Main Engine Cut Off - T+189: Stephen Forbes, DARPA Blackjack Program Manager

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

Stephen Forbes, the Program Manager for DARPA’s Blackjack project, joins me to talk about DARPA and its interaction with the rest of the Department of Defense, how they approach space initiatives, where Blackjack came from, where it’s going, what they hope to accomplish with it, and how it fits into the near-future of the industry.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 40 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, and seven anonymous—and 589 other supporters.TopicsBlackjackLockheed Martin wins $27 million contract modification for integration of DARPA’s Blackjack satellites - SpaceNewsNorthrop Grumman to supply navigation payloads for DARPA’s Blackjack satellites - SpaceNewsSEAKR wins $60 million DARPA contract to demonstrate autonomous satellite operations - SpaceNewsDARPA orders six satellites from Blue Canyon Technologies for Blackjack program - SpaceNewsRaytheon wins $37 million DARPA contract for Blackjack payloads - SpaceNewsThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by NASA

I am really excited for the show today. I sent a bunch of guest emails last week for people to come on here, Main Engine Cutoff, with me, Anthony Colangelo. And I did not expect it, but DARPA was the first one to email me back. The very secret of DARPA that is tough to get questions answered from many times. I'm sure we're very open and willing to come on the show. So we've got Stephen Forbes here. He is the program manager for the Blackjack program that DARPA has been working on for a couple of years now and is heading up to launch in the next couple of years. It's going to be a really

cool conversation because I haven't talked about DARPA Blackjack much on the main show. I've covered a lot on headlines because they've been announcing many different contractors over the past couple of months as everything kind of forms up for the launch. But we're going to dive into what it is, what they're trying to do, how DARPA and DARPA space programs interact with the rest of the Department of Defense, and I think just generally learn a lot about this program and some similar ones that are happening since low Earth orbit constellations are all the rage these days. And now it's going to start happening on the Department of Defense side as well here in the US. So a lot to learn about, but we'll get to that in a second. First, I want to say thank you to

all of you who support Main Engine Cutoff over at mainengincutoff.com slash support. There are 626 of you supporting the show every single month. This episode is brought to you by 40 executive producers. Thanks to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Munis, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for making this show possible. If you want to help support the show, if you want to get Miko headlines in your podcast

feed every week, mainenginecutoff.com slash support is where to do that. And without further ado, let's give Steven a call. All right, Steven Forbes, welcome to the show. I'm excited to have some DARPA talk, which is a topic I haven't covered a lot. So I'm hoping you can help us out. Sure, always happy to. I want to start with DARPA itself, because I know we have a lot of international listening audience that might not be super familiar with DARPA.

Could you give us a sense of what DARPA's mission is overall and the way that it relates to the rest of the Department of Defense? Sure. So we're focused on high risk, high reward, science and technology research. So, you know, we're really there to push the boundaries of what we can do with technology. You know, understanding that certainly as you get further along in the acquisition cycle, failing becomes unacceptable. Yeah, but you need a safe space in which you can take those high risk, high reward payoff areas, you know, make significant bets where you aren't sure of the outcome, where the technology is borderline, you know, you're right on the hairy edge, but the payoff, if for those that, you know,

work is huge. So that's a fundamentally DARPA's role is to take those high risk, high reward research opportunities that then other folks in the acquisition community can build upon. And that end process, the kind of handoff to the other organizations that exist, what does that typically entail? Do you actually interact with other organizations to share lessons learned and insights, or is there a different form of knowledge sharing there? and insights? Or is there a different form of knowledge sharing there? Sure. So it varies on the programs and the sort of maturity of what's being developed. So I work in the tactical technologies office. We're sort of right now the focused on systems. So we take component technologies that have been developed by either other offices or other organizations, and try and

stitch them together and big into big systems that, you know, are closer to transition than, say, somebody in some of the other offices, like microtechnology, right there, they're really focused on pushing the absolute most that you could get out of, say, a semiconductor or, or a clock or something like that. Not so much on the focus of how that fits into a broader system. You know, they're obviously looking at that, but they exist to really push that technology boundaries. TTO really exists to push the systems and what you can do in that domain, which is why, you know, the Blackjack program, which is a multiple satellite constellation demonstration program,

sits in the tactical technology office. So depending on where you sit in that technology maturity range, influences how you do that transition. So for the folks of us in TTO, in the tactical technologies office, we sit, we interact very closely with those that are on the transition side.

So I work very closely with SMC, you know, the Air Force, you know, folks who would actually be closer to acquiring a system than say somebody who is attempting to advance how many transistors we can pack into a semiconductor chip, right? There they'd be working more with industry and the transition would be more in product offerings that you know in intel or some other semiconductor boundaries could offer so it varies uh we all definitely want to have a home for our technology when we're done um you know that's that's our purpose and you know we want to see our programs succeed achieve their objectives and then see those uh technologies technologies actually get used by others. You know, and that's really what we want to judge success by is that we fundamentally change things.

