The U.S. Space Force awarded five companies complementary sets of contracts and other transaction agreements worth $12 million per company to demonstrate multi-vendor connectivity and develop orbital routing capabilities for its planned Space Data Network.
Amazon LEO for Government, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab, and York Space Systems each received a $10 million fixed-price contract and a $2 million other transaction agreement as part of the Space Force’s push toward an open architecture that can integrate competing commercial satellite systems.
The awards, made through the Space-Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio acquisition executive, are intended to establish standardized interfaces that will allow new providers to join the Space Data Network without costly custom redesigns.
“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 Space Force Col. Ryan Frazier, acting portfolio acquisition executive for space-based sensing and targeting.
The $10 million contracts have six-to-nine-month periods of performance and will test ground-to-space and space-to-space data transport between vendor systems. The demonstrations will focus on connecting different industry systems to the Space Data Network backbone through standardized physical and data interfaces.
“By investing in standardized interfaces now, we are creating a clear runway for any capable and innovative company to come in and compete,” Frazier said. “It keeps the playing field level and ensures we can constantly bring the best commercial technology to our missions.”
The separate $2 million other transaction agreements have six-month periods of performance and will provide seed funding for the development and fielding of Space Exchange Point satellites. Those spacecraft will function as orbital routers, allowing separate networks and government satellite systems to connect directly to the Space Data Network backbone.
The Space Force said the Space Exchange Point effort also creates a path to field prototype payloads developed through its multi-year, multi-vendor Enterprise Space Terminal program. That program designed optical terminals using a government-owned communications standard for connectivity from low-Earth orbit to geostationary Earth orbit.
The service plans to pair commercial satellite bus providers with mature Enterprise Space Terminal developers to create a repeatable technical baseline for buying and fielding the orbital nodes at scale.
“For SDN, we cannot afford to treat every new satellite like a custom science project built from scratch,” said Space Force Lt. Col. Alexa Eggert, materiel leader for the Space-Based Sensing and Targeting Space Data Network Backbone program.
“We need to leverage mature commercial production lines that already know how to build at scale,” Eggert said. “This current integration work lets us burn down technical and onboarding risks in labs and small-scale prototypes, which will completely change the timeline and economics of how we will buy SDN space systems in the future.”
Space Systems Command said the broader effort is intended to create a resilient orbital mesh network capable of rerouting critical tactical data around localized interference or threats in orbit while maintaining connectivity for operators worldwide.