SDA misses self-imposed deadline on orbital mesh network

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Space Development Agency’s ambitious plan to create a satellite-to-satellite data relay network is now lagging a year behind, SDA director G.P. Sandhoo revealed.

Just over six months ago, Sandhoo told the Satellite 2026 conference in Washington, DC that “we are about three months behind” on the orbital mesh network, but he hoped to start building it within six months. That self-imposed deadline expires in 10 days.

But Sandhoo said here on Tuesday that that SDA wasn’t going to make it. In fact, he now doesn’t expect to start for another three months at least. All together, that pushes the total expected delay to at least a year.

“We have not started yet,” the SDA director told reporters bluntly at the AFA 2026 conference. “We are behind on that. We should be there already.”

“I push on the team every week. … The next step is to get that done,” he continued. “In the next three to four months, that’s the number one priority for us.”

The network is such a high priority because it’s needed to streamline data transfers across SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PSWA), meant to encompass hundreds of satellites providing missile warning, tracking, and fire control. To do that, the network will allow satellites to transfer data directly to each other — instead of having to relay signals through ground stations — using laser beams instead of radio waves.

There have been “multiple issues,” Sandhoo said, but one of them is just getting sufficient numbers of the high-quality optical components required. The “optical heads” have to be finely engineered enough to send and receive clear signals, he explained, yet robust enough to survive being launched into orbit.

The problem is literally rocket science — plus supply chain logistics.

SDA used firm fixed price contracts to keep costs down for the initial group of PWSA satellites, Tranche 1, Sandhoo explained. But all of those contracts ended up going with the same supplier for Optical Communication Terminals (OCTs).

“That vendor is having issues with throughput and not able to deliver,” he said.

“I have not seen the improvement that I wanted to see … in Tranche 1,” the director continued. “With Tranche 2, we have done some risk mitigation.” The plan is to create “a parallel path … so you have options later in the design” to swap in OCTs from another supplier.

In the longer term, the Space Force has even bigger ambitions for its PWSA satellites, Sandhoo said. That includes adding edge computing and artificial intelligence to the satellites so they can digest vast amounts of data in orbit, conserving space-to-earth bandwidth and speeding the flow of priority data.

“We plan to leverage all of that as we get into this,” Sandhoo said, “But we are not going to start with transformative AI. … We’ve still got to get the satellites up first.”

Theresa Hitchens contributed to this article.