The Space Development Agency announced a new agreement with two contractors on Monday to produce satellites that have the ability to defend against hypersonic missiles.
Out of the seven applicants, L3Harris Technologies, located in Melbourne, Florida, and Northrop Grumman Strategic Space Systems, out of Redondo Beach, California, won the contract, which the Department of Defense said has a total possible value of more than $1.3 billion. Each company will build a space segment consisting of two planes, with seven satellites per plane, meaning a total of 28 will be created. They will collect infrared data and help with network communications.
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The Tranche 1 Tracking Layer should be able to identify and track hypersonic weapons and other advanced missiles from their earlier stages of launch to impact.
“The T1 Tracking Layer effort is a critical step toward building the National Defense Space Architecture,” said Derek Tournear, the agency’s director. “SDA is confident that selection of the L3 Harris and Northrop Grumman teams provides the best overall solution to accelerate delivery of a low-Earth orbit constellation with wide-field-of-view infrared sensors for a global missile warning and missile tracking capability in Tranche 1, on schedule. I’m pleased to see our industry partners building the marketplace necessary to quickly deliver new space capabilities to the warfighter.”
Various Pentagon officials have spoken out in recent months regarding the Chinese military’s superiority on hypersonics.
“China’s moved to deploy hypersonic weapons more aggressively than the United States, definitely. … They have fielded more capabilities than we have, and they have fairly aggressive development programs,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told the House Armed Services Committee in April, while former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. John Hyten called China’s hypersonic military program “stunning” back in the fall.
The Defense Department has successfully conducted two hypersonic missile system tests recently, the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced last week.
The Air Force said last Wednesday that they successfully conducted Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon Booster Test Flight-3, while the same day, DARPA announced that it successfully launched an OpFires missile test from a logistics truck as a medium-range missile launcher.
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Last summer, China successfully launched a hypersonic missile that surprised governments across the globe.
The Chinese military conducted the first fractional orbital launch of an ICBM with a hypersonic glide vehicle last July, and it “demonstrated the greatest distance flown (~40,000 kilometers) and longest flight time (~100+ minutes) of any Chinese land attack weapons system to date,” according to a report titled “Challenges to Security in Space — 2022” from the Defense Intelligence Agency, released in April.
The Pentagon has referred to China as its “pacing challenge.”
