Derek Tournear, director of the Space Development Agency, said SDA is working to build resilience in space through the proliferation of satellite communications systems that are cost-effective, cyber-hardened and interoperable.
Speaking at the Navy League’s 2023 Sea Air Space Conference and Exposition, Tournear said that SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture satellites undermine the idea of shooting down satellites to disconnect them from ground assets as they are “more affordable than the missiles that you need to shoot them down,” the Department of Defense reported Tuesday.
“We made it to where … it’s really difficult to shoot those satellites down just by just by virtue of proliferation,” said Tournear, a previous Wash100 awardee.
SDA is also investing in boosting its satellites’ resilience to cybersecurity threats, according to Tournear.
“If there’s a common mode failure that can take out all your satellites or your ground systems, then you can’t proliferate your way out of that. So that’s a major concern. We have a lot of protections in place, and that’s something that we put a lot of resources on to make sure that we’re hardened against cyber threats,” the official said.
SDA launched on Sunday the first 10 satellites for PWSA’s Tranche 0 Transport and Tracking Layer aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The low-Earth orbit satellites will demonstrate low-latency military communications to enable warfighters to track missile threats.
