The event took place as part of the Defense Department’s Technology Readiness Experimentation, or T-REX, a semiannual showcase and evaluation staged at Camp Atterbury in Indiana. The event aims to validate prototypes built to fill urgent capability gaps across the military services and combatant commands.

Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry, commander of the Pentagon’s Rapid Assessment or Prototype Technology Task Force, told Defense News in an interview Monday that DOD plans to host at least two Top Drone schools each year.

The goal, he said, is to provide a chance for service members, industry and academia to prove out tactics, operational procedures and drone capabilities on a test course that mimics the kinds of terrain and adversary effects an operator might see in the field. It also allows the department to validate and refine its own counter-uncrewed aircraft system sensors.

“It’s a dual effect of data collect but also benefits the warfighter and industry flying through this threat-represented and emulated environment,” Limeberry said.

For the inaugural, four-day event, the task force set up a training course at the Muscatatuck Training Center just south of Camp Atterbury, designing it to imitate an urban setting and focusing on maneuverability, endurance and reconnaissance. Two companies, Vector and Code 19, flew drones alongside two service partners — the Army’s Combat Lethality Task Force and its Aviation Center of Excellence.

The drones were a mix of untethered first-person view systems and fiber-optic-connected drones.

The department also staged a trial at a separate test range at Camp Atterbury that was supporting T-REX where the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team conducted live fire demonstrations.

Limeberry said he was impressed with how well service members participating in Top Drone performed, navigating and identifying targets. For future events, he hopes to expand the trials over multiple weeks to allow operators to “refine” their tactics against more complex obstacles.

The department is also building a secondary Top Drone course at Camp Atterbury to emulate a more dense, wooded environment.

“As we continue to scale the complexity, it will be an a la carte menu of [electronic warfare] jamming and providing a real-world, adversarial threat-informed environment that we need to fly with and through to make sure that we’re staying competitive,” Limeberry said.

Senior leaders in the Pentagon in recent months have ramped up their drive for what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called “drone dominance.” The intent is for the military services to not only field more drones to operators, but also develop the organizational and training infrastructure to support broader adoption by 2027.

Top Drone supports that push as did much of last month’s T-REX event, which focused on low-cost, attritable attack drones as well as counter-uncrewed aircraft system technologies like interceptors and sensors.

Over the course of the two-week showcase, the department assessed 58 technologies, some of which were sponsored by a military service or combatant command and others brought by firms that had never engaged with the Defense Department but had technology with the potential to address a critical capability gap.

Of those technologies, some number will progress into joint, rapid experimentation and others will require further development and iteration or experimentation. Limeberry noted that DOD has a number of innovation pathways aimed at further maturing technology and T-REX is a good way to identify which route makes the most sense for a particular capability.

“The goal of T-REX is to come out and you find your best transition partner, an innovation pathway that fits the need of your company or fits the need of the government, depending on where the gap and critical need is,” he said.

Decisions about which technologies will transition into the rapid experimentation phase are pending, Limeberry said. He expects the team will brief Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael in the coming weeks and have a determination before the end of September.

Along with the technology demonstrations, T-REX also featured static displays from another 50 companies whose capabilities are in an early stage of development. Those capabilities may be considered for participation in future T-REX assessments.

“They were showcasing emergent and urgent capabilities but didn’t have the capacity yet to fully assess and put their prototypes into the environment, so we put them on a prototype technology display,” Limeberry said.

The 21 satellites, all built by York Space Systems, flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The spacecraft are part of SDA’s Transport Layer, designed to provide fast, secure communication capability to military operators.

The launch represents a new phase for SDA, which since 2019 has been crafting plans for a large constellation of government-owned missile tracking and data transport satellites in low Earth orbit. Its first spacecraft, Tranche 0, launched in 2023 and 2024 and have been used to demonstrate capabilities like laser communication between satellites, with the ground and recently between a commercial partner’s satellite and an SDA terminal installed on an aircraft in flight.

