{"id":91559,"date":"2026-11-01T01:54:28","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T17:54:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/sdas-first-tracking-satellites-slip-to-spring-sandhoo-says\/"},"modified":"2026-11-01T01:54:28","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T17:54:28","slug":"sdas-first-tracking-satellites-slip-to-spring-sandhoo-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/sdas-first-tracking-satellites-slip-to-spring-sandhoo-says\/","title":{"rendered":"SDA\u2019s First Tracking Satellites Slip to Spring, Sandhoo Says"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Space
SDA Director GP Sandhoo opens the MilSat Symposium at Silicon Valley Space Week 2026. (Photo: SatNews)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Space Development Agency\u2019s first missile tracking satellites won\u2019t launch this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was hoping sometime this year we\u2019ll get our first launch up, but doesn\u2019t look like it\u2019s gonna happen,\u201d SDA Director Gurpartap \u201cGP\u201d Sandhoo said Wednesday, opening the MilSat Symposium at Silicon Valley Space Week. He now expects the first tracking satellites to launch next spring.<\/p>\n

Tracking is the half of SDA\u2019s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture built to follow hypersonic weapons and other dim, fast-moving threats. Every Tranche 1 plane in orbit today is a transport plane.<\/p>\n

84 up, hundreds to go<\/h2>\n

All three Tranche 1 transport vendors now have at least one plane up. Northrop Grumman\u2019s Oct. 10 launch was the fourth. \u201cWe have 84 on orbit right now,\u201d Sandhoo said. Checkouts are moving slower than he\u2019d like.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one thing to launch one or two satellites. It\u2019s a whole different ball of wax when you launch 21 or 42 and try to get them all to working and operating,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Then he laid out the queue:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Six more Tranche 1 launches.<\/li>\n
  • Tranche 2, with 190 transport satellites and 54 tracking satellites over about 18 launches.<\/li>\n
  • Tranche 3: no transport at all, only tracking.<\/li>\n
  • Another 36 accelerated missile defense satellites tied to Golden Dome.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    By the end of Tranche 3, Sandhoo said, that comes to about 474 satellites. The next round has started, too. SDA\u2019s request for information for Tranche 4 is out, looking at next-generation sensors, compute, processing and fusion.<\/p>\n

    One executive for missile warning<\/h2>\n

    Sandhoo wears a second hat as the Space Force\u2019s portfolio acquisition executive for missile warning and tracking. That puts SDA\u2019s proliferated LEO work under the same executive as the Space Force\u2019s MEO, HEO and GEO sensing programs and its early-warning radars. The new PAE organizations stand up \u201cin the next month or two,\u201d he said, though \u201cin the short term, it\u2019s not going to change anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Data transport goes the other way, to a separate executive for space-based sensing and targeting that runs the Space Data Network. SDA will still field the Tranche 1 and Tranche 2 transport satellites before handing them off.<\/p>\n

    With hundreds of satellites on the way, Sandhoo expects the ground to become the bottleneck. More autonomy and on-orbit compute will ease that in later tranches, he said, but for the first ones, ground is where SDA has to get it right.<\/p>\n

    His message to vendors: SDA will buy on a modest demo. A \u201cC+, B-\u201d result on one or two satellites, he said, can be \u201cgood enough for us to go out and buy a plane or a Tranche of those.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews SDA Director GP Sandhoo opens the MilSat Symposium at Silicon Valley Space Week 2026. (Photo: SatNews) The Space Development Agency\u2019s first missile tracking satellites won\u2019t launch this year. \u201cI was hoping sometime this year we\u2019ll get our first launch up, but doesn\u2019t look like it\u2019s gonna happen,\u201d SDA Director […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91559"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}