Sierra Area is becoming a member of Rocket Lab as a present or previously VC-backed area firm to land a serious satellite tv for pc take care of the navy.
The Area Growth Company (SDA) chosen Sierra, together with Lockheed Martin and L3Harris, to construct 54 satellites in offers collectively price $2.5 billion. The information, introduced in the present day, follows information from final week that Rocket Lab landed an analogous contract for as much as $515 million.
The award, in addition to Rocket Lab’s, exhibits that increasingly firms want to take a slice of a market that till now had been the unique area of protection primes: navy satellites. Most just lately, Sierra closed a $290 million Collection B spherical that skyrocketed its valuation to $5.3 billion.
The 54 satellites will kind a part of the SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Area Structure, a large missile detection and monitoring constellation in low Earth orbit that’s being constructed and launched in “tranches.” The trio of contracts introduced in the present day is for 18 satellites every within the Tranche 2 Monitoring Layer: L3Harris’s award is price $919 million; Lockheed Martin, $890 million; and Sierra Area, $740 million.
“We’re pleased to welcome Sierra Space, a new entrant as a prime vendor on Team SDA, as we continue working with L3Harris and Lockheed Martin on Tranche 2,” SDA director Derek Tournear stated in a press release. “The marketplace is responding to the demand signals for our spiral development model. The agile response across the space industry is critically important as we deliver to the warfighter this no-fail mission capability of missile warning, missile tracking, and missile defence.”
The 54 satellites will include 48 devoted to missile detection and monitoring and 6 to missile protection. All can be geared up with infrared sensors, although the sensors on the six birds devoted to missile protection can be able to producing what the SDA calls “fire control-quality tracks,” that are delicate sufficient to information an interceptor to convey down an aggressor’s missile.
Whereas Lockheed and L3Harris have a longtime observe document successful satellite tv for pc manufacturing contracts with the SDA, that is the primary award of this type for Sierra Area. The latter firm is greatest identified for its Dream Chaser spaceplane and Orbital Reef non-public area station mission, relatively than satellite tv for pc manufacturing at scale.
The satellites are anticipated to launch no later than April 2027.
