor data and make faster decisions — into its Joint Operations Center, or JOC.

The JOC provides a joint operations floor for multiple services and agencies to integrate data and decision-making. The center is using Maven to streamline tactical information between Space Command and its subordinate operations centers, Whiting said.

Separately, Space Command has been testing a capability to fuse missile warning and missile defense data in a way that gives operators a single picture of the threat environment. Whiting said the command has since developed an initial data integration layer and plans to install it at the JOC. As it expands on the pilot, the plan is to iteratively feed new capabilities to the center.

Whiting also announced a new pilot program to demonstrate sustained space maneuver. In partnership with the Space Force’s innovation arm, SpaceWERX, Space Command plans to award 10 firms contracts worth $1.9 million each.

“This effort will continue to invest in the most promising technology from commercial industry to help us solve the sustained space maneuver challenges so we can bring this joint function to the space domain,” he said.

The missions are part of a surge in NRO launches, the agency’s Director Christopher Scolese said Tuesday in a pre-recorded message posted to the agency’s website. In the last two years, NRO has launched 150 satellites — at least 100 of those flying last year alone.

Details about NRO’s proliferated constellation — which the agency developed over several years, largely in secret — are tightly held. But its mission is, in part, to provide rapid data collection and delivery across multiple orbits. Scolese said its performance to date is “setting a new standard for data collection, speed, and responsiveness.”

“This enhanced constellation is already shortening revisit times and increasing observational persistence, delivering enhanced coordination and empowering faster data processing, fusion, and transmission speeds,” he said. “All with greater resilience and security.”

These capabilities make it “harder for our adversaries to hide,” Scolese added, and allow NRO to provide insights to users on the ground in seconds.

National Reconnaissance Office launches proliferated constellation

The NRO designs, launches and operates spy satellites for the U.S. government. In recent years, it has expanded its use of commercial services to enhance and augment the capabilities provided by the satellites it owns and operates.

While officials haven’t identified which companies are building its new satellite constellation, Reuters previously reported that Northrop Grumman and SpaceX are involved in the effort. The agency has said the constellation will have a hybrid architecture, indicating it likely involves a mix of defense and non-traditional firms.

The agency plans to continue building out the constellation with launches through 2029, Scolese said.

Along with its heavy focus on launch, the NRO is also investing in improvements to the ground systems that operate those satellites. That includes upgrading data processing and cybersecurity capabilities and using machine learning and advanced data and analytics to improve satellite tasking and data collection and processing.

“It highlights another instance of the Space Force’s ability to complete high priority launches on a rapid timescale, which demonstrates the capability to respond to emergent constellation needs as rapidly as Space Vehicle readiness allows,” Col. Jim Horne, senior materiel leader of launch execution, said in an Monday statement.

The upcoming mission will incorporate lessons learned from the Space Force’s first Rapid Response Trailblazer effort in December 2024. For that mission, launched by a SpaceX Flacon 9 rocket, the service quickly planned and launched a GPS III satellite in months — a process that typically takes as long as two years.

Lockheed Martin, which builds the GPS III spacecraft, loaded the satellite on a truck at its Littleton, Colorado, facility and transported it to Buckley Space Force Base, where it was loaded onto a C-17 for the final leg of its journey to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The spacecraft arrived on April 3, and Space Operations Command’s Delta 31 is conducting initial satellite processing.

Malik Musawwir, Lockheed’s vice president of navigation systems, told reporters Monday that with the two recent GPS missions, the company now has only two GPS III satellites in storage. The remaining two will be ready for launch this year, he added.

Following those missions, the company is looking ahead to the first launch of the next variant, GPS IIIF, in late 2026 or early 2027. The first of those spacecraft, which will bring improved anti-jam capability and an improved civilian signal, are entering the integration stage of production and heading to final assembly.

The Space Force today has at least 31 operational GPS satellites in orbit — ranging from older models to the newest GPS III satellites. As concerns grow about the vulnerability of the service’s constellation amid increased jamming and spoofing threats, the service is exploring new options for delivering positioning, navigation and timing, or PNT, capabilities.

That includes a new constellation of small GPS satellites as part of a program called Resilient GPS. The service has three companies on contract to draft prototype designs and hopes to begin launching the first batch of eight satellites by 2028.

At the same time, the Space Force is wrapping up a broader study of its PNT architecture that will further define a roadmap for the service’s future mix of PNT capabilities. That analysis should be wrapped up this summer.

LeoLabs CEO Tony Frazier told Defense News in a recent interview the company plans to deliver the first few Scout radar systems to the Indo-Pacific later this year and is in conversations with several potential customers about further ramping up production in the coming years.

“We can envision a future where we can get to dozens of these systems over the next few years,” Frazier said.

In 2024, LeoLabs tracked 253 successful launches to low Earth orbit — 155 of those by the U.S. and 86 by its adversaries, including 65 launched by China. As the number of commercial and military launches increases and concerns grow about threats to U.S. assets, LeoLabs is expanding its network of ground-based radars to provide more coverage of what’s happening in orbit, especially from the Indo-Pacific region.

“There’s a big gap in being able to detect and track all that launch activity and then rapidly catalog those payloads,” Frazier said.

LeoLabs is using a mix of government funding and private capital to build out its radar and sensor network. In late 2024, the firm unveiled Seeker, its first ultra-high frequency radiant array system, as an early step in that expansion. LeoLabs developed the system, in part, using a small-business innovative research contract it received in 2023 from the Air Force’s innovation arm, AFWERX.

In March, the company announced it had received a strategic funding increase contract to operate Seeker in the Indo-Pacific by 2027.

The firm hopes the deployment of Scout — also developed with funding from a 2024 small business innovative research contract — will build on that momentum, allowing it to expand its own network and offer customers the option to either buy and operate their own radars or lease capacity to get coverage in specific areas.

“I think we’re seeing a pattern similar to what has happened in remote sensing, kind of ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] from space, where companies may have a network they own for a specific commercial mission, but then are able to build sovereign sensors for certain customers,” Frazier said. “We’re exploring both.”

