Q And we wanted to talk a little bit about the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. Tranches 1 and 2 involved missile tracking and defense capabilities, and you recently released solicitations for a Tranche 3. Can you talk a little bit about the contracting aspects and how you’re tracking with that? A. Tranche 3 is underway. We released a solicitation for what we call the Tranche 3 program integrator. So, we’re actually going to bring in a company to help us coordinate amongst the multiple vendors that are going to participate on Tranche 3 of the PWSA. Our acquisition model is a little bit unique in that we don’t just have one big prime that builds the whole system for us. We have multiple performers communicating with each other through common standards. We want interop- erability, but we do have multiple performers. There are advantages to that in the sense that we don’t get vendor- locked to one big prime. But there are challenges when you’re trying to coordinate with multiple performers. And for Tranche 3, we’re bringing on this integrator; that’s sort of one programmatic thing to highlight. In terms of the actual satellites themselves, you know we have our data transport layer and our missile warning/ missile tracking layer. For transport, we’re going to be field- ing 140 satellites and we’re dividing those up into three variants. We’re using Greek letters: Lambda, Upsilon, and Sigma. Lambda is going to be our advanced Global Link 16 satellites. We’re going to add additional capabilities to the existing Link 16 capability that we currently support. The 40 Upsilon satellites are going to support legacy global tactical satellite communications. And then the 20 Sigma variants will support tactical SATCOM [satellite commu- nications] using S band frequency. So, we’re rolling out with that. We’ve actually had an industry day where we’ve pitched that concept. We also talked during the industry day about the plans for our tracking layer. We’re not as far along with tracking, but we anticipate that we’re going to have a total of 54 satellites that we field. Thirty-six of those will provide missile warning/missile tracking capability, and the remaining 18 we hope will have missile defense capabilities.
For both the Upsilon transport variance and the mis- sile warning/missile tracking/missile defense, we have recently released draft solicitations looking for industry feedback. We’ll see what we get back. Our plans won’t change too much, but in terms of the specific mechanism contractually and programmatically, we’re looking to get industry feedback. We anticipate that some of those Tranche 3 solicita- tions will be awarded by the end of this fiscal year and early Fiscal Year 2026. Q Last November, SDA awarded contracts for about eight satellites scheduled to launch in the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2027 as part of the FOO Fighter program. Could you describe the program and its value? A. I can’t go into specifics with the program because the statement of work itself is classified. Like you said, it is eight satellites providing fire control capability to the War- fighter on orbit. We’ve also put into place a contract for ground sup- port that’s going to support the FOO Fighter mission called the Advanced Fire Control Ground Infrastructure. And FOO Fighter is part of that bigger Futures Program that we have. As the name implies, it’s looking at future capabilities. They’re not going to be at least immediately incorporated into the PWSA, but we’re trying to validate those on orbit to see if they would be good candidates for future tranches. So that was the whole idea behind that Futures Program Office. Q Are there any other ongoing SDA programs that you would like to highlight for us? A. I think the biggest one is probably our HALO [Hybrid Acquisition for Proliferated Low Earth Orbit] program. It’s basically an IDIQ [Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity] type arrangement. We have a pool of 19 nontraditional space companies. They were given small awards for about $20,000 each. They’re going to be competing for proto- type mission demonstrations on orbit. I think it’s exciting because it’s people that haven’t really been working with SDA yet that may have good satellite buses that we’d like
34 | DEFENSE ACQUISITION | March-April 2025
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