Building the PLEO Supply Chain

Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (PLEO) is in full swing in the halls of the Pentagon this fall. On October 23, 2024, the Space Development Agency (SDA) announced its initial Hybrid Acquisition for Proliferated LEO (HALO) pool of 19 companies, potentially the first step in building the satellite supply chains of the future.

But HALO isn’t in a hurry. Each company is getting a whopping $20,000 to cover admin and travel expenses along with the ability to compete for future HALO demonstration prototype orders. Winners of prototype orders will get the opportunity to provide rapid end-to-end mission demonstrations of two (2) identical satellites 12 to 18 months after award, with the first planned prototype awards for the Tranche 2 Demonstration and Experimentation System (T2DES) projects dealing with demonstrating the feasibility of proliferation for future tactical data links and optical communications missions. 

While going from order to orbit – let’s be cool kids and call O2O – in 12 to 18 months is light speed for procurement, the problem becomes scale. PLEO by definition will be composed of much larger constellations of satellite that will have to be replenished in peacetime and replaced in wartime. To support PLEO requires looking at the supply chain of both launch vehicles and satellites over the next five years. 

Today’s ongoing revolution of launch vehicles has opened not one, but several roads to orbit. Smaller vehicles, such as Firefly’s Alpha and Rocket Lab’s Electron, present the capability for quickly launching a small number of satellites while the SpaceX Falcon 9 fleet distributed between Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral has the demonstrated and proven ability to put a larger number of satellites into orbit within weeks to months. 

In 2025, that relatively thin bench of small and medium-sized LVs should become deeper with Rocket Lab’s Neutron, the intertwined efforts of Firefly and Northrop Grumman. The addition of Blue Origin’s New Glenn in the near-term and SpaceX Starship farther out would provide the nation with an unprecedented selection of options and capabilities.

The United States will be certainly able to launch PLEO networks, but who will build the satellites in mass? Will national space policy recognize the need to have a disaggregated supply chain for procuring and producing PLEO constellations? Certainly SDA is casing a wide net, but it needs to build multiple pipelines. 

There are some established principles that can be applied to those questions and some new concepts that can be borrowed from other parts of the aerospace industry to provide answers. The established principles are relatively simple and complementary: multi-source procurement, competitive bidding at regular intervals, COTS as much as possible and practical. Sole-source procurements and reliance upon a single vendor isn’t healthy, since it keeps pricing up, stifles innovation, and provides a single point of failure that is hard to recover from. Competitive bidding at regular intervals ensures that there are multiple providers and stimulates both lower costs and innovative approaches, the latter if the proposal process is if framed to incentivize new ideas and capabilities. 

Leveraging commercial hardware and services is essentially how SpaceX’s Falcon 9 now has the lion’s share of the nation’s launch business, so there will need to be production lines for satellites. But this generates a chicken-and-egg problem since there are few commercial satellite factories cranking out enough volume of spacecraft that would support military needs in time of crisis. 

The largest producer of satellites today is SpaceX, which is also building runs of satellites under its Starshield line for the Department of Defense. Given SpaceX’s concentration of the launch market, having both launch and satellite manufacturing through a single vendor would be unwise in the long-term. There’s no argument that SpaceX has the demonstrated capability to build thousands of satellites since it is doing so for its own uses, but if something should happen to SpaceX in the future, it would leave the nation ill prepared to fill in the gap. 

DoD has said all the right things about buying new commercial services, but words are one thing while fostering industry investment through competitive contracts is another. However, the Pentagon may already have a solution it may borrow from its requirements to build massive amounts of low-cost drones and munitions to counter future adversaries. 

The DoD Replicator program is designed to field attritable autonomous systems at scales of thousands or more in a matter of months. Silicon Valley, both independently and in partnership with defense manufacturers, is working out new ways to develop and deliver guided munitions and drones in the quantities needed for a large-scale conflict. For example, new-wave contractor Anduril has announced plans to build a “hyperscale production facility” to crank out huge numbers of disposable military hardware. 

Could Anduril-style factories be a path forward for the nation’s future satellite needs, producing commercial satellites for LEO constellations during peacetime and switching to DoD models time of crisis? It’s one option to consider to support the PLEO future.