Because Scout is meant to be expeditionary, its components are compact and its design is modular. The firm will showcase a truck-mounted version this week at the annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Frazier said there is also a ship-based version of Scout and LeoLabs is in talks with clients about a containerized version that could be rapidly deployed to a fixed site.

The awards are part of the service’s National Security Space Launch program, or NSSL, which it uses to acquire nearly all military launch missions. Under the deal, SpaceX will receive $5.9 billion to fly 28 missions, ULA $5.3 billion to launch 19 and Blue Origin $2.3 billion to conduct seven.

While ULA and SpaceX are both NSSL incumbents, Blue Origin is a new entrant to the program. Its New Glenn rocket has not yet completed the Space Force’s certification process, but following its first flight in January, it became eligible to compete.

“Today’s award culminates nearly three years of government and industry partnership to increase launch resiliency and capacity,” Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for assured access to space, said in a statement. “The result is assured access to space for our national security missions, which increases the military’s readiness.”

The Space Force expects to launch 84 missions between fiscal 2027 and 2032 — nearly double the number of missions it launched the previous five years. To meet that demand and create a path for more companies to compete, the service adopted a new strategy for this next batch of missions.

Under that approach, the Space Force created two lanes in which companies can compete. Lane 1 is for commercial-like missions and is geared toward new providers, and Lane 2 — which was awarded Friday — is reserved for firms whose rockets meet more stringent security and performance requirements.

SpaceX, ULA and Blue Origin were also selected to compete for Lane 1 missions, along with Stoke Space and Rocket Lab, which are both developing new rockets slated to fly this year.

The service expects to release its first request for proposals for Lane 1 launches later this spring and companies will have a chance to compete for additional missions in fiscal 2026.

Lecornu will also ask the European Commission to speed up deployment and increase the budget for the IRIS² sovereign satellite constellation, the French minister said in a press briefing with his Danish counterpart, Troels Lund Poulsen, in Paris on Tuesday afternoon.

The defense ministers are meeting on April 2 and 3 to discuss a white paper on the future of European defense, developing and financing defense capabilities within the 27-nation bloc, and military support for Ukraine. Lecornu said policymakers need to move on to concrete measures to build up Europe’s defense industry.

“We have to stop with the big speeches, we have to stop with the packages of billions where we don’t always know exactly how it works,” Lecornu said. “We need things that are sometimes perhaps more modest, but very effective.”

The EU’s Act in Support of Ammunition Production “worked, we are therefore calling for a new edition of an ASAP-type facility,” according to Lecornu. The European Commission allocated €500 million ($540 million) through the program to boost ammo output, and now forecasts the bloc will produce 2 million artillery shells this year, from an estimated annual capacity of 230,000 rounds in early 2023.

A new ammo program should cover both simple and complicated munitions, including missiles, the French minister said. EU aid could help in a hypothetical scenario where missile maker MBDA sets up licensed production in European countries by adding to corporate financing and purchases by the host country, according to Lecornu.

France has support from other EU members to ask the Commission to speed up the IRIS² plan for a sovereign European satellite constellation, Lecornu said, declining to name the countries. The project is key to European strategic autonomy and is progressing, but has “an enormous challenge in terms of execution time,” the minister said.

The consortium picked to deploy the satellite constellation, led by SES, Eutelsat and Hispasat, is targeting full operational status for the early 2030s, pushing back IRIS² by several years compared to an EU timetable in March 2023 that envisaged full service in 2027.

“It’s an issue on which the commission is obviously eagerly awaited and on which we’d like to help,” Lecornu said. “It’s about money because it’s about speeding up, and money means speeding up. It may also be about simplifying the organization, the very governance of IRIS².”

“It makes sense, because we don’t have a solution, we don’t have a plan B, it’s either that or Starlink,” Lecornu said, referring to the satellite constellation operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

“The problem is, we have industrial time that is sometimes decorrelated from diplomatic time,” Lecornu said. “I’m trying to reduce diplomatic time, because there are still people making noise and doing complicated things, when in fact there are industrial opportunities.”

Denmark formalized the purchase of French Mistral short-range air defense missiles in Paris, and “we can do even more together,” Lund Poulsen said. “I hope also that it will be possible to make further announcements in the coming month about new procurements in France. I think the French defense companies have a lot to offer.”

The Danish government in February agreed to allocate an additional 50 billion kroner ($7.2 billion) to defense over the coming two years, boosting defense spending to more than 3% of GDP in 2025 and 2026.

The Nordic nation is looking to rebuild an air-defense bubble after decommissioning its Hawk missile systems in 2005. Denmark last month shortlisted the French-Italian SAMP/T and the U.S. Patriot air-defense batteries to cover the high end of the threat spectrum in its planned purchase, while MBDA France’s VL MICA system, Kongsberg’s NASAMS, the IRIS-T SLM from Germany’s Diehl Defence and the U.S. IFPC. are in competition for the lower end.

“We are in Denmark very concerned about the situation with the land-based air-defense system, because we don’t have any,” Lund Poulsen said. He expects the government will be able to make a decision “before summer.”

“I’m very happy that France also today have told me directly that they will be willing to collaborate with Denmark in that context,” the Danish minister said. “We have to see the offers that will come in, but let me just underline that it is of our interest also to have a decision before summer.”

Buying SAMP/T would make Denmark the first export customer in the EU for the long-range air-defense system, with France and Italy currently the only users in the 27-nation bloc. Ukraine uses a donated SAMP/T system to defend the Kyiv area, while Singapore is the only other export user following a purchase in 2013.

Meanwhile, Lund Poelsen commented on the American military presence in Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, where the U.S. operates Pituffik Space Base. U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to annex Greenland, citing security needs.

“Denmark has a long-lasting good relationship with the U.S., also about the security in Greenland,” the minister said. He said Denmark has an agreement from 1951 about the U.S. presence in the territory. “So if the U.S. would like to have more bases in Greenland, it is possible for them to raise that question to the Danish government. And will they be doing that? We’ll be willing to discuss that.”