Once on orbit, the Tranche 1 satellites launched today will build on that work. Following initial payload health and safety checks, the spacecraft could start providing operational capability to combatant commands and other users within four to six months, according to acting SDA Director Gurpartap Sandhoo.

“This is the first time we’ll be able to start working with our COCOMs, our joint force to start integrating space into their operations and getting the warfighters used to using space from this construct,” Sandhoo told reporters prior to the launch. “This is the first time we’ll have the space layer fully integrated into our warfare operations.”

SDA’s first user group, whom Sandhoo called “early adopters,” includes military operators in the Indo-Pacific. This initial work is key, he added, to familiarize the services and combatant commands with the capability SDA can provide.

“Doing the warfighter immersion is going to be critical because they have to get trained on this and we have to provide this capability,” Sandhoo said. “That’s what Tranche 1 will start doing.”

Tranche 1 will include 154 satellites — 126 for the Transport Layer and 28 for the Tracking Layer. The first 21 spacecraft will bring a limited coverage and capacity, but that will increase over time as more reach orbit.

Starting with today’s launch, SDA plans to fly a new batch of Tranche 1 satellites each month for 10 months, with six of those missions carrying transport spacecraft and four flying missile warning and tracking satellites. The first few launches will be dedicated transport missions, but Sandhoo said tracking satellites will start to fly early next year.

The next mission is slated for mid-October and will feature satellites built by Lockheed Martin.

By the end of Tranche 1, Sandhoo said, SDA hopes to be providing regional capacity. Tranche 2, scheduled to start launching in late 2026, will further expand the constellation’s reach.

The agency is making headway on future missile tracking capabilities beyond Tranche 2 — which could provide essential support for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile shield — but the longer-term future of the Transport Layer is uncertain. The effort is fully funded through Tranche Two, but the Space Force has paused work on Tranche 3 amid an ongoing study considering whether the constellation is the best solution to meet the U.S. military’s data transport needs.

Sandhoo said the stalled funding will delay SDA’s plans to expand from regional to global transport coverage.

SDA’s deputy director, Gurpartap Sandhoo, will lead the agency in an acting capacity.

Tournear has been at the helm of SDA since 2019, overseeing much of the agency’s early work to define what is now the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture — a constellation of hundreds of missile warning and tracking and data transport satellites.

The leadership transition comes as SDA approaches a key milestone: proving the viability of its concept for a proliferated satellite constellation that is continuously updated on a two-year cycle as technology and threats evolve.

SDA launched its first satellites, dubbed Tranche 0, in 2023, and has been demonstrating the ability to track missile launches and share data among satellites, with ground operators and recently with moving aircraft via laser communication links. Later this week, the agency is slated to launch its next batch of satellites, Tranche 1, which will build on that work and provide a baseline operational capability.

In a LinkedIn post Monday, Tournear said his tenure overseeing the innovative agency’s growth was “a tumultuous journey.”

“At the time of SDA’s establishment, many thought that [proliferated low Earth orbit, or pLEO] was a terrible idea,” he said. “Convincing detractors of the virtues offered by pLEO was not easy, but through several major wins, the tide shifted. Now, SDA is not alone pushing for pLEO; this concept has been adopted and advocated by the Space Force at large, and incorporated into almost every mission area.”

In an interview with Breaking Defense, Tournear said that in his new position with Auburn, he’ll be helping build up the university’s space education and research ecosystem, adding that the role fell into his lap.

Sandhoo joined SDA in July and was previously the vice president and chief architect at Quantum Space and director for emerging technologies at Northrop Grumman. He also served as deputy director at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency and was the head of the spacecraft engineering division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

SDA’s Chief Program Officer Michael Eppolito will serve as acting deputy director.

