We call Tranche 0 our Warfighter Emerging Tranche because it allows people to start to develop their comm ops and their techniques and procedures to work with these kind of data.

Tranche 1 two years later, now we have hundreds of satellites in the Transport layer. We can actually start to get regional persistence for that tactical comm layer and we’ll move that data in and out of theater.

Figure 6.

For Tracking, we’re working within the department to say exactly what would be funded as part of Tranche 1 for Tracking, but ideally, we would have on the order of 47 satellites that would give us enough capabilities for regional persistence to be able to detect advanced missile threats.

For Custody, we’re working with mission partners to field out their constellations and get their constellations to plug into Transport to move those data. Some of those mission partners are commercial ISR providers.

Tranche 0 is our immersion Tranche and is essentially the free product, if you will, that will get people hooked on what we’re selling. It will allow them to see the data, understand what proliferated LEO can provide for their situation and then allow them to start to develop their plans around access to those data.

In Tranche 1, that’s when we have initial warfighting capability. This is our Release 1, if you will. This is when we have enough satellites up there so we can actually start to provide persistence over a given region of interest. We can actually start to affect a fight in different regions.

Tranche 2, hundreds more satellites, and now we have global persistence, not just regional persistence. That’s our final operating capability. In Tranche 3, that’s when we start to fold in lessons learned from Tranche 1. We start to pull in new technology that was developed along the way and then we can start to respond to new Tranches as they come online.

Tranche 4 and beyond, every two years, new technology gets fielded, more satellites get fielded, and we adjust based on threat and need. So, that’s how we operate.

How are we doing this execution-wise? One of the key things that we’ve learned over the year is that you can do quite well with distributed operations (See Figure 6).

Those are all of the locations where SDA has individuals that are working and operating, helping us to make this happen, so we’re distributed. Our next facility is going to open up some ground and mission operations center at in North Dakota. We have distributed operations to make sure we have access to talent where we need to and we can get to those missions in those locations (See Figure 7).

Figure 7 shows how busy we’ve been in the last year. It seems like not that long ago, when I was in person at the last smallsat conference talking about our plans for 2020, and I just want to highlight that we have been successful in hitting all of the milestones and achieving what we expected to achieve in 2020, even despite all of the challenges with COVID.

The key contracts (see Figure 8) that are critical to that Tranche 0 success. For Transport, we have 20 satellites, 10 on contract from Lockheed Martin and YORK Space Systems.

The Naval Research Laboratory is helping us with Ground. Missions Systems Engineering and Integration is done by Perspecta. They’re helping to make sure all of these pieces and parts come together, as we have multiple performers with multiple pieces.

Launch was the most recent contract awarded to SpaceX for two launches, one in September of 2022 and the second one no later than March of 2023.

And Tracking, we have two performers there, each delivering four satellites — L3Harris and SpaceX. As part of our mission team, MDA has two satellites and they have L3Harris and Northrop Grumman on their team.

Figure 7.

All of these performers are the ones actually doing the work. At the SDA, we’re in the government, we don’t actually do anything, we try to enable the folks that are actually doing the work. This is our Tranche 0 team and they’re actually building the satellites and making it happen.

The SDA accomplishments — we did deliver two satellites, nine months after receiving our initial funding. Those two satellites are at the bottom of this graphic. This was our holiday card (see Figure 9 on the following page) — this was a joint mission between DARPA, AFRL and SDA to build these two satellites.

Unfortunately, there was a mishap during payload processing down at the Cape, so they were not two of the 143 satellites that were launched as part of the SpaceX Transporter 1 mission. But, the good news is, while they were damaged in payload processing, we will be able to repair them and we will be able to launch them on Transporter-2.

Now let’s talk about some about some of the big impacts we’ve had. I cannot overstate the profundity of the proliferation and final development of architecture. When this was first pitched, this whole concept, within the Pentagon, within the department, people looked at the capabilities that we were planning to be able to provide and they said, “Who are those satellites to be able to do that?” With that, we looked at their historical model.

The chart (see Figure 10) reveals the hundreds of millions of dollars per satellite. So, if you want to proliferate hundreds to thousands of these satellites, there’s no way that’s affordable. I contended at the time that, no, the price was going to be actually less than $20 million per satellite and, in fact, it was affordable and I was basing that off what I had seen in industry to that point and what the commercial providers were able to do.

Figure 8.

As it turns out, you look at our Transport satellite, those 20 satellites — if you take the average cost of all the NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering costs) on those 20 satellites — it averages out to $14.1 million. It really shows that, yes, in fact, this is believable and it can be done at an affordable cost.