The award follows a Space Systems Command contract Northrop received last year to develop a tanker satellite called GAS-T, or the Geosynchronous Auxiliary Support Tanker, and incorporates technology and lessons learned from that effort, which the company recently completed.

“The Elixir program enables us to complete development, build and launch of our refueling payload, which was at the heart of our GAS-T tanker,” Lauren Smith, Northrop’s program manager for in-space refueling, said Monday in an interview with Defense News. “So, this is building on Northrop Grumman’s existing work and continuing to advance technologies for refueling.”

Smith would not disclose the value of the Elixir contract, the technical details of the tanker payload or the planned timing of the launch. She did, however, note that the Rapid On-Orbit Space Technology Evaluation Ring, or ROOSTER-5, will carry the payload. That spacecraft had been previously slated to fly in a 2027 mission.

The receiving spacecraft will be fitted with the company’s Passive Refueling Module, an interface for satellite refueling that the Space Force named last year as one of its preferred standard interfaces.

According to Smith, Elixir aims to tackle three fundamental technical challenges: rendezvous and proximity operations — positioning satellites close together so that one can attach to another; docking, or making contact, with another satellite; and transferring fuel from one spacecraft to another.

“Performing refueling in space does require a carefully orchestrated dance, and we’re really looking forward to proving that out on orbit,” she said. “The scale at which this mission is being performed will position the technology well for a streamlined transition to future operational use, should the customer decide to do so.”

In-space refueling is seen as a key near-term enabler for mobility in space — a high priority for the Space Force as China and Russia demonstrate the ability to perform complex maneuvers in space that could impede U.S. operations. Speaking at a defense conference in March, Gen. Michael Guetlein said commercial space firms had observed multiple instances of Chinese satellites performing what he called “satellite dogfighting” maneuvers in orbit.

“We have observed five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchronicity and in control,” Guetlein said March 18 during the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington. “That’s what we call dogfighting in space. They are practicing tactics, techniques and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another.”

The Space Force has yet to lay out its vision for how it will incorporate satellite refueling and servicing capabilities into its architecture, but Elixir is one of several demonstrations it will stage over the next few years to help inform those plans.

That includes a 2026 mission involving a refueling spacecraft built by Astroscale U.S. and an Air Force Research Laboratory effort called Tetra-5, where two satellites will dock with refueling vehicles — one with Orbit Fab’s refueling station and a second with Astroscale’s. That mission is also slated for 2026.

In a statement Thursday, the service said Rocket Lab and Stoke Space will join three other firms — SpaceX, United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin — chosen last year to enter the provider pool. The companies, both of which are developing new rockets for military and commercial customers, must fly their vehicles in order to be eligible to compete for contracts.

Both firms expect their rockets to take flight this year.

“With today’s award, the Space Force expanded our portfolio of launch systems able to deliver critical space capability. These new partners bring innovative approaches and increased competition to our mission area,” Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for assured access to space, said in the statement.

The addition of new vendors is part of the Space Force’s new strategy for space launch, which it calls National Security Space Launch Phase 3.

Under that approach, the Space Force created two lanes in which companies can compete. Lane 1 is for commercial-like missions and is geared toward new providers, and Lane 2 is reserved for firms whose rockets meet more stringent security and performance requirements. The providers selected to date have all been for Lane 1, but SpaceX, ULA and Blue Origin will likely also be chosen to compete for Lane 2 missions.

The service expects to release its first request for proposals for Lane 1 launches later this spring and companies will have a chance to compete for additional missions in fiscal 2026.

Lt. Col. Douglas Downs, Space Systems Command’s materiel leader space launch procurement, said the service plans to bring on more emerging launch providers in the coming years.

Along with their on-ramp to Lane 1, Rocket Lab and Stoke each received a $5 million contract to develop an approach to mission assurance, a term the Space Force uses to describe efforts to lower the risk that a Defense Department space mission will fail.

“Vulcan certification adds launch capacity, resiliency, and flexibility needed by our nation’s most critical space-based systems,” Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, Space Systems Command’s program executive officer for assured access to space, said in a statement.

To achieve certification for National Security Space Launch, or NSSL, missions, companies must complete a rigorous, yearslong process tailored to their rocket’s unique capabilities. For Vulcan, that process started in 2016. Since then, the Space Force and ULA validated the rocket met 52 certification criteria, including 18 subsystem design and test reviews and 114 audits of the spacecraft’s hardware and software.

The final steps of that process featured two Vulcan launches, the first in January 2024 and the second last October. During the second mission, the rocket suffered an anomaly involving its Northrop Grumman-provided solid rocket booster. In February, ULA CEO Tory Bruno told reporters the issue was found to be a manufacturing defect involving a booster component.

The investigation into that root cause appears to have delayed the Space Force’s certification process, which was expected to wrap up by the end of 2024.

In a statement Wednesday, Bruno said the Space Force’s long-awaited sign-off positions Vulcan to meet the service’s “expanding spectrum of missions.”

“This next-generation rocket provides high performance and extreme accuracy while continuing to deliver to our customer’s most challenging and exotic orbits,” he said.

ULA and SpaceX are the only companies with rockets certified to fly NSSL missions. For years prior to the certification of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, ULA with its legacy Atlas V and Delta IV rockets — which the company is retiring — was the sole provider of military launch services. In 2020, SpaceX won a 40% share of those missions slated to fly between fiscal years 2022 and 2027 with ULA maintaining the remaining 60%.

Vulcan’s certification means SpaceX’s line of Falcon rockets should have at least one competitor for future launches, though several other companies are lining up behind the two firms. One of those contenders is Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which conducted its first certification flight in January.

A handful of other firms are further behind in their launch vehicle development. Rocket Lab hopes to fly its Neutron rocket by December 2025 and Relativity Space plans to launch its Terran R sometime next year. Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman and Firefly Aerospace have partnered to develop the Medium Launch Vehicle and are also targeting a 2026 debut.

Speaking March 20 at a virtual Defense One conference, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said the service is encouraged by the number of companies looking to break into the military space launch market.

