By On August 13, The U.S. Space Force announced that it has awarded complementary sets of fixed-price contracts and Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreements valued at $12 million per set, to five companies as part of a deliberate acquisition strategy under the Space-Based Sensing and Targeting (SBST) Portfolio Acquisition Executive (PAE). This strategy is designed to evolve how the military procures and integrates satellite communication technologies.
In partnership with commercial and defense aerospace partners, these awards are the outcome of the SBST PAE and Space Systems Command (SSC) establishing the groundwork for a highly resilient, open-architecture Space Data Network (SDN). The five companies selected were Amazon LEO for Government, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab and York Space Systems.
The primary objective of this effort is to validate integration methodologies and demonstrate that diverse commercial systems can seamlessly connect to and transport, data across the core SDN system. By combining on-orbit testing of high-speed optical communications routing with rigorous physical, electrical, and data interface standards, the Space Force aims to build a repeatable, secure baseline which allows different commercial satellite offerings to contribute to the network.
“We have to break away from the old way of doing business, which too often locked the government into single-source vendors for decades,” said U.S. Space Force Col. Ryan Frazier, acting portfolio acquisition executive for SBST. “By investing in standardized interfaces now, we are creating a clear runway for any capable and innovative company to come in and compete. It keeps the playing field level and ensures we can constantly bring the best commercial technology to our missions.”
To transition to a fully diversified, resilient architecture, the Space Force is utilizing multi-vendor integration efforts to plan the onboarding of new providers. This approach requires deliberate planning, strategic investment, and deep cooperation across the industry to build the standardized physical and data interfaces, digital models, and security protocols needed to integrate new entrants.
To execute this transition, the SBST PAE leveraged the recently established Space Data Network consortium to competitively award five companies with a two-part complementary set of OTA agreements to form a unified strategy.
The first part focuses on demonstrating both ground-to-space and space-to-space data transport between vendor systems. To achieve this, five fixed-price contracts with a six-to-nine-month period of performance were awarded to prototype and demonstrate multi-vendor interconnectivity across the SDN Backbone. This will ensure diverse industry partners can seamlessly connect to and communicate with the core network infrastructure. These contracts will be valued at $10 million each.
The second part operationalizes these connections in orbit. To achieve this, five OTA agreements with a six-month period of performance were awarded to seed the development and fielding of Space Exchange Point (SEP) satellites. These specialized spacecraft act as orbital routers, allowing disparate networks and government satellite systems to connect directly to the SDN Backbone. These OTAs will be valued at $2 million each.
This SEP initiative lays a path to field prototype payloads from the multi-year, multi-vendor, Enterprise Space Terminal (EST) program, which designed optical terminals utilizing a government-owned communications standard suitable for low-Earth orbit (LEO) to geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) connectivity. By pairing commercial satellite bus providers with mature EST developers, the Space Force is establishing the repeatable technical baseline required to rapidly procure and field these critical nodes at scale.
Source: SSC
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