The Space Development Agency (SDA) had planned to resume Tranche 1 launches early this year, but is in a “strategic pause” that is to end with the next launches in May or June, Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo, the agency’s acting director, said on Monday.
Last September and October, 42 communications satellites–21 by York Space Systems [YSS] and 21 by Lockheed Martin [LMT]–launched for Tranche 1 of the Transport Layer, and SDA’s plan was to continue one launch per month for 10 straight months to get its constellation of 154 Tranche 1 space vehicles on orbit (Defense Daily, Sept. 10, 2025).
“We have had a strategic pause for a couple of things,” Sandhoo said at the SatShow in Washington, D.C. “One was we launched the second plane [the 21 Lockheed Martin satellites] in the middle of a government shutdown so there was some disruption just to get a team to get that done.”
The second reason for the “strategic pause” is “we saw a handful of things that we kind of stopped and made sure we fix those for the next set of launches,” according to Sandhoo. “We’re in the middle of that right now.”
“It’s not an easy thing to check them all out,” he said.
Another challenge is the optical mesh network.
“On the operations side of things, we have not yet started building out the optical mesh in Tranche 1,” Sandhoo said. “We are going through the checkouts…We are about three months behind.”
The Lockheed Martin and York satellites are still going through the vendor-run launch and early orbit phase checkouts before control is handed over to the government to begin operational testing, Col. Alexander Rasmussen, chief capability officer at SDA, said during a separate panel at SatShow.
SDA and the vendors have their operational teams in place at the agency’s operations centers in Huntsville, Ala., and Grand Forks, N.D., which are “ready to get online” later this spring or early summer, Rasmussen said.
Once operational testing begins, SDA “as able” also wants to “provide capability early for warfighters around the globe,” he said. The agency is already working with combatant commands and warfighters on the best ways to serve them, he said.
Over the past few months, York has been demonstrating Link 16 connectivity to assets in space, Melanie Preisser, the company’s executive vice president, said alongside Rasmussen.
“But I think the demonstration was even more important than that,” she said. “So, we also showed that you can connect two or more different domains–space and air, or space and ocean, etcetera, and so that is promising for the capabilities that are going to be required as we move toward things like the Golden Dome architecture.”