“It was only about 10 years ago when we had one provider and just a few rocket systems,” Saltzman said. “I think we’re on the right trajectory.”

The service planned to launch the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 demonstration, dubbed NTS-3, in 2022 with an eye toward experimenting with new positioning, navigation and timing signals and payloads that could be installed on future GPS satellites and shape its long-term plans for the constellation.

The satellite’s development, led by the Air Force Research Lab and L3Harris, has proceeded on schedule, but delays to the rocket assigned to fly the spacecraft — United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan Centaur — have stalled the program for years. The mission is slated to fly on Vulcan’s first national security launch this year, but those plans are on hold as the company awaits final certification from the Space Force.

Cordell DeLaPena, who oversees the Space Systems Center’s positioning, navigation and timing and satellite communications portfolios, said the service is weighing its options for how to proceed with integrating NTS-3 technology into upcoming GPS production lines.

“The longer it takes to actually launch those experiments, get the data and be able to assess it, the window starts to close on the availability of production vehicles,” he told Defense News in an interview.

The Space Force had intended to funnel NTS-3-proven capabilities into the production line for its latest variant of GPS satellites, dubbed GPS IIIF. The service plans to buy 20 of these satellites from Lockheed Martin and, to date, has ordered 10. The first five of those spacecraft are slated for deliveries over a five-year period beginning in 2027.

ULA’s new rocket won’t fly its first Space Force missions until 2025

DeLaPena said GPS IIIF is approaching the end of its design period and will soon shift toward production. There’s still room on the satellite for additional size, weight and power — or SWAP — which means the program could still make changes to incorporate NTS-3 technology. But the clock is ticking, he said.

“If there are a handful of these experiments that launch and prove themselves out on orbit and if they’re mature enough to start considering maturing those concepts for production, that would be the path,” DeLaPena said.

If the the Space Force misses its window to install NTS-3 technology on the first five GPS IIIF satellites, the service could aim to include any relevant technology either on its next batch of five spacecraft or as part of other PNT programs, DeLaPena said. That includes a program called Resilient GPS, which is meant to augment the larger constellation with a fleet of small, lightweight, lower-cost satellites.

The Space Force’s NTS-3 demonstration and its plans for Resilient GPS, or R-GPS, are part of a broader rethinking of its approach to providing navigation and timing capabilities. One piece of that involves the orbit in which satellites reside.

The military has traditionally launched its GPS satellites to medium Earth orbit, and that’s where R-GPS will operate. However, the service is considering a multi-orbit approach for its future PNT capabilities. Along those lines, NTS-3 is destined for geosynchronous orbit, and the Space Development Agency plans to launch PNT satellites to low Earth orbit as part of its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.

DeLaPena noted that demonstrating a “blended,” multi-orbit navigation capability is a primary goal for NTS-3, adding that countries like Japan, South Korea and India are all exploring GEO-based systems.

The Space Force is in the midst of an analysis of alternatives that will further define a roadmap for the service’s future mix of PNT capabilities. The need for an R-GPS capability was an outgrowth of that study, which should be completed this summer, DeLaPena said.

“With our commercial assets, we have observed five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchronicity and in control,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said during the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington. “That’s what we call dogfighting in space. They are practicing tactics, techniques and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another.”

A service spokesperson later elaborated on Guetlein’s comments, saying the operation occurred in 2024 and involved three Shiyan-24C experimental satellites and two other Chinese experimental spacecraft, the Shijian-605 A and B. The Shijian-6 systems are believed to have a signals intelligence mission.

The exercise showcased the country’s ability to perform complex maneuvers in orbit, referred to as rendezvous and proximity operations, which involve not only navigating around other objects but also inspecting them.

Guetlein listed the satellite dogfighting demonstration alongside several other concerning activities from “near-peer” U.S. adversaries. That includes Russia’s 2019 demonstration of a “nesting doll” capability, where one satellite released a smaller spacecraft that then performed several stalking maneuvers near a U.S. satellite.

These behaviors indicate the space capability gap between the U.S. military and its closest enemies is shrinking, a concern Space Force leaders have been raising for years.

“That capability gap used to be massive,” Guetlein said. “We’ve got to change the way we look at space or that capability gap may reverse and not be in our favor anymore.”

Guetlein’s comments come as the Space Force ramps up its emphasis on establishing “superiority,” or dominance, in space, both by defending its satellites from enemy attacks and through offensive measures of its own.

“The purpose of the Space Force is to guarantee space superiority for the joint force — not space for space’s sake. Space [operations] guarantee that, just like all the other domains, we can fight as a joint force and we can depend on those capabilities,” Guetlein said.

Col. Corey Klopstein, program executive officer for Operational Test and Training Infrastructure at Space Systems Command, said his team started discussions last year with the Air Force’s Advanced Training Capabilities Division about how the Space Force could be involved with the effort, known as the Joint Simulation Environment. The Space Force has since joined the JSE user group and is working with the program office to find ways to bring space capabilities into the simulation environment and eventually develop an advanced test and training capability of its own.

“The Space Force needs to provide space effects to the joint warfighter to ensure the joint warfighter can validate in their training events and their exercises, whether or not they’re going to be effective,” Klopstein said March 5 at the Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. “The Space Force also needs a high-fidelity environment to be able to validate not just our system performance in the threat environment that we anticipate, but also our tactics, and validate our tactics.”

The JSE is typically associated with the F-35 because the Navy and Air Force developed it as a high-end test capability for the advanced fighter jet. Though there’s currently just one JSE system located at Patuxent Naval Air Station in Maryland, the program is weeks away from flipping the switch at a second site at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada and plans to eventually host the capability at all of its F-35 bases.

As the services expand their JSE footprint, the goal is for the system to become the premier combat training environment for U.S. and coalition partners. As part of that process, they’re working with the Space Force to integrate simulated space capabilities and scenarios into the environment to help make training more representative. That could include things like space-enabled electronic warfare, navigation or communications.