The mid-August special user demonstration at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington was part of a project called Launched Effects, a term the Army coined to describe a class of autonomous system that isn’t quite a drone or a loitering munition but can be launched from the ground or a vehicle to provide a range of effects — from targeting and surveillance to kinetic strike. The systems are designed to scout high-value targets in hard-to-reach terrain where a soldier might not have a clear picture of what’s happening on the battlefield.

The service plans to field short, medium and long-range Launched Effects, or LEs, in the coming years, and a key part of its strategy is to continuously iterate on and update those systems based on soldier feedback and mission requirements. That’s a departure from more traditional acquisition programs that can take years to set a requirement, develop and test a system — all before an operator ever touches it.

The Army’s approach closely aligns with a push from senior leaders in the Pentagon to significantly ramp up efforts to arm U.S. military units with drones and other unmanned systems. In late April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed Army leadership to equip every division with launched effects by the end of next year. Following Hegseth’s memo, the Army announced a new strategy, the Army Transformation Initiative, that emphasizes the need for more autonomous systems.

Then in June, Hegseth issued a broader directive, instituting a wave of acquisition reforms aimed at making it easier for the services to buy and field unmanned systems. The goal, he said, is “drone dominance” by 2027. While the Pentagon hasn’t defined what that end state looks like from a quantity perspective, the message is clear: Senior leaders want to get autonomous systems into the hands of operators, and fast.

In an interview after the demonstration, the Army’s program manager for uncrewed aircraft systems, Col. Danielle Medaglia, said that while the service’s Launched Effects initiative predates these Pentagon directives, the urgency and high-level tasking from Hegseth is key to aligning priorities within the service and making sure the program sticks to its delivery timelines.

“What this did was really allowed us to get the advocacy we needed to issue launched effects as quickly as possible to the soldiers,” Medaglia told Defense News. “We have been given that flexibility from the Army acquisition executive to do exactly that, and by saying, ‘field to each division by 2026,’ that also helped align all of our teammates.”

Soldier feedback

The three-week event here had multiple aims, but chief among them, officials said, was soldier feedback on whether the first batch of short-range Launched Effects systems is user friendly and relevant to their mission needs.

In March, the service chose three off-the-shelf short-range systems that will serve as a baseline for the effort: RTX’s Coyote Block 3, Anduril’s Altius 600 and AEVEX Aerospace’s Atlas. It bought a limited number of each vehicle and distributed them to three units during the user demonstration in August, with each unit focused on a single system.

Brig. Gen. Cain Baker, director of the Army’s Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, said in an interview that while the service has experimented with Launched Effects at several exercises, the user demonstration was the first time it gave them to operators for hands-on training.

“Getting that feedback from the soldiers, from the commander in the field, helps us drive industry from the standpoint of what are the pros and cons of the capability,” Baker said. “From a larger perspective across the Army, it drives our doctrine, our organization, the materiel solution, the training aspect.”

During the first week of the demonstration, each of the three 7th ID units participating in the event conducted initial equipment training on their assigned system. They learned how to set up the LEs, integrate them into their mission planning and use the flight controllers. They also conducted simulated flights.

In week two, they operated the systems live for the first time, running through the setup protocol and tracking their flight path.

For the third week, the units once again flew their systems but this time they applied them to a tactical scenario and had a chance to operate multiple vehicles at one time.

According to soldiers and service officials, the demonstration was largely a success. Army leaders — from engineers to program executive officers — said they were impressed with how quickly soldiers adapted to the new equipment and their enthusiasm around incorporating them into operations.

Medaglia said it’s too early to provide a distilled rundown of the lessons learned, but she noted that the event provided invaluable data that will shape future training, requirements and operational concepts.

“Each of those units did not interact with each other and you saw them fight it in their specific way, with their experience and their type of expertise,” Medaglia said. “It really opened our aperture on how we could leverage LE moving forward.”

Defense News was on site during the second week of the demonstration, when units were transitioning from the classroom to the training ground.

Spc. Jacob Richter, whose unit experimented with AEVEX’s Atlas, said he came into the demonstration with no experience operating drones. He said the classroom and simulation training prepared him well for the live flight and described the system as easy to use.

