The testing, which involved the variant of the future advanced reconnaissance vehicle, or ARV, equipped with a 30mm autocannon, took place in January and February at Camp Pendleton, California, according to a recent Marine Corps news release.

Prototypes by two designers, Textron Systems and General Dynamics Land Systems, underwent the water entry, swim and firing drills ahead of an upcoming competition period set to end with a down-select to one company around 2030.

In an exclusive interview with Military Times this month, Phil Skuta, GDLS’s director of Strategy and Business Development for the Marine Corps and Navy, described some of the challenges the new vehicle must overcome, including high-speed water entry and firing the autocannon on the water, both of which can involve weathering large and unpredictable waves.

He also described a new feature GDLS is asking the Marine Corps to evaluate: an “autotrim function” that would allow the ARV’s crew to outsource some of the work of driving the vessel in the water.

“You can set the course, the azimuth that you want to follow, and the vehicle will automatically stay on that course,” Skuta said. “So, we’re starting to build in a level of automation so that, while they’re doing, say, a long water-borne movement, that’s just one less thing the crew has to think about.

“They can think about the other activities involved in not only operating the vehicle but most importantly focusing on the enemy, so they don’t have to focus so much on, ‘Am I going in the correct direction? And is the vehicle being stable in the water?’”

Skuta said the function was somewhat similar to an aircraft autopilot function, but also like cruise control and automated lane-keeping in a ground vehicle.

“If you’re out of the lane, you might get a little buzz, so to speak,” he said. That’s more what this is right now — the first step.”

That’s particularly useful, from GDLS’ perspective, because the ARV’s swim system, separately from the ground automotive system, is piloted via a “small joystick” by a driver looking at internal screens, underscoring what a chore it is to do manual course corrections. The feature could also help the vehicle adapt to the increasingly automated future, Skuta said.

“We’re demonstrating by [incorporating] the automated trim course and azimuth function that we can eventually, in anticipation of future requirements, put more automation into the system, as well as robotic controls,” he said.

The ARV is expected to come in three variants: in addition to the ARV-30 autocannon platform there will be a Command, Control, Communications and Computers/Unmanned Aircraft Systems model, or C4/UAS, which has previously undergone testing; and a logistics variant, which will be featured in upcoming swim tests, Skuta said.

Textron and GDLS are both set to contract with the Marine Corps as soon as this fiscal quarter for 16 additional prototypes that will enable testing in coming years ahead of the final down-select.

Textron’s vehicle, which it calls the Cottonmouth, has six wheels compared to GDLS’ eight.

During the recent evolution, Skuta said, shoreside testing included a bilge pump demonstration, in which the ARV-30 was flooded with water, triggering safety sensors that automatically pump it out “like a water fountain.”

Water safety has been an increased focus since a July 2020 assault amphibious vehicle sinking off the coast of Pendleton, resulting in the deaths of nine service members. A malfunctioning bilge pump was found to have contributed to the tragedy.

Once in the water, the new vehicle was put through its paces on a five-kilometer swim course to test its maneuverability and stopping distance in calm conditions.

“You’re just kind of pivoting in the water to show the characteristics of how you can do very tight maneuvering in water spaces,” Skuta said. “And you know, that’s pretty important, because the Marines will find themselves crossing rivers and water obstacles while they’re in combat zones. And they need to have a good appreciation for how tight a turning radius the vehicle has in the water.”

Crews also practiced moving the turret around as if preparing for live fire on the water, which affects the vehicle’s center of gravity, he said.

“In a river-crossing scenario, [if the] enemy presents themselves on the far shoreline the Marines would fire from the vehicle in the water,” Skuta said. “So, that gives a good indication of how the turret and the fire control system will stabilize on a target while they’re in that water environment.”

Another tested skill, high-speed water entry, made for one of the “more fun” events to observe, he said.

The ARV-30 entered the water at progressively higher speeds, topping out at 25 miles per hour and sending a massive water plume into the air.

Notably, for all the testing with GDLS and Textron, Marines from the amphibious vehicles community were able to observe and monitor testing, Skuta said.

While the Marine Corps has not released any specific feedback from the demos, he said the onsite response from the Marines was encouraging.

“A lot of smiles, a lot of thumbs up from what they saw,” Skuta said.

The sea service reached an agreement with the Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics, the company confirmed Tuesday, to deploy tech capable of streamlining repairs and reducing maintenance delays for a surface fleet that continues to be stretched thin.

The contract will begin as a 5-year, $54 million indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity deal that will soon see Gecko begin work on 18 ships assigned to the Navy’s U.S. Pacific Fleet.

