WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency is pushing prime contractors to line up secondary and tertiary suppliers for key satellite components amid fears of supply chain shortfalls that could delay the agency’s ambitious schedule for deploying a new proliferated architecture in low-Earth orbit.
Col. Alexander Rasmussen, chief of SDA’s Tracking Layer program, said the agency is in discussions with all its major vendors about “diversifying the supplier base” as much as possible after issues emerged with contractors being overly reliant on single sources for critical subsystems.
An agency under the U.S. Space Force, SDA has plans to spend about $4 billion a year on a proliferated constellation of hundreds of small satellites to be deployed on a frequent cadence. In order to leverage the commercial satellite market, the agency is ordering satellites from multiple vendors and requiring manufacturers to make their spacecraft interoperable via optical links.
That approach has created supply chain bottlenecks that delayed the deployment of SDA’s first batch of satellites, known as Tranche 0. The agency continues to have concerns about limited manufacturing capacity among suppliers to scale up production.
‘Energize’ supply chain
Speaking June 5 in an interview with C4ISRNET, Rasmussen said Tranche 0 provided a major lesson about getting the supply chains “energized early.” He said SDA’s prime contractors understand that they have to have a “different mentality” when it comes to ordering parts and components for satellites.
“We’re not going to do a milestone and then order some parts and then another milestone. We have to have pretty mature designs at kickoff, and start ordering those long-lead items really early to make sure we understand if there is enough supply chain diversity,” said Rasmussen.
During the Tranche 0 program the agency learned that multiple primes were dependent on the same vendor for…
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