By 
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – L3Harris Technologies [LHX] is moving into production on the new Accelerated Missile Defense Tranche 3 (AMDT3) missile warning/tracking sensor satellites and experts to deliver all 18 units by the end of 2028 or early 2029, a company official said this week.
L3Harris expects to meet a record delivery rate, with “award to delivery by somewhere close to the end of 2028, and hopefully earlier than that” for all 18 satellites, Rob Mitrevski, L3Harris president for Golden Dome Strategy and Integration, told reporters here Wednesday during the Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.
Mitrevski said production is looking to finish around the end of 2028 and beginning of 2029, but he also said “there are some efforts toward accelerating that that we have in process, and we’ll see.”
The Space Development Agency (SDA) in July announced a $955 million award under Accelerated Missile Defense Tranche 3 (AMDT3) to L3Harris for fixed price Other Transaction Authority (OTA) rapid prototyping contract for an expedited launch of Tranche 3, Tracking Layer satellites by the end of 2028. SDA also awarded Sierra Space a similar $798 million contract for 18 satellites. These systems are in support of the larger Golden Dome missile defense program (Defense Daily, July 13).
The awards mean L3Harris was directed to build 18 Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS)-like missile defense variant space vehicles (SVs) across two orbital planes, while Sierra Space is under contract for 18 missile warning/missile tracking variant SVs across two orbital planes.
Mitrevski said L3Harris has already proved its ability to deliver this capability as a prime contractor for the SDA tracking layer via the two prototype HBTSS satellites it previously delivered to orbit, which he said AMDT3 is based on.
He emphasized this HBTSS-like capability is ‘the one and only line item in the Iron Dome executive order that used the word accelerate rather than develop and deploy, which recognized that we had the capability, the next generation capability, at hand, shovel ready, and ready to build.”
Mitrevski said the company has also invested in its production capability ahead of the contract award.
“We’ve made a habit of investing ahead, not only in our capitalization, where we put $125 million against our payload integration facility in Indiana, and another $100 million against our space vehicle integration facility in Florida, but we invested ahead of contract to make sure the supply chain remained resilient. Luckily, it worked out for us, and we were given the award, which means that we’ll be delivering AMDT3 in record time from the standpoint of our historical averages as a nation.”
He said the investment in their Indiana facility means they are driving to get to “at the very least a payload a week. We’ve demonstrated a significant amount of capability there.”
Likewise, the Florida space vehicle facility has a similar production capability and they are also working with tier two suppliers, including Intuitive Machines, as a spacecraft bus supplier, he added.
“You have to have bus capacity. They’ve demonstrated capacity and expansion and investment. You have tier threes where you’ve watched tier three suppliers start to increase their capacity. Remember, in 2020, low power propulsion didn’t exist as a capability. It was more high power propulsion, low power propulsion had to be stood up. Optical cross-link terminal capability and scale has to be stood up. Crypto capability has to be stood up. All those things continue to ramp as our quantities get more and more, and so our ability to create an integrated space vehicle is dependent on our ability as primes to make sure that we can create resilience in that supply chain,” Mitrevski said.
He boasted that due to the need for a resilient supply chain in these kinds of satellite systems that is “why we invested in the supply chain ahead of contract award and it wasn’t a little bit, it was a lot to make sure that that demand signal was very apparent to tier two and tier three suppliers, so that they wouldn’t go cold as a production line, so that they could deliver in a timely manner and not drive our critical path.”
Mitrevski said there is little difference between HBTSS and AMDT3, with them both having the same payload and a developed design.
“Same capability, it’s fire control capability…it’s really as close to build to print as you can get.”