To expedite what has in recent years become a headache for naval readiness, Gecko uses drones, wall-climbing robots and fixed sensors to gather data on components, decks, welds and hulls.

That information, paired with AI tools, is used to identify current and potential structural issues that may remain hidden to the naked eye.

“A single robotic evaluation and digital rendering of a flight deck eliminated over three months of potential maintenance delay days,” the company release stated about one such procedure.

These measures have expedited maintenance “up to 50 times faster and more accurately than manual methods,” the company added.

“Readiness isn’t just a metric, it’s all that matters,” Jake Loosararian, co-founder and CEO of Gecko, said in the release. “This growing partnership is about unfair advantages Gecko is deploying to our Navy; and how prediction, through our robotics and AI products, ensure our brave men and women are the most advantaged in the world in their fight to defend freedom.”

In fall 2024, then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti unveiled a goal of having 80% of the Navy’s fleet ready to deploy at any given time by 2027.

Obstacles to reaching that goal materialized quickly, however, with a Government Accountability Office report in December 2024 highlighting a readiness rate among the Navy’s amphibious warfare ships of just 46% between 2011 and 2020. This rate, in turn, significantly hindered Marine Corps deployment and training plans.

In August 2025, that rate reportedly dipped to just 41%, resulting in a more than five-month gap in Marine Expeditionary Unit deployments that year and further straining resources amid the Trump administration’s push to counter the illicit drug trade in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The 80% plan, meanwhile, was picked up by Franchetti’s successor, Adm. Daryl Caudle, who called the rate “an ambitious but essential readiness goal.”

“Achieving this requires shorter maintenance cycles, increased spare-parts availability, improved training pipelines and targeted upgrades across the fleet,” Caudle wrote for Military Times in December.

“Readiness is not a budget line — it is a promise to the American people that their Navy will never arrive late to a fight."

The new tactical loitering munition from Singapore’s best-known defense company — dubbed the EagleStrike, and the first weapon in this category from ST Engineering — should be ready for production in early 2027.

The beyond-line-of-sight airborne weapon was developed at the company’s initiative, but it will presumably be offered to the Singapore Army in due course.

Jackson Tean, assistant vice president of International Business, Advanced Material Engineering, Land Systems, said the loitering munition has reached Technology Readiness Level 7. Further testing and certification will occur this year to fully mature it.

The company listed the munition’s range at 12.4 miles, with a 30-minute loitering time. Traveling at speeds of 67 miles per hour, the EagleStrike possesses a 7-ounce dual-mode shaped-charge warhead optimized for top attack against lightly protected targets.

The EagleStrike is launched from a canister. It is expected that a pod of 16 such canisters could be carried on a suitable vehicle.

ST Engineering has a range of drones in its portfolio, but Singapore’s military has shown a predilection for Israeli-made unmanned aircraft.

At Singapore Airshow 2026, for example, it publicly exhibited for the first time its large Hermes 900 drone from Elbit Systems as well as the Orbiter 4 from Aeronautics. The Hermes 900 is replacing the Singapore air force’s Hermes 450, which was in service for more than 20 years.

Turning to small arms, ST Engineering unveiled a new family of 5.56mm-caliber rifles based on Colt’s AR-15 design. This rifle family contrasts with the SAR-21 bullpup rifle that ST Engineering supplies to the Singapore Armed Forces.

This AME modular family of rifles is designed to equip an army squad with a range of five weapons comprising a carbine, assault rifle, grenade launcher, light machine gun and sharpshooter rifle.

The smallest member is the AME-A510 with a 10.5-inch barrel, which could be ideal for a vehicle crewman, for example. Next, the standard AME-A514 squad rifle boasts a 14.5-inch barrel. Specifications released by ST Engineering state a length of 32.3 inches and a weight of 6.4 pounds unloaded.

The same rifle can have an under-barrel 40mm grenade launcher attached, which changes its nomenclature to AME-A514GL.

More capable is the AME-A516L, which possesses a 16-inch barrel and integrated heat sink so it can act as a squad’s light machine gun.

Finally, the family boasts the AME-A520SS designated marksman rifle with a bipod.

A spokesman told Defense News that these rifles are aimed primarily at the export market. He also confirmed international sales have been achieved already.

Enhancements compared to the original AR-15 include enhanced barrel harmonics, a two-stage trigger, a muzzle brake that reduces recoil by 20% and ambidextrous controls.

A representative said the rifles are designed to be reliable, simple and cost-effective.

Housed within the Virginia Space Authority’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Wallops Island, the facility, dubbed Launch Complex 3, will support testing, launch and return missions for the reusable rocket — the largest vehicle to ever fly from the spaceport.

