Above: The Missile Defense Agency’s mission. Right: HBTSS satellites, encapsulated within a SpaceX Falcon 9 faring, make their way to the launch facility near Cape Canaveral, Fla. Source: Courtesy of Missile Defense Agency
on the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), Defense FAR Supplement, and the DoD Directive 5000 series. The Acquisition Team quickly tar- geted a nontraditional acquisition strategy and the use of Other Trans- actions (OTs) under 10 U.S.C. § 4022. The team consistently sought ways to innovate, streamline processes, and enable capability to the Warfighter at the speed of relevancy through a phased development approach, in- cluding “rolling down-selects” that al- lowed the most promising solutions to advance through subsequent phases. HBTSS Phase I—Concept Devel- opment. The Acquisition Team deter- mined that the quickest way to initiate the HBTSS project was to collaborate with an external partner and leverage an existing OT consortium. Phase I leveraged the U.S. Air Force Space Enterprise Consortium and awarded nine fixed price agreements to both traditional and nontraditional defense contractors (i.e., “performers”) for the initial competitive prototyping phase for HBTSS concepts. The purpose of this virtual prototyping phase was to educate and inform industry about
the emerging threat and garner in- dustry concepts on how to solve the technical challenge of tracking HGVs from space. The initial concepts were orbit-agnostic and followed by an ex- cursion focused on concepts in the LEO regime. Subsequently, the de- termination was made that the HGV tracking sensor would be proliferated in LEO. HBTSS Phase IIa—Signal Chain Processing Demonstration. Phase IIa included a down-select to four per- formers, leveraged MDA’s OT Author- ity, and was critical in reducing risk and maturing algorithms before going to space. One of the biggest technical challenges that emerged with a LEO sensor was how to extract clutter against a moving Earth background when trying to detect and track dim targets. The answer was a completely new class of algorithms. This phase consisted of a ground demonstra- tion where synthetic scenes with embedded targets were injected into flight-representative hardware. This allowed for the new clutter algorithms to be tested within each competitor’s unique designs and essentially al-
The Missile Defense Agency’s mission. Source: Courtesy of Missile Defense Agency
lowed for a “fly-off” among the per- formers, again using fixed price agree- ments. HBTSS Phase IIb—On-Orbit Pro- totype Demonstration. Based upon the success of Phase IIa, the Acqui- sition Team was confident that the missile defense mission could be ac- complished from LEO and that the risk level was appropriate to proceed with an on-orbit prototype demonstration. Two fixed price agreements were awarded, and only 37 months later the two HBTSS prototypes were launched.
24 | DEFENSE ACQUISITION | March-April 2025
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