SDA Director Derek Tournear Talks Agency Efforts to Build Resilience in Space Through Spiral Development & Proliferation

As competition ramps up in space, the evolving domain has taken center stage among U.S. Department of Defense priorities. Ensuring dominance in this novel warfighting environment requires a number of new capabilities, but to keep pace with adversaries, they must be developed and deployed more quickly than ever before.

Tasked with developing, fielding and operating the planned Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, the Space Development Agency has adopted a “spiral development” approach to accelerate the process of delivering this capability, according to SDA Director Derek Tournear, who closed out the Potomac Officers Club’s 2023 Air Force Summit with a keynote fireside chat on Tuesday.

Spiral development, Tournear explained, is a new mentality that challenges the idea that a project must be completed before another is initiated. With the spiral development approach, different stages of different projects are conducted simultaneously to shorten the time between the deployment of each product.

“Unless we get on this model of spiral development and get new capabilities up there every two years by hook or by crook, we’ll never get ahead of the threat and be able to keep up,” he said.

Tournear, a 2021 Wash100 Award winner, noted that currently, it takes four years just to meet the requirements to release a solicitation, and it can take 10 years to field and two years to deploy the capability. By that point, he said, the nation is looking at fighting a war with 16-year-old technology designed to address a 16-year-old threat.

“If we’re doing that, what about our adversaries? Have their weapons stagnated for 16 years? No, technology moves and the threats move,” he said.

“You have to get the capabilities up there. You aren’t going to get the perfect capability on day one – you’re not even going to get everything that everyone wants on day one. The whole idea is that you have something up there and then continue to grow from there,” said Tournear.

Spiral development is key to reaching the end goal of a proliferated satellite constellation. Proliferation, said Tournear, is the “primary means of resilience” in a constellation – and the concept itself is “pillar number one” for the SDA.

Having a large number of satellites, he explained, allows the nation to lose a small number of them without losing a significant amount of capability. It also helps the DOD determine if satellite destruction was caused by something random or if it was a result adversary activities, he said.

Recently, the SDA saw success with the launch of Tranche 0 of the constellation, and according to Tournear, Tranche 1 is in the assembly, integration and test phase and Tranche 2 is in the acquisition stage.

This undertaking is the first time the agency has “actually exercised the full breadth of the spiral development model,” which he said marks a “profound” time for the agency.

“We have satellites that are on orbit, we have satellites that are being built and we have satellites that are in the early acquisition stage,” he said.

In the future, Tournear hopes to see the spiral development method used across the full range of SDA operations, and more broadly, across the DOD.

“Once we demonstrate that it works and we get a couple of tranches up there operating and showing the whole flow, I think that it will be more embraced and you’ll see a lot of people doing it,” he said.

Do you want to learn more about activities across the DOD? For a look into current Army efforts, the Potomac Officers Club will host its 8th Annual Army Summit on August 1st. Click here to learn more and register to attend the event, which will convene top Army leaders and industry experts to dive into the service branch’s most significant challenges and priorities.