Ready for Launch: Small Agency Blazes Trail For New Space Architecture.

• Author: Luckenbaugh, Josh

The Space Development Agency is trying to live up to its motto--"Semper Citius," or always faster--as it integrates with the Space Force and ramps up acquisition for the service.

The agency officially became part of the Space Force in October 2022. Through its acquisition strategy that prioritizes delivery speed over cost and performance, the agency is looking to transform how the service procures and fields new technologies and capabilities from the inside out.

Creating change has been a focus for the Space Development Agency since its inception in March 2019, said the agency's director Derek Tournear.

"We were established outside of what was the Air Force--there was no Space Force back then--for one reason and one reason only, and that was to come up with a completely new way to do space architecture that disrupted the status quo," he said during a recent keynote address at the Mitchell Institute Spacepower Security Forum.

The SDA modeled itself off the book "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen, "which essentially says... you cannot have disruption from within, it really has to happen from outside," Tournear said.

The agency has led the Defense Department's efforts to develop the National Defense Space Architecture, or NDSA, a proliferated system of satellite constellations primarily in low-Earth orbit to provide war-fighters beyond-line-of-sight targeting of mobile objects such as ships and advanced missiles in flight.

Demonstrating this increased capability to track and alert soldiers to vehicles and missiles will help U.S. forces deter aggression and prevent future conflict, Tournear said.

"Once you can demonstrate that we have these capabilities... that will prevent war, because everyone will see that and see how rapidly we can employ those capabilities and know that if they choose to actually engage in the United States, then we will be able to defeat them," he said during a panel discussion at the Air and Space Forces Association's annual conference in National Harbor, Maryland, in September.

To put the new spacecraft in orbit as soon as possible, the SDA introduced an acquisition strategy called "spiral development," fielding capabilities in two-year stages called tranches.

"We are not going to take 10 years to field a constellation, 10 years to field a capability," Tournear said. "We're going to start with a minimum viable product, and we're going to field that and increase that capability every two years by hook or by...