A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket takes off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2024 carrying four satellites for the Space Development Agency.
U.S. Space Force
If President Donald Trump wants his Iron Dome–the space-based missile defense shield for the United States he proposed last month–it’s going to require tens of billions of dollars and a lot of new satellites.
For the last six years, the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency has been working on a key part of what’s needed: a first-of-its-kind constellation of over 1,000 small satellites in low-Earth orbit designed to detect hypersonic missile launches and keep tabs 24/7 on mobile launchers and other threats on the ground. SDA was set up with a mandate to move fast and skip many of the snarls of red tape that have bogged down U.S. weapons development and inflated costs.
However, in the last month, SDA has been engulfed in crisis: Derek Tournear, the head of the agency, was put on leave a week before Trump’s inauguration and marched out of the Pentagon. Now a bureaucratic power struggle over the program is slowing progress on the constellation and the future of the agency itself is in doubt.
“It seems like they’re just going to dismantle us,” a senior staffer told Forbes on condition of anonymity.
SDA has faced long-simmering resentment among acquisitions bureaucrats over the agency’s alleged circumvention of their authority, as well as turf concerns among Space Force brass, current and former staffers, and a former Air Force official, told Forbes.
Tournear has openly acknowledged that he rubbed some officials the wrong way, writing in 2023 that he was happy to play the “bad cop” and stiff-arm attempts to make the agency comply with what he thought were pointless, time-wasting procedures.
Fueling suspicion over the motives for Tournear’s suspension, he was said to have been under consideration by the Trump team for a higher Pentagon position where he could have pushed for wider use of faster acquisition practices.
When Tournear was suspended, the Air Force announced that it was “pending the results of an investigation.” Into what, it didn’t say. A person familiar with the probe said it involved allegations that Tournear communicated improperly during the bidding process with Tyvak, which was one of two winners of a satellite contract that was protested by the loser, Viasat. The Air Force decided earlier this month to cancel the $254 million award to Tyvak and recompete it.
In the weeks after Tournear was sidelined, the SDA, a lean organization with a headcount of 450 and a budget of $5 billion, has been targeted with two investigations. Former congressman Mac Thornberry is leading an outside team assembled by the Air Force to conduct a 30-day review of the agency’s performance and methods, and its independent status within Space Force. And last week the Air Force’s inspector general informed the agency’s acting head that it would be subjected to a weeklong probe in March.
The Air Force did not answer questions from Forbes about the actions against Tournear and SDA.
Observers said it’s an unusually vigorous series of moves by interim leadership before the new administration’s appointees are put in place.
“The establishment in the Pentagon and in the Air Force and even the Space Force to a great degree have had long knives out for SDA and specifically Derek since it was stood up to be independent,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who’s championed the agency. “It sends a chilling message to industry and to acquisition professionals” about trying to buck the status quo of how weapons are developed, he said.
That status quo is widely regarded as imperiling Washington’s efforts to retool the military to counter rapidly expanding Chinese forces after decades of fighting lightly armed insurgents in the Mideast and Afghanistan. Major DoD weapons development programs that have been completed in the last few years have taken an average of 11 years from start to finish, three years behind already glacial plans, according to a 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office.
The poor performance includes the dozens of major geostationary satellites that the military relies on for communications and surveillance. They cost billions of dollars each and take five to 10 years to make. And because their positions are well-known, they would make easy targets on the first day of a shooting war.
SDA was established in 2019 as an experiment to change all of that. Its mission was to build a dispersed constellation of small satellites in low-Earth orbit, now called the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, or PWSA. Such a constellation would be able to do a better job of tracking the emerging threat of hypersonic missiles – and it would make it more expensive to shoot down any of the smallsats with a missile than to build and launch a replacement.
That organization was supposed to run with scissors. They were supposed to be edgy.