“As we prepare for our next-generation rocket, it makes sense that we have a world-class launch facility and landing facility,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said at the event, which was attended by several Virginian politicians, including Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R). “That high cadence for launch vehicle Neutron will expand indigenous capability and enable the United States to quickly and reliably reach the International Space Station, Earth orbit, the moon and beyond.”

The company sees Neutron as a contender to help ease the bottleneck in demand from both commercial and military customers for a ride to space. Today, that demand is in large part being met by a single provider in the medium-lift market, Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The firm has its sights on eventually supporting the Defense Department’s most important and complex national security missions. Today, only SpaceX and United Launch Alliance are eligible to launch those missions, though Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will join them once its New Glenn vehicle meets all of its certification requirements.

Last May, the U.S. Space Force brought Rocket Lab into the fold of its multibillion-dollar National Security Space Launch program, which allows the firm to offer the Neutron to fly a less-strenuous slate of military missions.

But first, Neutron needs to take flight at all. Beck has said on several occasions that while Rocket Lab believes its plan to launch this year is within reach, the schedule is aggressive with no margin for error.

Speaking with reporters at the launch site, Beck said the company has some key testing in the coming months to qualify key stages of the rocket, which will give it a better idea of whether it can meet that 2025 timeline.

“Nobody’s waving the white flag here until the last hour of the last day,” he said.

Following the first launch this year, the company is eyeing three more next year and five the following — eventually building its cadence to one flight per month. Asked how soon the firm expects to be competing directly with SpaceX, Beck said Rocket Lab is focused on helping meet demand in the market, not on a particular competitor.

“We service the opportunities that are in front of us, sort of run our own race,” he said. “I don’t wake up every morning going, ‘How am I going to compete with Elon?’ We see this opportunity here and we’re going to go after it and do a good job.”

The path forward

As Rocket Lab prepares for Neutron’s first flight, progress at its Virginia launch site in the coming weeks will be crucial.

Shaun D’Mello, a company vice president overseeing Neutron, told reporters that the rocket’s hardware is starting to be delivered by boat to a barge at the facility, and the company expects to have the full rocket on site by November. Much of the vehicle’s assembly is happening at a Rocket Lab facility in Middle River, Maryland, so the final mating at the site should be straightforward, he said.

“Our second stage is already on a boat on its way,” he said. “So, we’ll soon see a lot of hardware coming together here. A lot of the key integration will take place up there, so it’ll be a just-in-time arrival of hardware at Wallops before we put it on the pad.”

Once the rocket is on site and integrated, the firm will start static-fire testing, where engineers will validate the engine’s performance and ensure the system is ready for launch.

In parallel with hardware arrivals, Rocket Lab’s focus right now is in two key areas: readiness for Neutron’s ascent mission and the performance of its propulsion system.

While the rocket will eventually be fully reusable, the company is aiming for a controlled “splash-down” landing after its first flight. D’Mello said the firm’s experience with its high-cadence Electron rocket — which flies smaller satellites from Wallops Island and the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand — has prepared it for the launch itself, but the rocket’s landing is a new challenge.

“Most of the engineering team right now is spending time landing the rocket and not launching because we know how to get to orbit,” he said.

On the propulsion system, dubbed Archimedes, D’Mello said the company isn’t seeing any showstoppers but noted that this phase of testing is difficult.

“It’s a physics problem at the end of the day, rocket engines, so we’re holding the course and seeing some great performance,” he said. “Other than the fact that rockets are hard, there’s nothing out of the ordinary. ... We’re not too particularly concerned about any specific aspect. It all just needs to come together.”

Room to grow

As Rocket Lab expands Neutron and Electron operations in the coming years, D’Mello and Beck said they’re looking forward to seeing the facility at Wallops Island grow with them.

Officials representing the spaceport and NASA as well as state and local politicians said this week that Neutron’s success is a key part of their strategy for making Wallops a bigger player in commercial and military launch.

Speaking Thursday during the Rocket Lab event, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin said the state’s vision is for the launch facility to one day be “the most vibrant space industry complex in America.”

“In order to lead, it requires us to have an ecosystem that can fulfill not just the current requirements but the future requirements,” Youngkin said.

Rocket Lab officials said that while they considered more traditional medium and heavy-lift facilities like Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida, space is tight at those venues. Expanding their operations at Wallops offered a chance for the company to be a priority tenant and have a better chance at meeting its high-cadence launch targets.

“The Cape is an amazing place,” Beck said. “But it’s busy. It’s only getting busier.”

