WASHINGTON—It’s been about six months since the SDA launched its first operational tranche of satellites—but troops still aren’t benefiting from the better comms tech because of a series of small issues that forced the agency to take a “strategic pause,” SDA Acting Director Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo told Payload.
Sandhoo chatted with Payload on the sidelines of the Satellite conference in DC about the delay facing the agency, scaling challenges for the SDA’s planned constellation, and how the SDA can remain fast-moving as it celebrates its seventh birthday.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
You said in September that troops would be able to start getting operational data from the sats that launched then, in four to six months. What’s the status of that effort?
We haven’t gotten that yet. We still haven’t gotten through the [launch and early operations phase], which is the vendor’s checkout of the system. We are behind on that. We haven’t accepted that into our functional on-orbit testing. We are at least three-plus months behind at this point.
At the same time, the things that we’ve found through that—in the first three months here—we haven’t launched anything since that because there are things that we need to fix based on what we saw. We’re doing that right now.
What were the issues you found?
It’s nothing major, but a lot of small things that were just accumulating. So we said we’re going to stop, fix everything we can the best we can. We also had the [full government] shutdown for 45 days. It’s not like one single thing. It was a bunch of things that piled up.
I don’t want to share anything specific right now. It literally is our thermal models don’t match what we’re seeing, versus what’s on the ground. We want to make sure we have a good model of that. We have software issues; the baseline is slightly different. It’s nothing “major showstoppers”, but it’s a lot of little things that take time.
How will the delay affect the rest of your launch timeline?
The goal here is the next launch will not take four months to check out. It was not on the schedule we had planned, or anticipated. But by doing this strategic pause to make sure we fix the known issues, when we start the launch campaign…if you end up with 42 satellites on-orbit and they have a software problem, versus 21, it’s a lot easier to solve 21.
How are you addressing the challenges you’re facing in scaling the PWSA?
If you go back and look at commercial industry—space, or anything else—there’s a growth curve that has to happen…There’s just that growing pain that has to happen. By spending the time now, hopefully the rest of them will get there.
How did you make the decision to work with Starfish Space on deorbiting PWSA sats?
We have always had this plan. As we launch satellites, to expect that all of them will work 100% is not reasonable. There will be some that don’t operate as designed or intended—and won’t be able to deorbit themselves, either.
At the same time, there’s this growing commercial marketplace—from servicing, to repositioning. So instead of trying to come up with our own system to deorbit satellites, we wanted to see if [by] doing it as a service, we can leverage technology being developed for other reasons—and put it to work.
Using the Beltway, I don’t want a tow truck of my own. I want to call AAA when my car breaks down. That’s kind of the mindset we had.
Do you face any challenges as an acting leader of the agency, versus a permanent director?
I don’t know. Nobody has told me, ‘No, you can’t do that yet.’ And I haven’t asked, either. We’re just executing.
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