Klopstein described that work as “ongoing,” noting that the Space Force is funding an effort to develop standards and specifications to bring those capabilities to the JSE.

Longer term, the Space Force is crafting a plan for an advanced simulation capability of its own. The service has training devices, but for the most part they’re not interconnected, meaning that guardians assigned to different missions can’t train together.

Klopstein said the Space Force is in the process of creating distributed — or cross-mission — and high-end training systems. On the distributed side, it has been using a system called Swarm for large, tactical training exercises like Space Flag.

Space Force to seek industry help to test tech, train guardians

Realistic simulation is also key for the Space Force’s testing enterprise, which relies heavily on virtual systems to validate that satellites and other space capabilities work as envisioned. Unlike the other services that can test their ships on the water or their aircraft in flight, the Space Force can’t validate most of its systems in the space environment, which makes the quality of its ground-based testing infrastructure even more important.

Klopstein stressed that as space becomes more congested and adversaries increase their threats against U.S. systems, the service needs an advanced simulation capability that factors in a changing space environment.

“We’ve got to make sure that our systems can survive in a threat environment that we haven’t had to consider in the past,” he said. “Gathering quantitative data that is representative of our systems that gives us the confidence level that the systems can perform in this threat environment is something that we’ve got to do going forward.”

The service hasn’t decided what a JSE for space could look like and hasn’t announced any specific timeline in that regard, but Klopstein said the service wants to learn from the Air Force’s work on the program and carry those learnings into a future system.

“The partnership that we’ve started ... is only going to continue to broaden going forward,” he said. “We are looking to be able to prototype and partner with [the Air Force] to leverage that work that’s been done and potentially build out the Space Force synthetic and high-fidelity training environment that we need.”

Europe operates its own constellation of global positioning satellites called Galileo. Made up of 27 operational satellites in medium-earth orbit, the system provides positioning accuracy down to 20 centimeters horizontally and proudly boasts of being “the world’s most precise GNSS program.”

The Galileo system provides additional redundancy and independence from American GPS and Russian GLONASS satellites while being the only Global Navigation Satellite System, or GNSS, under civilian — rather than military — control.

For the system’s newest upgrade, the Spanish company GMV has been tapped to enhance the satellite constellation’s Galileo Reference Centre in Noordwijk, Netherlands, in a contract worth up to €27.5 million, or $30 million USD.

Acting as one of the cornerstones of the service, this facility keeps track of the quality of signals while also functioning as the European Monitoring and Analysis Centre in a joint UN project that includes other global navigation systems like GPS, GLONASS and BeiDou.

The upgrades will allow the Dutch facility to monitor vital parameters in real time. This will strengthen the center’s ability to succeed in one of its core tasks, investigating service degradations.

“With the current version, the monitoring function is done in post-processing,” GMV told Defense News in an email. This means a delay in detecting service issues. The upgrade will reduce the time needed to issue such warnings to Galileo users once problems are detected.

The tech facelift also comes with the implementation of a signal authentication service, emergency warning satellite service for public disaster alerts and enhanced search and rescue capabilities, along with strengthened cybersecurity, GMV’s press release said.

All the upgrades, collectively referred to as “V2,” should be ready by 2026 while not disrupting the Galileo Reference Centre’s operation in the meantime.

GPS signal jamming has become a significant concern in recent years, particularly in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Especially along the frontline and in the Baltic, interruption of signals is causing inaccurate position readings, which pose problems and safety risks to civilian flights and military applications alike.

Multiple countries, including Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden and parts of Germany, have experienced GPS disruptions which are often traced back to Russian transmitters.

In one of the worst episodes of satellite navigation interference ever, a 63-hour-long attack on GPS signals occurred in March 2024, affecting more than 1,600 passenger planes.

Spoofing, too, has become more widespread. As opposed to jamming, where the weak satellite-based signals are overpowered by noise from ground-based transmitters, spoofing imitates the legitimate data stream to mislead the receiver into thinking it’s somewhere where it, in fact, isn’t.

The signal authentication service that comes as part of the Galileo Reference Centre upgrade package addresses this issue by helping users distinguish between legitimate and spoofed signals.

Aside from the new work announced in the Netherlands, a global upgrade of Galileo’s entire ground segment is currently underway, with key sites in Belgium, the Indian Ocean and Norway already having been upgraded and 11 more sites slated for 2025. Alongside the ground element, GMV has also been awarded a six-year framework contract worth €35 million ($38.2 million) to upgrade the European GNSS Service Centre infrastructure.

The space component is receiving upgrades, too, with two satellites launching in September 2024 and six more to follow this and next year. The new arrivals promise to strengthen the robustness and increase the performance of the constellation.

A wholly new second generation of Galileo satellites is also proceeding through the pipeline, with the system moving from the design to the validation phase.

The service reached out to industry last year for concepts for satellites and sensors that can track activity and objects in space from geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 miles above Earth. The Space Force already has sensing systems in GEO through its Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, or GSSAP. But these new satellites would be small, potentially refuelable and lower cost than existing capabilities.

Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the acting space acquisition executive, said Tuesday at a Washington Space Business Roundtable event in Washington, D.C., that he’s tasked the Space Force’s acquisition team to push forward with a commercial analysis of the responses it received from industry that considers what capabilities are available off-the-shelf, their price point and the potential delivery time frames.

Space domain awareness is a top priority for both the Space Force and U.S. Space Command as they look to monitor and respond to threats in space. Purdy said Space Command, in particular, has been pushing for an unclassified capability, particularly as it looks to strengthen partnerships with U.S. allies and commercial companies.

Speaking with reporters after the event, Purdy said there has been significant interest from international partners in buying into the space domain awareness constellation the Space Force is exploring. Bringing on more commercial companies and international allies presents a challenge with a classified system, he noted, but the service is considering whether it could split the GSSAP mission so that the unclassified functions could be performed by outside firms or foreign militaries.

The Space Force is conducting similar analyses across other mission areas, Purdy said, as part of a bigger push to find areas where it can use commercial means to get the capabilities that operators need on faster timelines and at lower cost. Purdy said he plans to issue similar directives — called acquisition decision memorandums, or ADMS — for “a host of other programs,” including other space domain awareness systems, as well as satellite communication programs.