The facilities at Wallops are sufficient for Rocket Lab’s current operations, but as the company looks to the future, with an eye toward supporting human spaceflight, it will require more infrastructure, including deep-water ports.

“Right now, we have the minimum viable equipment that we need to get on and start ramping up,” he said. “As that ramps and we’re successful and the state’s successful, then we’ll all continue to invest in that infrastructure.”

Pending range approval, the mission is slated to lift off Aug. 12 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying Space Force satellites destined for geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 miles above Earth.

The milestone is a long time coming for ULA, the Defense Department’s longtime launch provider, which started developing its Vulcan rocket in 2014. The vehicle — which is replacing the company’s legacy workhorse, Atlas V — flew two demonstration missions last year and achieved its required military certification from the Space Force in March.

ULA and SpaceX are the only companies with rockets certified to fly National Security Space Launch (NSSL) missions. For years, prior to the certification of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, ULA was the sole provider of military launch services. In 2020, SpaceX won a 40% share of those missions slated to fly between fiscal years 2022 and 2027 with ULA maintaining the remaining 60%.

In April, the Space Force awarded SpaceX, ULA and national security launch newcomer Blue Origin a combined $13.5 billion for missions that will fly between fiscal years 2027 and 2032. Under the deal, SpaceX will receive $5.9 billion to fly 28 missions, ULA $5.3 billion to launch 19 and Blue Origin $2.3 billion to conduct seven.

The Space Force mission set to fly on the rocket next week, USSF-106, was originally set to launch in 2022. After being rescheduled as a Vulcan mission in 2023, the satellites have been grounded for two years as the rocket faced delays.

The mission includes an experimental spacecraft built by L3Harris called Navigation Technology Satellite-3, or NTS-3, that will demonstrate capabilities to augment the Space Force’s GPS constellation or support a future program. That effort, led by the Air Force Research Laboratory in partnership with Space Systems Command, will test technologies like steerable beams to provide regional coverage, a reprogrammable payload that can receive upgrades in orbit and protections against signal jamming.

Once NTS-3 is in orbit, AFRL will experiment with those capabilities over a one-year period, exploring how new satellite configurations could strengthen the Space Force’s positioning, navigation and timing, or PNT, capabilities.

That could mean integrating new capabilities onto the Space Force’s GPS IIIF satellites, which are built by Lockheed Martin, and approaching initial production. The service may also funnel relevant technology into other positioning, navigation and timing programs, including an effort called Resilient GPS, which is meant to augment the larger constellation with a fleet of small, lightweight, lower-cost satellites.

NTS-3 is the Air Force Research Laboratory’s first major PNT demonstration in nearly a half century. The last NTS satellite flew in 1977 and proved out capabilities that ended up being integral to the GPS program.

CEO Tony Gingiss, who’s been in the role since last December, told Defense News that much of his initial focus has been on managing the firm’s growth.

The company, which was founded in 2001 and acquired by Boeing in 2018, has delivered 14 commercial and government satellites to orbit. It’s now positioned to produce about that same number of spacecraft this year alone and expects to double its deliveries next year, Gingiss said in a recent interview.

The firm also has around 70 or 80 vehicles in its backlog to deliver over the next four years.

“Really, my focus is on the team, the infrastructure, the processes that we have, the tools that we have ... to be able to meet that demand,” he said. “And that’s a commitment to today, but also to continue to fill the pipe with new customers and new business because there’s clearly a lot of exciting things going on in the industry that we want to be prepared to continue to respond to and win work to keep filling our pipe.”

Millennium is a key provider for several Space Force programs, including 12 satellites for Space Systems Command’s Missile Track Custody program and eight vehicles for the Space Development Agency’s Foo Fighter effort — both programs focused on space-based missile warning and tracking.

For both programs, the company is scheduled to deliver initial satellites in fiscal 2027.

To accommodate those spacecraft and other Defense Department and NASA programs, the company is focused on two levers that Gingiss said are key to scaling capabilities: efficiency and capacity.

On the efficiency front, the firm and its parent company Boeing have been working to introduce more automation and build in commonality between product lines that allow for more capacity and output without a larger footprint.

The company is also streamlining processes so that its various operations — from manufacturing to analysis — take less time to conduct.

While those approaches helped make room for more work, the Foo Fighter contract Millennium received last year required further expansion to its vehicle integration capabilities. Rather than build a new facility, the company announced in April it would use 18,000 square feet of existing space adjacent to its current small site factory that resides within Boeing’s facility in El Segundo, California. That amounts to about a 30% increase to Millennium’s overall manufacturing footprint and will come online later this year.

