The U.S. Space Force has picked the second and third sites for for the Northrop Grumman [NOC] Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC), as the program proceeds apace, a service official said on Apr. 10.
The DARC system of three ground-based sensors is to track objects in geosynchronous orbit to help detect threats to U.S. and allied satellites.
“In terms of DARC site one, construction is going very well,” Col. Bryon McClain, Space Systems Command’s program executive officer for space domain awareness and combat power, told reporters at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs “Hardware is moving forward…Site two, we’re getting ready to move forward on that next contracting action. Contract timeline for site two we should be looking [to award] in a number of months.”
In 2022, the Space Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $341 million contract to build and field the first DARC radar in the Indo-Pacific region by 2025 (Defense Daily, Feb. 23, 2022). Yet, a revised timeline calls for the first DARC radar site to field in Western Australia in 2026.
Last September, the three nations in the AUKUS alliance–Australia, United Kingdom, and the United States–signed a Memorandum of Understanding on DARC.
The DARC collaboration is part of AUKUS Pillar 2, which is to spur allied cooperation in developing artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, cybersecurity and space systems.
Late last year, a joint statement on AUKUS’ Pillar 2 by the defense heads of the three nations said that DARC will field in all three by the end of the decade (Defense Daily, Dec. 4, 2023).
McClain said that “we’ve publicly released information on DARC sites in advance of when it should be released, and I don’t want to do that in the future.”
Last May, Northrop Grumman said that it had completed the Critical Design Review and a software demonstration for DARC (Defense Daily, May 30).
Asked about space domain awareness gaps that Space Force needs to fill to meet the goal of Gen. Stephen Whiting, the head of U.S. Space Command, to be combat ready by 2027, McClain said that, while he would not address specific gaps, “we have been very good from a space domain awareness perspective of understanding where satellites were, where debris was, and predicting where they’re going to be in the future state, assuming no external forces. ”
“If I look at the mission that Gen. Whiting has, he needs to know where things are right now,” McClain said. “Space domain awareness is our focus and, in terms of getting systems ready, we’re continuously looking at our oncoming systems, DARC being of those systems. One of our big focus areas is to not let the schedule slip.”