“It was a seamless transition,” Richter said. “The flight simulator they had mimicked the flight almost perfectly. There was almost no change.”

Access to LEs means units can use an autonomous system to scout a target or gather other intelligence, and then a second vehicle can act as an attack drone for the strike mission. Richter and 1st Lt. Zach Glenn said the scout capability could allow them to fly further into restricted spaces and lessen some of the security concerns that come with sending human operators to perform that mission.

“We can use the scout drone to know what’s ahead of us, and we can also use the attack drones with the scout to eliminate the assets we’re worried about,” Glenn said. “If we’re worried about the enemy detecting any type of [electromagnetic] signature we’re putting off with our radios, we can eliminate that ahead of time. It’s just added security. It’s another tool in the toolkit we can use.”

Lt. Col. Michael Wallace, battalion commander for the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, said getting feedback from soldiers like Glenn and Richter allows him to refine operational concepts based on their experience with the system.

“They’re identifying some of the limiting constraints of employing it, they’re seeing what the capabilities are, how to integrate it into their operations,” Wallace said. “They’re providing that to guys like me that have a little bit more experience on how to refine that and nest it with how we fight and how we do operations.”

Wallace noted that getting systems in the hands of soldiers is about more than familiarizing soldiers with how they work — it’s a chance to let them experiment and decide how the technology might augment or support their mission in a way someone on the outside might not have envisioned.

“I think that’s what all these great civilians are out here trying to do is get the items in the hands of the warfighter so that we don’t see it for the first time when we’re downrange,” he said. “We’ll continue to iterate on it, provide feedback and ultimately they can help inform a capability that’s going to make the whole Army more lethal and more ready.”

Continuous iteration

The Army plans to leave some number of systems behind with units at Joint Base Lewis-McChord to continue training and improving the capability, but the service is still defining its longer-term strategy for fielding the first round of Launched Effects.

In late July, the Army approved the program’s acquisition strategy, which uses what’s called an urgent capability acquisition pathway — an approach reserved for high-need programs slated to field in two years or less. That label, according to LE Product Manager Lt. Col. Hunter Gray, gives the program flexibility to move fast, regularly update its requirements and reopen competition to new vendors.

“It’s something that allows us to move very quickly, to adopt technology that’s ready to issue to units today and to iterate — to provide a continuously upgraded capability that’s driven by user feedback and the most current state of the technology that we’re seeing in industry,” Gray told Defense News.

That level of openness will require the service to find a balance between leveraging commercially-available equipment and making sure the systems it delivers are operationally relevant. The plan right now is to initially field off-the-shelf platforms like those it demonstrated last month and then survey industry every six months to see what new capabilities might be available, never committing to a single vendor but rather always soliciting new ideas solutions.

Maj. Chris Dudley, assistant product manager for Launched Effects, said in an interview at the event that the Army’s strategy is a significant departure from other acquisition programs that spend years on the front-end building an exquisite system with little to no operator input.

“We’re sort of inverting the process and trying to get it into the soldiers’ hands first, and then we’ll iterate and develop on the findings that we have,” he said.

As the Army makes its plans for fielding the baseline short-range LE systems, the service is also eyeing medium and longer-range systems using the same acquisition approach. Officials said the recent special user demonstration will inform the process for buying, fielding and crafting training plans for those platforms as well.

At the same time, the service is working to make sure that its architecture for Launched Effects is modular — from the launchers they fly from to the controllers used to operate them. Having a plug-and-play infrastructure not only makes the system versatile and simpler to integrate, but it makes it easier for vendors to design systems that fit those specifications.

Baker, director of the Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, said the plan is to have that architecture defined over the next 18 to 24 months.

“What we want is really an agnostic capability to launch from air to ground,” he said. “What we don’t want is to buy one type of specific launched effect to do one type of mission set and then another launched effect to do another mission. We want modularity with the program.”

Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress from Alabama, who stood beside Trump during an Oval Office announcement, insisted it was former President Joe Biden who politicized the basing process.

“This delegation has worked together, both chambers, both parties, to make sure that Huntsville was the place that Space Command called home,” Sen. Katie Britt said during the event. “Obviously, the Biden administration chose to make this political.”

The announcement is just the latest development in a yearslong back and forth about which of the two states should host the the military command, which is charged with operating the Defense Department’s space assets.

The headquarters has been provisionally based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, since 2019. In 2021, just as Trump was leaving office at the end of his first term, the White House announced Huntsville, Alabama, as its pick for the headquarters.

The decision sparked pushback from Colorado lawmakers, largely led by former Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., who called the Air Force’s selection process “fundamentally flawed.” A series of Government Accountability Office and DOD Inspector General reports followed, identifying issues with transparency and credibility in the Air Force’s basing process but concluded that the service followed the law in choosing Alabama.

Despite the conclusion of the watchdog investigations — and then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s support for relocating the command to Huntsville due to estimates that the move would save DOD $426 million — the White House announced in July 2023 that it had abandoned the first Trump administration’s decision and that Space Command would remain in Colorado.

Trump’s announcement that he would revert to his earlier, 2021 decision to base the command’s headquarters in Alabama was widely expected. However, his insistence Tuesday that the move was closely linked to Colorado’s embrace of mail-in voting — a major concern for the president — was not previously publicly identified as part of his administration’s justification.

More than once during the briefing he called Colorado’s policy of allowing voters to submit ballots by mail as “crooked” and claimed it influenced his decision.

“When the state is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections,” Trump said. “That played a big factor.”

As president, Trump has been forward leaning on space policy. During his first term in 2019 he created the U.S. Space Force and reestablished Space Command as the 11th combatant command.

Later in the briefing, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-AL, indicated the new command would be named the “Donald J. Trump Space Command Center.”

The Space Force and Space Command deferred questions about the claim to Tuberville’s office. A spokesman for the senator said he “is exploring avenues to make that the official name.”

“Sen. Tuberville believes that naming U.S. Space Command headquarters after the guy who created Space Force and has brought Space Command back to life is more than appropriate,” the spokesperson told Defense News in an email.

The successful proof-of-concept demonstration took place in July between a General Atomics Electromagnetics optical communications terminal that was mounted to an aircraft and a commercial satellite operated by Kepler Communications in an orbit around 311 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth. While SDA has shown several times it can connect satellites from its initial data transport constellation, or tranche, the airborne link up was a first.

“Now it becomes an effort to fold this into actual tranches where we can operationalize this,” Nathan Getz, director of SDA’s Data Transport Cell, told Defense News in a recent interview.

The communications capability is an integral part of SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, or PWSA. The laser communications links and optical terminals allow satellites to pass data amongst themselves, with users on the ground and with aircraft and other systems. The goal is much faster, higher-volume data transmissions than traditional systems, which rely on radio frequency beams and in-demand spectrum access to send information.

Along with demonstrating the link between those satellites and General Atomics’ airborne terminal, the experiment proved the ability to make a connection between two optical communication terminals, or OCTs, built by different firms — crucial for SDA, which is relying on a mix of commercial vendors and more traditional defense contractors to build out its architecture. The agency has established an open OCT standard to help with that compatibility.

“This demonstration not just achieved the milestone for SDA-compatible communications across the air and space domains, but very importantly proved the robustness of the SDA standard for communications between OCT’s built by two different companies,” Gregg Burgess, vice president of GA-EMS’ Space Systems division, said in a statement.

SDA is on a path to launch hundreds of data transport and missile tracking satellites in the coming years as part of the PWSA through an incremental development and fielding approach. It’s partnering closely with companies offering proven technology and is delivering capability in batches, also known as tranches, that can be replaced or augmented every two years or so with new, more advanced spacecraft.