“When you turn both of those knobs of efficiency and capacity simultaneously, ultimately what you do is increase capacity, but you decrease the dollar per capacity unit that you’re spending because you’re getting more value with every hour spent,” Gingiss said.

As Gingiss and his team prepare for that planned growth, there’s also the possibility for unplanned production increases — especially as DOD pursues programs like Golden Dome and invests in tactically responsive space capabilities that could require significant production ramp-ups or requests for additional satellites on short notice.

Millennium has some additionally capacity built into its inventory to meet “unforecasted demand” for certain parts that are common across its product lines, Gingiss said. While those don’t equate to a full vehicle, they provide a baseline level of responsiveness to customer needs.

At the vehicle level, Gingiss said the company works closely with its customer — in this case SDA or SSC — to understand where they might want flexibility to buy more of a particular vehicle or what future capabilities or variants they might want.

“I think a lot of that is really staying in lockstep with the customer on what their strategy is and getting that clear demand signal from them about what would those demands look like,” he said.

Each company received a contract worth up to $200 million, according to a notice from the Chief Digital and AI Office. The firms will help the Defense Department develop agentic AI workflows for key national security missions.

“Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems,” Chief Digital and AI Officer Doug Matty said in a statement.

The military services have adopted generative AI tools to varying degrees and for a range of tasks — from tech support to finding files. Agentic AI uses more advanced reasoning to address and act on more complex challenges.

The Pentagon didn’t specify what missions the program would support, but the department has said it wants to use AI in areas like intelligence analysis, campaigning, logistics and data collection.

Following the announcement, Elon Musk-owned xAI — whose conversational AI chatbot goes by the name Grok — unveiled a U.S. government-specific production line called Grok for Government.

Announcing Grok for Government - a suite of products that make our frontier models available to United States Government customers

We are especially excited about two new partnerships for our US Government partners

1) a new contract from the US Department of Defense
2) our…

— xAI (@xai) July 14, 2025

Grok has come under scrutiny after an update generated a slew of racists and antisemitic comments. In one instance, the chatbot referred to itself as “MechaHitler.”

The award follows Musk’s months-long push from within the White House to slash federal spending. Amid a public falling out earlier this summer, President Donald Trump has threatened to cancel government contracts awarded to Musk’s companies. Under this new deal, however, the billionaire’s federal work would expand.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman confirmed the pause in a congressional hearing Thursday, telling senate appropriators the service is studying “other avenues” to use small, commercial satellites flying in low orbits to provide low-latency communications to troops on the ground.

“We are simply looking at alternatives as we look to the future as to what’s the best way to scale this up to the larger requirements for data transport,” he said.

The alternative the service is considering is a largely secretive and little-known program called MILNET, a space data network that could eventually include nearly 500 satellites. SpaceX’s Starshield, a business unit that builds a military version of its Starlink spacecraft, is on contract for the effort, providing satellites, terminals and operations support.

Meanwhile, SDA’s transport layer is the service’s flagship effort to prove that a large constellation of small satellites — built by multiple companies selected competitively — can meet the military’s tactical SATCOM needs.

SDA has 19 transport satellites in orbit and is on track to launch another 126 spacecraft as part of the program’s next phase, dubbed Tranche 1, beginning late this summer. Another 182 spacecraft are on contract, and the agency had planned to buy Tranche 3 satellites in 2026.

Senators raised concerns Thursday about MILNET’s dependency on SpaceX satellites and the potential that it could undermine the competitive environment and open architecture SDA has cultivated through its transport layer.

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., claimed that MILNET has “no competition, no open architecture, no leveraging a dynamic space ecosystem.”

Saltzman and Air Force Secretary Troy Meink noted that while the service is pausing future buys of SDA transport satellites as it evaluates its path forward, it hasn’t made any firm decisions beyond that. Other elements of the program, they said, would move forward as planned.

Meink added that MILNET is not tied to a single system or acquisition approach.

“How we field that going forward into the future is something that’s still under consideration, and we will look into the acquisition of that,” he said.

The service’s budget request includes $277 million for MILNET — the first time the program appears in its public facing funding proposal — but it’s not clear what that would fund.

The Space Force didn’t immediately provide clarification on the analysis it’s conducting and its role on MILNET to date. And while it released some information Thursday on its fiscal 2026 budget request, it has yet to publish more detailed funding documents that could provide more insight into the effort.

The company, Obviant, was founded in 2023 and developed its defense acquisition platform as a means to help both DOD and the defense industry better understand how the Pentagon is spending its money and what stakeholders in Congress and in the department are prioritizing.

Navigating that system typically means combing through the thousands of pages of PDFs that make up the Defense Department’s budget request, tracking congressional markups through multiple committees and — in the fiscal 2026 cycle — keeping tabs on the status of a $150 billion budget reconciliation bill.