Purdy said the effort is meant to disrupt the Space Force’s typical practice of waiting five years or longer to refresh technology — an approach that doesn’t work when industry is rapidly iterating and introducing new capabilities.

He noted that some of this analysis won’t lead to major changes in programs, especially if it turns out the expensive, complex requirements are what operators need to perform their missions. The acquisition community’s job, he noted, is to provide options.

“A lot of the most expensive systems, they have key requirements that are driving that expense and time,” Purdy said. “That may be what the operator wants, that’s fine. But I owe it to them as an acquirer in the community to find out, ‘Hey, some of these new commercial options, is this a good trade off?’”

Regularly checking in with the commercial market and finding ways to introduce new technology on faster timelines isn’t necessarily a new approach for the Space Force. The Space Development Agency, which is developing a large constellation of small satellites to track missiles and transport data, has built its acquisition strategy around a two-year technology refresh cycle. Purdy said he wants to emulate that within other parts of the Space Force, including Space Systems Command, the service’s primary acquisition hub.

“I’ve issued those ADMs specifically to get us out of one-off, billion-dollar systems and into proliferated architectures,” he said. “We are absolutely trying to move into that same model.”

NGA’s mission is to turn data from satellites, radars and other sources into usable intelligence for military decision makers and operators. Given that mission and its lead role in the Defense Department’s high-profile Maven data and image processing system, AI has long been a part of the NGA’s focus.

But NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said this week he wants NGA to commit more funding toward AI efforts and establish new standards and leadership roles that allow it to better leverage the technology.

One of NGA’s biggest needs in this area, Whitworth said Monday at the Satellite Conference in Washington, is funding for the computing power that’s required to run large-scale AI models.

“We need to ensure that as we get additional models and we run inference on those models that we have the compute needed to do that,” he said, noting without that supporting infrastructure, NGA’s data processing rates could start to lag.

The agency also needs to invest more in data labeling, which is the process of describing or cataloging raw data to teach and improve the performance of AI models.

Whitworth said he’s having good discussions with the Defense Department and the Director of National Intelligence about funding and he’s “confident” NGA will get the resources it needs.

Also at the top of Whitworth’s list of goals for this year is establishing stronger AI leadership within NGA. Along those lines, the agency has created two new director positions to oversee AI standards and programs and an executive director who will lead AI operations.

Whitworth also wants NGA to make progress on establishing a standardized government framework for evaluating risk within AI models, building trust between analysts and the AI systems they’re working within and improving its ability to monitor adversary activity.

“With the added challenge of late supplier deliveries, it has become clear additional time is required for system readiness to meet the Tranche 1 minimum viable capability,” the agency said in a statement.

The satellites are part of a mega constellation of data transport and missile tracking spacecraft known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. SDA is launching the satellites in what it calls tranches and currently has 27 spacecraft in orbit as part of Tranche 0. Those first systems are meant to prove the viability of the constellation, and Tranche 1 will deliver the first operational capability.

The agency initially planned to start launching the Tranche 1 satellites in September 2024, but has walked back those plans on several occasions because of mounting delays from the companies building those spacecraft. Most recently, SDA was eyeing an April launch date.

Despite the delay, SDA expects to meet its requirement to provide “initial warfighting capability” by early 2027. An SDA official, who was granted anonymity in order to speak freely about the program, told reporters the team has been able to perform some level of validation while the spacecraft are on the ground, which should speed up the on-orbit test timeline.

The agency also has “a little margin and some flexibility” on its test requirements, which could help maintain schedule, the official said.

Tranche 1 is expected to feature 154 operational satellites and four demonstration systems. Of the operational spacecraft, 126 will be part of SDA’s data transport layer and the other 28 will be part of its missile warning and tracking layer.

Once the first Tranche 1 satellites lift off later this year, SDA will kick off a launch campaign targeting one mission per month.

The decision to delay the launch was made my SDA leadership in partnership with the Space Force, the official said. Supply chain issues have been a persistent challenge for the program, and while some hang-ups have been resolved along the way, others, including components like encryption devices and optical communications terminals, have remained.

Speaking at a Defense News conference in September 2024, SDA Director Derek Tournear linked program slow-downs to financial troubles among some SDA vendors who have struggled to scale their manufacturing capacity to meet requirements. That includes California-based Mynaric, which supplies optical terminals to several of the agency’s satellite providers and has struggled to ramp up production.

Tournear said parts of SDA’s vendor base are experiencing “growing pains” as they adapt to the agency’s go-fast approach, which calls for launching new technology on a two-year cycle. The model is built on the idea that over time, firms will adapt to this approach and face fewer supply challenges.

Meanwhile, SDA’s procurement model and its leadership have come under scrutiny in recent months, starting with a Jan. 16 announcement that Tournear had been placed on administrative leave due to an ongoing Air Force Inspector General investigation.

The investigation involves a past contract action that may have violated the Federal Procurement Integrity Act.

Later in January, the Pentagon’s acting acquisition executive ordered a review of SDA’s performance and organizational structure, establishing an independent team to consider schedule and development risks and recommend mitigations to any issues it finds.

In late February, the Government Accountability Office recommended SDA reevaluate its launch plans due to lagging technology maturity, claiming that early satellites haven’t met performance objectives. SDA said in response that while GAO is accurate to say the agency hasn’t demonstrated the “full range” of capabilities, it has met the foundational objectives it set for Tranche 0.

The space plane blasted into orbit from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in December 2023 on a secret mission. Launched by SpaceX, the X-37B vehicle carried no people, just military experiments.

Its predawn touchdown at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California was not announced until hours after the fact. Photos showed the white-and-black space plane parked on the runway in darkness.

It’s the seventh flight of one of these test vehicles. Space Force officials said the mission successfully demonstrated the ability to change orbits by using atmospheric drag to slow down, saving fuel.

It’s “an exciting new chapter in the X-37B program,” program director Lt. Col. Blaine Stewart said in a statement.

