Dubbed “Dragoon,” the satellite was one of the multiple payloads launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Monday via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of the company’s Transporter-14 smallsat rideshare mission, according to SDA. The spacecraft is the first of 12 prototype satellites developed by York Space Systems under SDA’s Tranche 1 Demonstration and Experimentation System (T1DES) program to go on orbit.

In 2022, York Space Systems received a $200 million other transaction agreement from SDA to develop and deliver 12 T1DES platforms that were slated for launch beginning in fiscal 2026. However, the company accelerated delivery of the first payload to prepare it for Monday’s mission “in response to an identified agency need,” York said in a statement.

“The Dragoon mission showcases exactly why our rapid mission delivery model matters,” Melanie Preisser, York’s general manager and executive vice president, said in a statement. “When SDA needed this capability sooner, we didn’t just accelerate, we delivered. That kind of responsiveness is what today’s defense posture demands.”

SDA did not provide many details about the specific demonstration that the recently deployed Dragoon satellite will conduct on orbit, but noted in a statement that the payload will enable “tactical data delivery to warfighter platforms to support capabilities like targeting, missile warning and tracking of advanced missile threats” and “support integration with tactical [SATCOM] system capabilities from low Earth orbit.”

Broadly, birds developed under the T1DES program will augment the Tranche 1 transport layer of the agency’s future mega-constellation known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) and inform requirements for future programs.

“T1DES will demonstrate mission payloads and configurations for potential proliferation through future tranches of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture in an effort to lower latency of tactical data delivery and enhance beyond line-of-sight targeting capability,” SDA Director Derek Tournear said in a statement. “We’re very pleased to see this prototype space vehicle launch four months ahead of the original T1DES baseline schedule and before the first launch of Tranche 1’s operational space vehicles.”

The PWSA is a planned LEO constellation comprising hundreds of satellites carrying data relay, communications, missile warning and missile-tracking capabilities that will be launched in increments — known as tranches — every two years. The first operational batch of PWSA payloads known as Tranche 1 were expected to launch in September 2024, but supply chain bottlenecks and recent leadership instability have forced the agency to push the mission to late summer 2025.

The remaining 11 T1DES satellites are on track to launch sometime in fiscal 2026, SDA said in a statement. Once deployed, the constellation “will conduct demonstrations and experimentation of TACSATCOM, advanced waveforms, and Integrated Broadcast Service (IBS) capabilities, which are key for future connectivity of joint warfighters around the globe,” according to the agency.

SDA is also pursuing a second batch of experimental birds for Tranche 2 of the transport layer — an effort known as Tranche 2 Demonstration and Experimentation System (T2DES). The agency intends to leverage its new vendor pool established by the Hybrid Acquisition for Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (HALO) program to contract the effort.

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The Other Transaction Authority prototype agreement, worth up to $200 million, is for the development, manufacture, test, launch integration, and deployment of the T1DES space vehicles and mission-enabling ground systems.

The tech will “augment the Tranche 1 Transport Layer (T1TL) constellation with demonstration and experimentation of tactical satellite communication and integrated broadcast service capabilities from low-Earth orbit,” according to a press release.

The T1DES experimentation satellites will be used to demonstrate and evaluate new mission payloads for proliferation in future tranches of the data transport layer for the national defense space architecture.

“SDA is confident that the selection of York provides the best overall solution to deliver T1DES, which will demonstrate that tac satcom and IBS capability by leveraging the low latency transfer that’s provided by the Tranche 1 transport layer for that …  beyond-line-of-sight command and control,” SDA Director Derek Tournear told reporters during a media roundtable on Thursday.

However, “it’s a little different for the T1DES satellites [than the other Tranche 1 systems]. They will utilize different radios that go down to special users in the field and special platforms, utilizing the UHF and S-band frequencies that are not going directly down via Link 16 or Ka or optical,” he added.

The integrated broadcast system is typically handled by geosynchronous satellites today, he noted. But SDA wants to be able to demonstrate integrated broadcast service capabilities in low-Earth orbit.

“There are actually a lot of technical challenges that we need to prove out to show that the technology can be applied from moving it from geosynchronous down to LEO … where you have Doppler shift differences and things like that. Because we want to demonstrate that we can do this for the user … and the user radio on whether or not they’re talking to a geosynchronous satellite or a satellite in low-Earth orbit,” Tournear said. “That’s why these satellites are demonstration and experimental because they’re going down to users that are typically used to being served by geosynchronous satellites.”

Space-based data processing capabilities will be critical, he noted.

“The processing capability on board the LEO satellites has to be significant enough to be able to do all that processing on board, which is — which is where the real technical challenge lies. So, that is only enabled because of what the commercial industry has pushed in the ability to do a lot of this supercomputing in low-Earth orbit. And so we’re capitalizing off the commoditization of those supercomputers,” he said.

However, despite the technical challenges, the payloads being tested are more mature than those that will be integrated into the National Defense Space Architecture Experimental Testbed (NExT), which is expected to begin flying in 2024, according to Tournear. A contract for NExT was awarded to Ball Aerospace earlier this week.

“For T1DES, these payloads, although there are certain technical questions on them, we do think they’re of a maturity level that we can — we can do this acquisition and this demonstration at fairly low technical risk. And this would be a demonstration of a capability that we would certainly want to proliferate in the future. For the NExT program, those are all experimental payloads that have a lot of high risk, and there’s a lot of high technical challenges that are being burned down,” he said.

“Even if those [NExT payloads] pan out, then the decision on whether or not to proliferate those … will be determined at a later date,” he added.

The T1DES satellites are slated to launch in fiscal 2025, and the launches will be procured through the Space Force’s National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contract.

SDA hopes to be able to incorporate payloads that are successfully demonstrated by T1DES into the Tranche 2 data transport spacecraft which are scheduled to be launched in 2026.

“The way we work is we come up with a minimum viable product that we have a warfighter council essentially set our requirements for our next tranche. That warfighter council is scheduled for March of ’23. That’s when we would set our baseline minimum viable product for Tranche 2. if all is going well … with the acquisition and development of T1DES, our intention would be to have at least a large fraction of the Tranche 2 transport layer be populated with the same capabilities that we’ll be demonstrating on T1DES. So that is the plan,” Tournear told DefenseScoop during the roundtable.

Tournear said York Space Systems came out on top in what was a “full and open competition” among six bidders vying for the T1DES program.

“We determined that York provided the best value to government to deliver on-schedule, at an affordable cost, and meet our demonstration requirements,” he said in the press release.

York Space Systems CEO and President Dirk Wallinger said: “We look forward to leveraging our strong and established supply chain, mission expertise, and existing mass production capability to help ensure a T1 T1DES success. Our team understands the mission importance to the SDA, and our country, and is excited to be able to execute such an important mission.”

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