“There’s no source of truth. There’s no mapping for that,” Obviant founder and CEO Brendan Karp told Defense News in an interview. “All this information is just loads of structured and unstructured sources.”

On Tuesday, Obviant announced $7 million in seed funding that it will use to increase the AI-based platform’s capabilities and make it available to more users.

“With this recent funding, Obviant will expand its team, advance the AI capabilities of its platform, and broaden its customer base — transforming how companies, investors, and government leaders make more informed decisions across the defense sector,” Obviant said in a statement.

The funding round was led by Shield Capital, a venture firm led by former DOD and defense industry experts focused on early-stage companies developing AI, autonomy, cyber and space capabilities.

Karp and his team rolled out their platform last year and have targeted a few main customer groups: investors trying to understand where the department is focusing its funding, companies trying to sell to the military, congressional staff tracking DOD funding priorities and program offices and acquisition leaders in the Pentagon trying to transition technology to the field.

For all of these users, Karp said, Obviant pulls data from open-source budget documents and appropriations and contract announcements, as well as any unique customer data, and finds common threads within it.

The company provides information about how much the department is investing in certain capabilities or using certain contracting tools. It can also track trends, such as whether DOD’s public rhetoric matches its actual spending.

The firm has experienced success in its first few years, recently closing its first government contracts with several DOD innovation organizations, which Karp said he can’t yet disclose.

As lawmakers call for reforms to the defense acquisition system and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pushes for greater speed and efficiency in the weapons-buying process, Karp said he sees a role for the company in facilitating progress in those areas.

“We feel like we can play an accelerant role in that process,” he said.

The spacecraft, dubbed Dragoon, will fly on SpaceX’s Transporter 14 rideshare mission, which is slated to launch June 20 on a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

York is a key provider for SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture — a mega constellation of small missile warning and data transport satellites in low Earth orbit. The firm is building 136 satellites over three phases of the agency’s Transport Layer. Ten of those satellites have already launched as part of the first phase, Tranche 0, and the remaining satellites will launch in batches over the next few years.

Of those satellites, 12 are part of a $200 million contract York received in 2022 as part of SDA’s Tranche 1 Demonstration and Experimentation System, known as T1DES. The satellites will carry various experimental communication payloads that typically fly in geostationary orbit, about 22,000 miles above Earth. Through T1DES, SDA wants to see whether payloads in low Earth orbit, around 1,200 miles, can provide the same capability.

T1DES was originally planned to launch next year, but last fall SDA requested that one of the satellites be accelerated to fly about six months earlier than planned. So, according to York’s General Manager Melanie Preisser, the company pulled a spacecraft bus from its production line, integrated a prototype payload and tested the satellite in a matter of weeks.

Pressier told Defense News the faster schedule was a challenge but allowed the company to demonstrate its ability to respond quickly to customer needs. Along with assembling the spacecraft in a shorter window, York also acquired the commercial launch service through SpaceX — a step usually led by the government.

“The government paid to accelerate the mission and then we made all the arrangements, contractual arrangements to make it happen,” she said. “I’m hoping that this is a model to accelerate moving out new capabilities for a variety of customers.”

The remaining 11 T1DES satellites are slated to launch in January 2026. Pressier said they are in production today and should be ready to integrate with their communication payloads this fall.

Meanwhile, Dragoon is one of five missions York is schedule to launch this year — the company’s busiest annual cadence to date, Pressier said, and one that’s not likely to slow down any time soon.

Along with Dragoon, the firm plans to launch a classified project called Tyndal. That mission will be followed by another communications demonstration dubbed Bard that is scheduled to launch in July. The company also has two SDA Transport Layer flights — the first in July and a second at the end of the year.

While York’s involvement in SDA satellite development has largely been associated with the agency’s communications layer, the company is eyeing opportunities to build spacecraft to support SDA’s missile tracking and custody layers, which will include satellites that can detect and engage targets.

York has worked internally to demonstrate that its spacecraft buses can integrate the more complex sensor payloads required for those satellites, Pressier said, adding that the Tyndal mission that York is building for a classified customer will demonstrate its utility for custody-type missions.

The House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel proposed $131 million in its draft of fiscal 2026 military spending legislation for the Defense Department to create a Commercial Reserve Manufacturing Network. The network would include companies qualified to quickly shift from producing commercial goods to rapidly scaling weapons production when called upon.

The committee, which released its bill Tuesday, directs the department to craft a plan to qualify the first factory. That plan is due within 30 days of the legislation’s signing.