First launched in 2010, the Boeing-made, reusable space planes have spent as long as 908 days in space at a time. They’re 29 feet long with a wingspan of almost 15 feet.

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The Army awarded the firm a $178 million contract in March 2024 to build 10 next-generation, AI-defined ground systems, known as TITAN.

“One year after being granted a prime agreement for TITAN’s development and delivery, the first TITAN systems of this phase are complete on time and on budget, a significant milestone for the Army’s modernization priorities,” the company said in a statement.

TITAN is designed to help the Army strengthen the connection between its data-collecting sensors and the weapons and decision-makers on the ground, improving the accuracy and speed of its long-range targeting capabilities.

Palantir declined to confirm when it’s next delivery is scheduled, but the company expects to complete all 10 systems by 2026, after which the Army will decide whether to carry TITAN into full-rate production. Although the service hasn’t said how many systems it will buy, officials have estimated between 100 and 150 units.

Of the TITAN systems Palantir is delivering in this initial contract, five will be advanced variants that can integrate with tactical trucks and receive data from space sensors. The other five will be basic variants that will be installed on the Army’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. Although it won’t have a direct space downlink, the basic version will be able to access some data from space sensors.

The company told Defense News it handed over one of each variant as part of its initial delivery.

The company is partnering with several other firms on the effort, including Anduril Industries, Northrop Grumman, Pacific Defense, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Strategic Technology Consulting, World Wide Technology and L3Harris.

The team has been working closely with Army units, and a Palantir spokesman said the company has “integrated a wide range of soldier feedback” over the last year to improve TITAN’s baseline hardware and software.

“It’s going to take concerted effort from the very top of our government,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said Wednesday. “It’s going to take national will to bring all this together. It’s going to be a heavy lift across all the organizations that are going to be participating.”

In an executive order signed just one week into his second term, Trump directed the Pentagon to start making plans for a “Golden Dome” missile defense capability made up of advanced sensors and interceptors designed to track and neutralize both traditional and high-end missile threats.

In response, the Space Force, Missile Defense Agency, National Reconnaissance Office and other Defense Department agencies have been crafting options for achieving that vision. They plan to provide a response to the White House by the end of March.

Experts and officials have pointed out the technical challenges the Golden Dome presents — particularly when it comes to space-based interceptors. But speaking this week at the National Security Innovation Base conference in Washington, D.C., Guetlein said he thinks the biggest hurdles will be collaboration among the various organizations tasked with contributing to the project.

“Without a doubt, the biggest challenge is going to be organizational behavior and culture,” he said. “We are not accustomed to having to integrate at the level that’s going to be required.”

The Pentagon hasn’t yet delegated responsibilities for the Golden Dome. And while Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman has said the Space Force will likely play a central role, Guetlein noted that the effort must be collaborative because of the different expertise each organization offers.

Space Force will play ‘central role’ in Iron Dome, service chief says

The Missile Defense Agency, for example, specializes in defending against ballistic missile threats and integrating complicated systems. MDA also has a robust testing enterprise, Guetlein said, with advanced modeling and simulation capabilities that will be crucial for the project.

The Space Force, on the other hand, has a fleet of missile-warning satellites in orbit now, and the service is launching a proliferated low Earth orbit constellation developed by the Space Development Agency. Those spacecraft will provide key communications capabilities to link the space sensors that detect a target to the “shooters,” or weapon systems, designed to attack it.

“All of that kit has got to come together and be integrated in a system-of-systems type fashion,” Guetlein said.

Trump’s executive order also directed DOD to consider whether it would need additional authorities to deliver these capabilities quickly. One of the biggest needs from the Space Force perspective is the approval to conduct on-orbit testing and training, Guetlein said.

“It’s a very constrained set of authorities that we have to do on-orbit test and on-orbit training, and we would ask that that open up so that we can increase our readiness of our forces on the front line to be able to do that protect and defend mission,” he said.

Based in Los Angeles, California, Space Systems Command manages the process for buying and building most of the satellites, sensors and ground systems the Space Force operates. Speaking with reporters Monday, SSC’s Commander Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant said the compounding effects of the new administration’s workforce reduction orders, combined with the prospect of a yearlong continuing resolution — which freezes funding at prior-year levels and stalls the start of new programs — is “incredibly challenging.”

“There is a lot of concern,” Garrant said during a media roundtable at the Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. “As a command and as a commander, we are going to focus on how can we continue to deliver the mission with the human resources that we have.”

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and his team have issued a slew of orders aimed at significantly reducing the size of the federal civilian workforce. On Jan. 28, the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, offered employees a voluntary deferred resignation program that would allow those approved to leave their government job but receive a paycheck through Sept. 30.

OPM has also directed many agencies to fire probationary employees — most of whom carry that designation because they’ve been in their positions for less than one or two years — and plans to implement a sweeping reduction in force across the federal government in the coming months.

Garrant said SSC “had a considerable number” of employees apply for the deferred resignation program, which is being implemented this week. The command also has a number of probationary employees who could be affected, and SSC is expecting those cuts to take effect in the next week or two. An SSC spokesperson did not respond by press time to a request for details on the number of affected employees.

“The intent is to decrease the size of the federal government,” Garrant said. “As the commander of SSC, I’m committed to executing the administration’s direction and vision.”

Garrant said SSC is planning ahead as much as possible for what he described as a “rapid offramp” of personnel. The goal of the plan is twofold — to make sure affected employees are “taken care of” and to ensure that the work they were doing is absorbed elsewhere in the command.

“Just because someone leaves doesn’t mean that work doesn’t get done. It just means the billet that they were sitting on goes away,” he said. “We’re being pretty deliberate in our planning, to the extent we can, to minimize those impacts.”

In a separate briefing with reporters, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said he worries about the impact of workforce cuts on a service that’s still growing. However, he added, the service is designed to be flexible and has performed its mission with fewer personnel than it has today.

“I’m always worried about making sure we have the right workforce to do the positions that we’ve been given,” he said. “The good news is we were to be lean and agile. So, if you start cutting back, we kinda know how that works.”

