The Space Development Agency launched its first operational satellites in 2023, roughly four years after the Pentagon created it to do something unusual: buy things fast. By early 2024 it had 38 spacecraft in low Earth orbit. Its plan called for at least 1,000. Before it got close, the Space Force moved to dissolve the agency, Breaking Defense reported.
The reorganization, confirmed by Air Force Secretary Troy Meink this week, folds SDA into the broader Portfolio Acquisition Executive framework that governs the rest of the service. The Tracking Layer, an infrared satellite constellation designed to detect and track missile threats, moves to the PAE office responsible for missile warning. The Transport Layer, which connects the network of satellites, transitions to a PAE for space-based sensing. There probably will not be an SDA when the transition finishes, according to Breaking Defense, Gurpartap Sandhoo, the acting SDA director expected to lead the new missile warning PAE.
SDA was created in March 2019 by Mike Griffin, then the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, to escape the slower acquisition system that had kept the Pentagon cycling through design reviews while commercial technology leapfrogged it. The model was fixed-price contracts, commercial parts, and iterative deployments called tranches, to get capabilities on orbit quickly rather than waiting for a perfect design. The agency moved to the Space Force in October 2022. By then, it had already launched its first experimental satellites.
The $6.4 billion question is what happens to the speed culture. Sandhoo said the intent is to preserve it. "It may be called something else, but we are doing our best to maintain that piece, because speed is critical," he told Breaking Defense. Whether that survives contact with the standard PAE structure, the acquisition office the model was supposed to escape, is the open question. Space Systems Command, led by Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, is finalizing nine PAE offices, with the last three expected by June.
The structural logic is defensible. Meink noted that SDA already functions like a PAE, or Portfolio Acquisition Executive, the official title for the offices managing groups of related acquisition programs. "Essentially, when you look at what a PAE is, SDA is essentially a PAE by another name," he said. The Space Force is requesting $6.4 billion in FY27 research and development funding for its three missile warning and tracking programs, including Next-Gen OPIR, MEO-based missile warning and tracking, and SDA's Tracking Layer. The programs themselves are not in jeopardy. The institutional wrapper is changing.
What the reorganization does not yet have is congressional sign-off. Meink said authorities for SDA and the Space Force's other rapid acquisition office, Space RCO, have not been worked with Congress yet. That is a non-trivial gap for an agency that relied on unique statutory authorities to move at commercial speed.
The counterargument is that SDA's first operational tranche, while real, was modest in scope. The 38 satellites on orbit as of early 2024 represent Tranche 1, a demonstration and early operational capability, not the full architecture. Getting to 1,000 satellites was always going to require more money, more time, and more congressional patience than the reform window that created the agency. Institutionalization is what happens when the reform succeeds enough to need scaling.
What is being tested now is whether the PAE framework can absorb the culture without flattening it. The Space Force has done acquisition reorganizations before. It has never had an agency built explicitly to operate outside that system and then been asked to fold it back in.