The Defense Department already has several models for fostering standby wartime capacity within the commercial sector. The Air Force’s Civil Reserve Air Fleet contracts with commercial airlines to provide additional airlift in emergencies, and the Navy’s National Defense Reserve Fleet provides a similar capability at sea. The Space Force is the newest service to adopt this approach, awarding initial contracts in March for its Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, which will provide space-based services in peacetime that can be scaled up during crisis.

The proposal for at-the-ready manufacturing capacity comes amid deepening concerns about the People’s Republic of China and its ability to quickly scale and deliver military systems to the field. That speed, juxtaposed against what the committee calls “the calcification of the United States defense acquisition system,” has lawmakers and defense officials alike looking for ways to strengthen the military industrial base with additional capacity and new technology.

“Action is needed to immediately accelerate the Department’s adoption of commercially available artificial intelligence (AI)-driven additive manufacturing factories to preserve America’s military advantage,” the committee wrote in a report accompanying its spending proposal. “The Department has an exceptional opportunity to scale advanced manufacturing technologies in a way that bolsters the defense industrial base and the broader American industrial base.”

The committee’s directive echoes a recommendation made in a report released in January by billionaire and former chair of the Defense Innovation Board Michael Bloomberg. Authored by several defense experts and former DOD officials, the report offers a path forward for mobilizing the industrial base. It also specifically advocates for the creation of a Civil Reserve Manufacturing Network that would establish “ready-to-scale defense production” and calls for Congress to fund it as soon as FY26.

In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in February, Nathan Diller, one of the report’s authors, highlighted that recommendation and called the offshoring of defense manufacturing a crisis. Diller, a former House Appropriations Committee staffer and one-time director of AFWERX, the Air Force’s innovation arm, now leads Divergent Industries, an automotive and aerospace manufacturing firm that is broadening the scope of its digital and AI-enabled factory to also produce cruise missiles and other defense systems.

“Right now, we literally are printing hyper car frames in the morning and cruise missiles in the afternoon,” Diller said in his written testimony. “We are in agreements with most of the defense primes and many startups, delivering capabilities for air, land, sea, and space during all phases of the life cycle.”

Diller emphasized the role that digital tools and AI have played in enabling his firm to broaden its scope.

“This is possible today with AI-driven manufacturing,” he said. “DoD has an opportunity to lead the way – driving adoption of dual-use technology and with it a resurgence in US manufacturing, while reducing taxpayer burden for defense.”

The Pentagon in recent years has emphasized the need for rapid production and scaling as a means to both replenish depleted weapons stocks and field low-cost systems like attritable drones in large numbers. Innovative manufacturing techniques are one way to get after that challenge.

Along those lines, the Defense Innovation Unit in April launched its Blue Manufacturing Marketplace, which is designed to connect technology firms with vetted advanced manufacturing companies whose production approaches could bring speed, scale and security to the defense industrial base.

DIU is currently reviewing proposals for its first round of companies, vetting manufacturing firms to make sure their supply chains are secure. The marketplace will then provide a venue to link those vendors with companies who could benefit from their technology.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Nathan Diller leads Divergent Industries.

Funded by AFRL, Varda’s W-3 capsule launched March 14 on Rocket Lab’s Pioneer satellite, which provided power, communications and propulsion for the system. It landed May 13 at Koonibba Test Range in South Australia.

The Varda capsule carried an inertial measurement unit — built for the Air Force by Innovative Scientific Solutions Incorporated and designed to allow systems to navigate and maneuver without GPS.

According to Varda, the W-3 capsule reentered Earth’s atmosphere at speeds that exceeded Mach 25, considered an “extreme” environment that can provide the military with new information about how systems perform in hypersonic conditions.

“The W-3 mission will provide unprecedented data to advance next-generation space and defense capabilities and continue to provide hypersonic environments to the reentry test community,” Dave McFarland, Varda’s Vice President of Hypersonic and Reentry Test, said in a statement.

Varda was founded in 2021 with a plan to send “production facility” satellites to space and manufacture everything from pharmaceuticals to fiber-optic cables in a zero-gravity environment. Because the capsules it uses to return the objects to Earth travel through a hypersonic environment, AFRL and NASA have partnered with the firm to use those vehicles as high-speed, reusable testbeds.

That application helped Varda secure a $60 million strategic funding increase in 2023 from AFRL, NASA and several private investors. Last November, AFRL awarded the company a four-year, $48 million contract to continue testing military payload reentry through a program called Prometheus.

Varda recovered its first capsule in 2024 in Utah and its second in February, also at the Koonibba Test Range. Varda’s fourth spacecraft is in the midst of integration and testing in California at Rocket Lab’s Spacecraft Production Complex.

