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An infrared image captures a successful intercept of a threat-representative ICBM target by two long-range, ground-based interceptors under the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s FTG-11 flight test, launched March 25, 2019.
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) wants to cancel its Space-based Kill Assessment (SKA) experiment in favor of higher priority Pentagon investments, such as the Golden Dome for America architecture, budget documents show.
The funding for that project will instead support a ground system for current and future missile-defense space missions called the Missile Defense Space Enterprise Architecture (MDSEA), according to the MDA’s fiscal 2026 research and development budget request released in June.
The SKA demonstration involved a network of 22 small sensors built by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and hosted on commercial spacecraft. The effort sought to study the operational feasibility of disaggregating large satellites and to consider the business case for shared versus dedicated satellite control, including the ground antenna networks.
The sensors were launched and completed on-orbit checkout in spring 2019, an MDA spokesperson, who declined to disclose the commercial spacecraft provider, tells Aviation Week.
The system demonstrated hit-assessment capability during a series of MDA flight tests, to include Flight Test Ground-based Midcourse Defense Weapon System (FTG)-11, FTG-12 and Flight Test Aegis Weapon System-44, the spokesperson said in an email.
“SKA showed that hit assessment can be accomplished from space quickly with existing, low-cost technology, making maximum use of commercial capabilities. SKA also collected a sizable amount of intercept data that can inform future sensors development,” they said.
The SKA ground system is operated out of the Missile Defense Integration and Operations Center at Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado.
MDA plans to consolidate funding from the SKA demonstration and the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) prototyping program to the MDSEA system, as the agency supports the Trump administration’s Golden Dome layered missile defense architecture. The agency referred Golden Dome-related queries to the Pentagon, which did not respond to a request for comment.
MDA developed HBTSS to track potential threats from their launch until interception, even while in a glide phase. L3Harris and Northrop Grumman each built a prototype satellite, which launched in 2024 alongside four spacecraft built for the Space Development Agency’s (SDA) nascent Tracking Layer. MDA is transitioning the HBTSS experiment from on-orbit to de-orbit operations, per budget documents.
The HBTSS capability will be slowly integrated into future phases of SDA’s Tracking Layer, defense officials have previously shared.
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