Borrowing a page from smartphone makers, SDA would pursue a spiral development model, fielding new batches of satellites every two years and making improvements in each one rather than trying to build the perfect system straight away. To lower costs, it would invite bids for each tranche rather than making it a winner take all project.
To get around the normal acquisitions process, SDA employed a little-used, speedier alternative called the middle tier of acquisition. And SDA won support in Congress, which helped it avoid red tape and maintain its independence as it was transferred to the Space Force, which was also set up under the Trump administration but remains a part of the Air Force.
Derek Tournear, director of the Space Development Agency
DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando
SDA has had a few notable successes. It launched its first test batch of 27 satellites just 27 months after ordering them—and at a relatively affordable fixed price of $14 million per satellite. They successfully demonstrated capabilities that are core to building the large network envisioned, including passing data back and forth between satellites via lasers, detecting missile launches, and relaying communications in the military’s encrypted Link 16 format from space for the first time, to an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.
Those successes are in no small part due to Tournear, according to staffers. They say he’s a charismatic leader who convinced talented people in private industry to take steep pay cuts to join the agency. One way Tournear helped speed progress was by operating as something of a human shield for his program managers to protect them from bureaucratic scut work, answering requests for information from up the chain of command. And sometimes he would refuse to attend meetings that seemed like time wasters.
“There were things that we would ignore,” said the SDA staffer. “They found it infuriating.”
Among those unhappy with SDA were high-ranking officers in Space Force who believed it should be run by Space Systems Command, the main body within the service that develops satellites and other space systems, a former senior Air Force official told Forbes.
Those included Lt. Gen. Phil Garrant, the current commander of SSC, the official said. Garrant was named acting head of SDA after Tournear’s suspension, rather than Tournear’s deputy, as would be customary. That raised objections from Sen. Cramer, who said it was a step toward subverting congressional legislation that established SDA as an independent unit, reporting directly to the head of Space Force for operations and to the Air Force’s chief of acquisitions for its development efforts.
Garrant was replaced in early February as acting head by William Blauser, deputy director of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. But in the few weeks Garrant was there, the SDA official said he expressed surprise at the risks SDA was taking, saying it rose to the level of irresponsibility for the first test tranche.
That sort of criticism misses the point of what SDA was set up to do, a former high-ranking staffer told Forbes. “That organization was supposed to run with scissors. They were supposed to be edgy.”
To be sure, all was not running perfectly at SDA. DoD brass blocked it from using off-the-shelf commercial satellites, as originally envisioned, over worries about relying on private-sector companies that could fail or change their business strategies. Supply chain problems with components on satellites in the first operational phase of its constellation, comprising 158 satellites, forced Tournear to delay the first launches from last September to April.
Before his suspension, Tournear was wrestling with whether to further push back the schedule or launch the satellites with a reduced set of capabilities.
President Trump’s executive order to establish Iron Dome gave a boost to SDA’s signature project last month, setting the goal of accelerating deployment of the PWSA.
But whether that will be carried out by SDA in its current form remains an open question. Staffers worry that even if its independence is maintained, SDA could get a new permanent head who has a lower rank than Tournear, who was the civilian equivalent of a three-star general. In the hierarchical Pentagon, that could make them more vulnerable to pressure from the brass.
And there’s the additional wild card of what cuts DOGE will seek to carry out at the Pentagon–for starters, SDA has been told to cut 45 probationary employees, 10% of its headcount–and what its leader, Elon Musk, thinks of SDA. SpaceX built satellites for the test phase of PWSA, but didn’t bid for the next two tranches. The company wasn’t interested in modifying its satellites to operate at the higher altitude required by SDA.
Sen. Cramer said the case against Tournear appears to be minor and he thinks the agency’s opponents are realizing they “overplayed” their hand.
But the turmoil shows the deep problems facing those seeking to get the Pentagon to pick up the pace with weapons development, said Todd Harrison, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s easy to talk about moving faster, taking risk, leveraging commercial. But it’s a lot harder to stomach the inherent missteps and failures that come along with that.”
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