The agency began launching its first satellites, dubbed Tranche 0, in April 2023, and the next batch, Tranche 1, is slated to start flying later this month. Together, the two tranches are meant to prove out SDA’s iterative development approach.

The successful air-to-space demonstration was part of an ongoing experimentation campaign involving both SDA Tranche 0 satellites as well as commercial spacecraft. That work contributed to significant progress earlier this spring on space-to-ground connections between SDA and commercial satellites and ground terminals. Since achieving its first successful space-to-air connect in July, Getz said, SDA has repeated the experiment several times.

“It’s become, I don’t want to say routine, but now every time we go up, we’re pretty much connecting, we’re exchanging data, gigabits of data,” according to Getz. “It’s a lot of expertise on the industry side as well as SDA. We kind of built this cookbook of how you make this work, and now we’re seeing some success.”

The demonstration comes as agencies both internal and external to the Defense Department are closely watching for proof that SDA’s development approach and operational concept are the best option for the military.

The Space Force this summer revealed it is evaluating additional options for proliferated satellite communications, including a separate space-based network called MILNET, which is so far relying largely on the SpaceX’s Starshield for satellites, terminals and operations support.

In February, the Government Accountability Office released a report that called into question whether SDA’s go-fast strategy was causing it to bypass key capability development milestones. The analysis recommended the agency hold off on launching its Tranche 1 satellites until it demonstrated required laser communications capabilities with the Tranche 0 spacecraft already in orbit.

GAO found that while SDA at that time had made progress in some areas — like developing an optical terminal standard, testing the capability in a lab and maturing some of the enabling technologies — it hadn’t been able to validate the technology on orbit as fast as it had hoped.

According to Getz, SDA has made “night and day” progress since the release of that report. At the time, he said, the agency was “on the steep part of the learning curve.” Since February, Getz said, SDA has learned a lot about the technology and its use on the Tranche 0 satellites.

“We’re using the SDA satellites constantly, not only for what I’m talking to you about — space-to-air, space-to-ground — but also space-to-space,” he said. “It’s ongoing all the time. There are contacts being scheduled. It’s getting more automated. So, it’s a little bit like a snowballing effect where it takes a little while to get going and then things start speeding up.”

Up next for SDA is to continue expanding the envelope of its experimentation and using what it’s learned to inform future satellite development and operations, Getz said.

While the initial space-to-air connect involved a commercial satellite, Getz said SDA is working toward demonstrating the capability with its Tranche 0 satellites, which are located around 621 miles (1,000 kilometers).

SDA is also planning more work with commercial firms whose terminals comply with SDA’s standards.

“We’re using our own satellites, we’re also working with commercial partners here to bring capabilities and advance capabilities,” he said. “A major message here is that SDA does both and that there is a pretty robust industry response to SDA and the SDA ecosystem. As we build out the tranches, we’re also looking to leverage commercial capabilities.”

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.”

Following previous DIU Director Doug Beck’s sudden resignation from the role Monday, the Pentagon announced Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael would lead the organization in an acting capacity. While the decision at least temporarily puts DIU under Michael’s purview, he was adamant the move was not permanent.

“DIU is a separate organization independently created in law with its own mission set,” Michael told reporters on the sidelines of a National Defense Industrial Association conference in Washington, D.C. “I’m acting until we find a full-time person.”

When DIU was first established in 2015 as a Defense Department outpost for Silicon Valley tech firms, it reported to the Pentagon’s head of research and engineering — a construct that senior leaders said impeded its influence. The following year, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter elevated the office to report directly to him.

By 2018, it was shuffled back within the research and engineering portfolio, where it remained until 2023. At that time, former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin again gave it a direct reporting line. Congress codified the office’s structure in the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which states that DIU’s director “shall report directly to the Secretary without intervening authority.”

While Michael won’t permanently wear the DIU director hat, at least for now, the Pentagon did recently expand his office’s scope. The department announced Aug. 20 that the Chief Digital and AI Office, formerly an independent organization, would reside within research and engineering moving forward.

