WASHINGTON — When the Pentagon established the Space Development Agency five years ago, it encountered fierce resistance from stalwarts of the military’s traditional satellite programs.
The agency had been given an ambitious but controversial mission: to build a new orbital architecture for national security using small satellites and commercially available technologies, overturning decades of preference for larger, ultra-costly spacecraft that took years to design and launch.
Many in the Air Force’s procurement ranks viewed the idea as heresy, threatening the huge investments and contractor relationships behind existing satellite programs.
But five years later, the agency is deploying the initial portion of a low-Earth orbit constellation called the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. It has 27 satellites on orbit and plans to launch more than 160 over the next 18 months.
“You’re going to ruffle feathers and you’re not going to make friends, but that’s what you need to do to be disruptive,” said Derek Tournear, the agency’s director. “And so far, it’s been working well.”
The Space Development Agency now has 322 employees and an annual budget of more than $4.2 billion.
The agency is viewed inside the Pentagon — and now the Space Force, which was carved out of the Air Force in December 2019 — as a model for a swifter, more commercial style of procurement and launch — perhaps a paradigm for how the military could overhaul its purchasing more broadly.
During a recent interview with SpaceNews, Tournear acknowledged that the path for the Space Development Agency has hardly been smooth, with doubters inside the Pentagon and Congress initially unwilling to fund its first-year budget request.
A major challenge for the Space Development Agency has been ensuring timely deliveries from suppliers amid…
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