The company has indicated that its first two successful missions proved the versatility of its W-series vehicle to fly a range of payloads and have given it the confidence to shift its focus to increasing the system’s launch cadence.

“For our pharmaceutical customers, increased cadence means we are able to more closely match drug development timelines,” the company said in a May 8 press release. “For defense customers, it allows for faster iteration between tests. And for microgravity researchers, we can offer a faster turnaround time between the design of an experiment and receiving data to iterate on.”

The mission, which lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on Tuesday morning, went south sometime after the rocket’s first stage separated and before the ignition of Alpha’s second stage. The mishap caused the vehicle to lose its engine nozzle extension, significantly reducing its thrust and making it unable to reach its destination in orbit.

Firefly initially reported the satellite had reached a lower orbit, but later confirmed that the spacecraft returned to Earth, making impact in the Pacific Ocean.

“The team is working closely with our customers and the [Federal Aviation Administration] to conduct an investigation and determine root cause of the anomaly,” Firefly said in a statement.

Lockheed’s self-funded mission was designed to test the capabilities of its LM 400 satellite bus — an adaptable, multimission system that can operate in a variety of orbits. The spacecraft has onboard data processing, a modular architecture and is compatible with several launch configurations.

Past missions have informed spacecraft design plans and helped improve Lockheed’s launch process.

In an April 7 briefing with reporters, Bob Behnken, the company’s vice president of exploration, products and technology, told reporters the company’s goal for the mission was to understand the “full lifetime experience” of the satellite.

“It’s important for us to exercise an LM 400 through the whole lifespace in preparation for those … mission needs that our customer has,” he said.

Lockheed spokesman Chip Eschenfelder said in a statement Tuesday issued after the failed launch that the company will work with Firefly to determine the cause of the mishap.

“Navigating risk and going fast are part of these self-funded demonstrations, and the knowledge we’ve gained already from the LM 400 production and processing will also benefit future customer missions,” he said.

Tuesday’s mishap follows a separate anomaly that occurred in December 2023 when an Alpha vehicle carrying a different experimental Lockheed payload delivered the satellite to the wrong orbit.

In June 2024, Lockheed selected Firefly’s Alpha to fly as many as 25 missions through 2029. The contract commits the longtime defense firm to 15 launch reservations and 10 optional missions.

The software-driven signal jammer, Pulsar-L, comes in two configurations — airborne and expeditionary. The company unveiled its first three Pulsar variants last year: Pulsar-V, which is a vehicle version; Pulsar Alpha, which is airborne; and a fixed-site configuration.

The primary differentiator between those variants and Pulsar-L is size, weight and power, Anduril’s Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer Chris Brose told reporters Monday. The smaller system is about the size of a shoebox and weighs less than 25 pounds.

“Think of Pulsar-L as a smaller form factor that’s going to extend that capability even farther out to the tactical edge onboard platforms and weapon systems,” Brose said.

Pulsar-L is already being used in operations and was first fielded last year. Brose declined to tell reporters where it’s stationed, but noted the system is “participating in real-world operations in the most stressing EW environments.”

Brose touted the speed at which the Anduril developed Pulsar-L, saying it took just eight months to move from the concept phase to fielding, largely because of the company’s common hardware and software platforms.

Pulsar-L can operate independently or with Anduril’s Lattice software, is user-friendly and can be set up in a matter of minutes, officials said. The company is pitching the system as an alternative to clunkier EW capabilities that it described in a press release as “rigid, manual, cumbersome and threat-specific.”

The system’s usability is closely tied to its autonomous technology, according to Sam El-Akkad, general manager of radio frequency and EW systems.

“All the operator needs to do, they can put it in an autonomous mode where it ingests the spectrum, figures out what’s out there, decides what’s a threat and what’s not and then engages those things,” he said in the briefing with Brose. “It all happens magically under the hood.”

With the first units fielded, Anduril is focused on ramping up production. El-Akkad said the firm plans to produce more than 100 low-rate initial production units by the end of this year, with a goal of scaling to thousands of Pulsar-L jammers annually in the next few years.

Brose declined to name Anduril’s early Pulsar-L buyers, but the company has been awarded several contracts in recent years for similar technologies.

Last October, an undisclosed Defense Department bought an unspecified number of Pulsar jammers as part of a $250 million counter-drone package that included 500 all-up rounds of Anduril’s Roadrunner interceptor.

The firm is also on a 10-year, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $1 billion with U.S. Special Operations Command to supply counter-drone hardware and software, including Pulsar, Lattice, Sentry Tower and its Anvil interceptor.