“Effective 17 April, 2025, Dr. Derek Tournear will return to his duties as the Director of the Space Development Agency,” a DAF spokesperson said in a statement. 

The department announced Jan. 16 that Tournear was placed on administrative leave pending the results of an ongoing investigation and put Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, head of Space Force’s Space Systems Command, in charge of the agency temporarily. Garrant was then replaced by William Blauser, deputy director of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, as SDA’s acting director in February.

While the DAF has not provided details regarding the investigation’s scope, Breaking Defense reported that Tournear was placed on administrative leave following an alleged contract dispute over SDA’s award for the Gamma variant of the Tranche 2 Transport Layer.

In August, SDA awarded prototype agreements to Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems — a Terran Orbital company — and York Space Systems to each develop and build 10 Gamma space vehicles. The variants are intended to advance the agency’s experimental fire control efforts and will be part of SDA’s mega-constellation in low-Earth orbit known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.

However, Viasat protested the award in September in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. According to court documents, Viasat claims the company’s proposal was undervalued by SDA while Tyvak and York Space Systems received additional guidance from the agency on how they could improve their bids, potentially giving them an unfair advantage.

SDA has since revoked Tyvak’s $254 million award for the 10 Gamma variant satellites and announced in March it will recompete the award. The $170 million contract to York Space Systems has not been affected by the bid protest.

As of press time, the Department of the Air Force did not immediately respond to DefenseScoop’s inquiry on the status and results of the investigation into Tournear.

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During the test, the contractor for the first time connected its hybrid SATCOM terminals to two commercial internet satellite systems — one stationed in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and another in geosynchronous orbit (GEO), according to the firm. The demonstration was the company’s first for AFRL’s Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI) effort, also known as Global Lightning.

“Northrop Grumman is responding to the U.S. Air Force’s need for rapid deployment of resilient communications to develop and field the technologies required by our warfighters to meet today’s challenging missions,” Steven Conn, the company’s director of advanced communications and signals intelligence, said in a statement. “This successful test, leveraging a diverse team of commercial and defense SATCOM providers, is critical for the pace of maturity on the Global Lightning program and the ability to begin flight testing in the near future.”

At the July demonstration, Northrop Grumman established connectivity between its hybrid SATCOM terminals to a commercial proliferated LEO communications provider at Ku frequencies, as well as with the ViaSat F1 satellite in GEO at Ka frequencies. The event validated ubiquitous communications and the ability to rapidly switch between constellation systems and orbital regimes, according to the organization.

Global Lightning looks to leverage commercial space internet services to establish path-agnostic communications for warfighters. The program is linked to the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort, which aims to connect disparate systems across the battlespace under a single network to enable rapid data transfer between all warfighting domains.

AFRL has given awards to various defense contractors and commercial SATCOM providers for the effort in recent years. In 2023, Northrop Grumman received a four-year, $80.3 million contract from the research lab to execute the demonstrations as part of its “call 3” phase that will demonstrate connectivity between military platforms and commercial space internet constellations across two use cases — communications in the Arctic region and airborne comms.

L3Harris also received a three-year deal worth $80.8 million to perform work on the call 3 exercises for Global Lightning. The company announced Sept. 10 it had completed a critical design review for its Rapidly Adaptable Standards-compliant Open Radio (RASOR) capability that will be used to test connectivity between military platforms and commercial space internet.

“Following this successful CDR, we plan on conducting integrated hardware testing within the next year to support Air Force flight tests currently scheduled to begin at the end of 2025,” Adam Milner, L3Harris’s senior manager of space networks, said in a statement.

Viasat, SES Space & Defense, SpaceX, OneWeb and Telesat are among the commercial SATCOM providers that have been contracted for the Global Lightning program since it began.

Meanwhile, AFRL is already looking forward to future demonstrations. Viasat announced Tuesday that it received a $33.6 million contract from the research lab to develop and deliver active electronically scanned array (AESA) systems as part of Global Lightning’s “call 4” phase.

The commercial AESA antennas are expected to support communications for tactical aircraft and enable connectivity across multiple frequencies, orbits and commercial networks.

“We believe hybrid resilient communication solutions are central to future government mobility operations and our teams are committed to continuing to help solve these multi-band, multi-orbit, multi-constellation interoperability challenges with high performance, cost-effective capabilities,” Michael Maughan, Viasat Government’s vice president of space and mission systems, said in a statement.

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