The Government Accountability Office on Wednesday issued a deep-dive review of the Space Development Agency’s progress toward demonstrating that its satellites can connect in space via a laser link. The complex technology allows satellites to share data amongst themselves and with users on the ground using optical communications terminals installed on the spacecraft. The result is much faster, higher-volume data transmissions than traditional systems, which rely on radio frequency beams to send information.

Because the satellites in SDA’s constellation are built by multiple vendors, compatibility among terminals and the ability to communicate across a network of hundreds of satellites is key for their vision of high-speed data transport.

GAO found that while SDA has made progress in some areas — like developing an optical terminal standard, testing the capability in a lab and maturing some of the enabling technologies — it hasn’t been able to validate the technology on orbit as fast as it had hoped. That’s in part because of supply-chain challenges that delayed the launch of its demonstration satellites, dubbed Tranche 0, disrupting its timeline for proving the technology works.

“About one quarter into the 5-year design life of the first T0 satellites, limited capability has been demonstrated,” GAO said. “We analyzed SDA’s documentation and identified at least eight capabilities as central to demonstrating a mesh network with laser communications technology and could have been demonstrated in T0.”

Further, GAO argues that SDA’s mandate to rapidly deliver a proliferated satellite constellation — launching satellites with new capabilities on a two-year cycle — is part of the problem.

“SDA’s schedule-driven focus impedes its ability to incorporate lessons from each tranche, a key feature of iterative development,” GAO said. “As a result, it has not fully incorporated lessons learned and corrective updates into these follow-on efforts.”

The agency has successfully demonstrated some laser communication capabilities. Last September, it conducted an optical crosslink test using its 27 Tranche 0 satellites. At the time, SDA Director Derek Tournear said the successful test marked the completion of all the agency’s Tranche 0 demonstration targets.

Then in January, two SDA contractors — SpaceX and York Space Systems — validated the ability to connect two of their satellites in orbit, proving a key linkage between spacecraft built by different vendors.

Space Development Agency validates high-speed satellite comm links

While these successful demonstrations are “a significant step,” GAO said, they make up only a small portion of the milestones the Tranche 0 satellites were expected to hit. GAO recommended SDA demonstrate the required optical communications capabilities before its first Tranche 1 launch, which is currently slated for March or April. It made similar recommendations for future tranches.

According to the report, SDA officials contend that not all of the technologies GAO identified need to be demonstrated. But that statement is at odds with contract language that describes SDA’s intent to demonstrate the capabilities as part of its baseline system, GAO said.

Still, SDA concurred with GAO’s recommendations, saying that it does plan to demonstrate key capabilities in one tranche before launching another. In a Feb. 6 memo, the Defense Department argued that it had met its minimum capability requirements for Tranche 0 and intended to do the same prior to fielding future tranches.

An SDA spokesperson told Defense News in a statement Thursday that while GAO is accurate to say the agency hasn’t demonstrated the “full range” of laser communications capabilities, it has met the foundational objectives it set for Tranche 0.

“SDA successfully met the baseline objectives set forth in Tranche 0; proving critical technology and providing lessons learned for both the government and vendor teams, thereby enabling the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture to deliver future capabilities to the warfighter rapidly and efficiently,” the spokesperson said.

“We will continue to apply lessons learned across the PWSA, employing a spiral development model with each tranche building upon earlier generations – and informing the development of those capabilities with the latest available technology advancements and intelligence assessments,” SDA continued.

The agency is currently addressing concerns raised by GAO and may further delay its first Tranche 1 launch, which was previously slated for last year.

The watchdog assessment comes as SDA’s performance — and its director — face heightened scrutiny within DOD.

Pentagon acquisition office orders review of Space Development Agency

In late January, the Pentagon’s acting acquisition executive, Steve Morani, ordered a review of SDA’s progress as well as its organizational structure. An independent review team will consider schedule and development risks and propose remedies to mitigate any issues it identifies.

The team will also evaluate the structure of the agency, which currently operates as a standalone acquisition office within the Space Force. Rather than report to the service’s primary development and procurement field command, SDA reports directly to the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration and the chief of space operations.

Meanwhile, Tournear was placed on administrative leave Jan. 16 as the Air Force Office of the Inspector General investigates a past contract action that may have violated the federal Procurement Integrity Act.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to include a statement from the Space Development Agency.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in late January calling on the Defense Department to develop an “Iron Dome for America” — a more advanced version of Israel’s Iron Dome, designed to counter a range of missile threats, including hypersonic weapons.

The order highlights several space-based elements of this architecture that build on existing capabilities like the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program and the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, which includes a constellation of missile warning and tracking satellites.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told reporters Monday that given the executive order’s emphasis on space systems, it’s natural the service would play a key role in its development, adding that the service has established an integrated planning team, or IPT, to explore options in response to the order.

“I think we have a central role to play,” Saltzman said. “We are leaning forward establishing this technical IPT to start thinking about it from an overarching perspective.”

The team is evaluating what systems the Space Force already has in development to support the president’s order and what capabilities it would need to build. From there, it’s exploring questions around technical feasibility and drafting cost estimates based on current programs, as well as its projections for what a more advanced architecture would require.

The IPT will likely finalize that early analysis in the coming weeks — a truncated timeline that will require “a lot of triage,” according to a senior Space Force official who spoke to reporters Monday on the condition of anonymity.

Once complete, the Space Force’s IPT work will be shared alongside similar analysis being conducted by U.S. Space Command, the National Reconnaissance Office and the Missile Defense Agency. Senior DOD leaders will then conduct a series of reviews to determine next steps, including what programs to start.

The official noted that the Space Force’s intent is to provide an honest assessment of where the technology stands today and what is feasible to deliver — particularly when it comes to fielding space-based interceptors.

“One of the worst things to do is bite off a technical challenge that you can’t solve in a reasonable cost frame, a reasonable time frame,” the official said. “We’ll be very forthright with, ‘Here’s where we think the technology stands.’”