At the time, the Pentagon said the move would “accelerate Department-wide AI transformation.” Michael reiterated that message Wednesday.

“Having it be part of R&E means that it’s part of a larger organization that hopefully has the muscle and the wherewithal to further develop and do bigger partnerships … and then more easily proliferate that technologies into various areas of the department,” he said.

Asked how his organization might spearhead AI advances that could support Golden Dome — a DOD initiative to create an advanced, multi-layered homeland missile defense shield — Michael was careful to note he doesn’t have direct involvement in the project. However, he said his intent is to invest in AI platforms that could be made available for large-scale efforts like Golden Dome, as well as for combatant commands, Pentagon employees and even defense contractors to support their mission.

“It’s really [about] trying to use the latent capability that’s primarily been invested in by the private industry,” he said. “They’ve been putting $300 billion per year into AI, whether it be software development, data centers and so on. So how does the DOD leverage that for an endless list of use cases that are beneficial.”

Along his focus on harnessing AI for defense applications, Michael noted that his team is also crafting a list of critical technology focus areas — a practice that has become a tradition for incoming research and engineering chiefs. He noted that rather than add to current list, which includes some 14 technologies, he’s working to narrow it to include only the department’s highest priorities.

Rather than craft roadmaps for each area, Michael added, he’ll instead call for “sprints” that aim to accelerate broader technology development and adoption.

“It’s a pyramid hierarchy, if you will. These are the most important things I need people to wake up every day thinking about,” Michael said. “I want to communicate that to industry.”

The Pentagon confirmed the personnel change in a statement to Defense News, adding that Michael Dodd, the incoming assistant secretary of defense for critical technologies, will be the acting deputy director of the commercial innovation hub.

“Together, both are laser-focused on driving innovation and enhancing the department’s ability to deliver groundbreaking commercial technologies to empower the American warfighter,” the spokesperson said.

Beck’s resignation follows more than two years in the DIU director role, where he oversaw the organization’s transition from a small, largely experimental office to one focused on helping the Defense Department scale commercial technology for operators in the field.

DIU and Beck have played a key role in major Pentagon programs like Replicator, an effort to change the way the DOD prioritizes, tests and buys high-need technology.

In recent years, DIU took on a more prominent role in the defense technology ecosystem, triggered largely by a nearly $1 billion funding increase from Congress and a decision by then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to have the office report directly to him. DIU previously fell under the oversight of the undersecretary for research and engineering.

The office’s new, if temporary, leadership could signal a shift back to the former organizational structure, though the Pentagon has not confirmed whether the reporting chain has been altered.

Michael, who took over the undersecretary role in May, is a former senior executive at Uber, as well as a startup investor. As the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, he is the department’s main advisor on technology development, experimentation and testing.

Dodd currently oversees energy programs within the National Security Innovation Capital office, an arm of DIU focused on accelerating technology adoption within DOD. If confirmed by the Senate for the assistant secretary role, he would lead the acceleration of critical defense and dual-use technologies like 5G, hypersonics, microelectronics and autonomy.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story misstated Michael Dodd’s current job title.

First reported by Politico, the circumstances of Beck’s resignation from the Defense Innovation Unit were not immediately clear. A DIU spokesperson declined to comment, and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for details.

Beck, a Navy Reserve captain and former Apple executive, took the helm of DIU in 2023. At the time, the organization was at an inflection point. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had just elevated the small, experimental unit to report directly to his office and Congress was proposing nearly $1 billion in funding for the office. Beck’s role was to help DIU field commercial technology to military units on faster timelines and in much larger quantities.

DIU and Beck have played a key role in major Pentagon programs like Replicator, an effort to change the way the Defense Department prioritizes, tests and buys high-need technology.

His departure follows the sudden announcement last week of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin’s retirement and the firing of Defense Intelligence Agency Chief Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse on Friday.