The U.S. Space Force’s first site for the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC) is to start operations in Exmouth in the Western Australian Outback in 2026, and a top Department of the Air Force official said on May 21 that the second and third sites will be in Texas and the United Kingdom.
For space domain awareness, “we are taking advantage of commercial [systems], where we can,” Frank Calvelli, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, told the Senate Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces panel in response to a question from subcommittee ranking member, Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), on the use of commercial systems for space domain awareness.
Space Force is able to use commercial telescopes and buy commercial data for space domain awareness, and “is putting [DARC] radars in three locations–Australia in the Outback, Texas and the United Kingdom,” Calvelli said. “That’s gonna give us space domain awareness to track really small objects in geosynchronous orbit. We’re also upgrading some of our internal Space Force antennas or telescopes to do space-based tracking. A combination of upgrades that we’re making on our systems as well as continuing purchasing of commercial and as more and more commercial companies start to take on the space domain awareness mission–taking advantage of that, I think, over time, we’ll grow the capabilities that we need for space domain awareness.”
Last month, Col. Bryon McClain, Space Systems Command’s program executive officer for space domain awareness and combat power, said that construction was moving forward on the Australian site and that Space Force was to award a contract for the second site in the coming months (Defense Daily, Apr. 11).
The Texas and United Kingdom radars are to field by 2030.
In 2022, the Space Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $341 million contract to build and field the first DARC radar “in the Indo-Pacific region” by 2025 (Defense Daily, Feb. 23, 2022). Yet, a revised timeline then called for the first DARC radar site to field in Western Australia in 2026.
Last September, the three nations in the AUKUS alliance–Australia, United Kingdom, and the United States–signed a Memorandum of Understanding on DARC.
The DARC collaboration is part of AUKUS Pillar 2, which is to spur allied cooperation in developing artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, cybersecurity and space systems.
Late last year, a joint statement on AUKUS’ Pillar 2 by the defense heads of the three nations said that DARC will field in all three by the end of the decade (Defense Daily, Dec. 4, 2023).
McClain said last month that “we’ve publicly released information on DARC sites in advance of when it should be released, and I don’t want to do that in the future.”
Last May, Northrop Grumman said that it had completed the Critical Design Review and a software demonstration for DARC (Defense Daily, May 30).