Production scaling woes delay next Space Development Agency launches | Space

Plans for the Space Force’s Space Development Agency to kick-start its next phase of launches this month is on hold due to supplier delays, according to its director Derek Tournear.

September was supposed to be the start of a 10-month streak of regular SDA launches to put the agency’s Tranche 1 satellites — which will provide initial operational capability — in low Earth orbit. Those spacecraft will now likely fly at the end of this year or early next, Tournear said Wednesday at the Defense News Conference.

The delays are primarily linked to financial troubles among some SDA vendors who have struggled to scale their manufacturing capacity, he said. That includes California-based Mynaric, which supplies optical terminals to several of the agency’s satellite providers and has struggled to ramp up production.

“These are things we have to work through with our primes, our spacecraft providers, to make sure they can continue to pull that schedule in when they have those kinds of delays,” Tournear said.

The Tranche 1 satellites are part of SDA’s broader proliferated space architecture, which it envisions will eventually include hundreds of missile tracking and data transport spacecraft operating from low Earth orbit, about 1,200 miles above the equator.

SDA started launching its Tranche 0 satellites in April 2023 and as of February has put all 27 of those spacecraft in…