And was that change adopted by the larger US community? So Blackjack itself, it's been around for a couple of years now, I forget the exact date, but I'd love to hear. I don't know if you were involved from the beginning. But if you know, you know, how it came about, what the inspiration was for this being a branch of work, I'd love to hear a little bit about the origin story. Sure. So I've been involved with Blackjack basically from its beginning as a formal program. So, you know, there's always an idea generation, idea down select process. And I came in at the end of that process. So at that point, Blackjack was looking pretty feasible. There had been a lot of community engagement

within the US defense space community, sort of scoping the program. And then I came from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Space Vehicles Directorate. We were part of supporting DARPA in that scoping activity and so that's how I got involved in the program and then from there I was selected to be the deputy of the program because blackjack is a joint DARPA air force space force program so I was the sort of service representative because at the time in 2018, Space Force didn't exist. It was still Havspace and the U.S. Air Force.

So I was the service representative on the program as the deputy. And Rusty Thomas was the Blackjack program manager, was the DARPA employee. He got an opportunity last August. And so I then took over for the program, you know, which is nice, because I've been here from the beginning. The only downside is I can't blame the former program manager for anything, because I was I was the deputy helping him make all of those decisions. So I'm just as guilty as as, as rusty is. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's in good shape and I'm very happy to have this opportunity for DARPA to give me this opportunity. And I think the program's, you know, going, making significant impacts and it's on a good path to success. idea was to prove out some different capabilities of small satellite constellation in exchange of

what the current model of certain capabilities are across the Department of Defense needs. And is that, I guess, which piece of that was more interesting? Is it the constellation side? Is it the small bus side? Are both equally interesting to what the goals of Blackjack are? are both equally interesting to what the goals of Blackjack are? So I think, you know, our fundamental goal with the program and my interest is the ability to build out that proliferated constellation. There's nothing that said, you know, we didn't start with a specific satellite size in mind. There was nothing that said we have to be small satellites, medium satellites, large satellites. You know, launch cost puts a cap at how big you can be

and still be proliferatable. If you can only fit four satellites per medium class, Falcon 9 or Atlas launch vehicle, the launch costs are gonna prevent you from proliferating out what you need. And so when you get right down to it, I expect our demonstration satellites are going to be in 300-kilogram class vehicles, so certainly not what I would consider traditionally a

small satellite. But they're also certainly not large satellites. They're not school buses or anything like that. But that enables us to get anywhere from 30 to 40 of them on a medium-class launch vehicle, which really allows us to hit to a very you know reasonable launch cost point for proliferating out of constellation when we look at it most of the missions require anywhere from the order of you know 60 to 90 at the low end to you know 100 to 200 to if you wanted to do a full up PNT constellation, a la GPS, that might

push you up to close to 400 satellites. So the fitting 30 to 40 on a launch vehicle makes it a very compelling game where launch costs, satellite costs, and everything sort of balances out. You know, it's, you have to have a certain amount of size to be able to do something useful. You know, and you need a certain amount of really power to do something useful. And so, so, you know, it'd be wonderful if we could solve all the US military needs with 6U CubeSats. They certainly have a role, they certainly can be very, very useful, but you can't solve

every mission need with that so the the espa grande class vehicles uh appear to be a really sweet spot same with the espa class vehicles those sort of sizes are really really a sweet spot for these proliferated constellations um yeah they can probably hit 70 80 percent of the missions that we want to do uh you can fit a fair number of them on the launch vehicle and really hit that price point that enables proliferation while also hitting the technical performance that's required to be useful. Yeah, it's certainly the trend right now is that, you know, low 100 kilograms satellites that are, we've got Starlink, we've got OneWeb, we've got a lot of imaging constellations that are in that size, black skies rolling out now. and it seems to be the popular thing these days if you've got a significant amount of satellites

you've got that size is kind of what you're looking at uh seems like a good balance but you were you know when you were starting this project um i don't know if that was as accepted as yes this will definitely work but now we've seen, you know, 60 Starlink satellites every week getting blasted off of Falcon 9. I think the positioning has changed in people's minds. Do you feel that from your side, was it harder up front to convince others that this was the right direction,

or was everybody kind of aligned that this made sense for your needs? So I think, actually, the place that was really sort of the question that we started the program trying to answer is, can we build a useful payload at a price point that enables proliferation? Not so much from a size or a mass perspective, because I think the advancements in technology and microelectronics fundamentally convinced everybody that technically within that sort of size

category of whether it was OneWeb or Starlink or the commercial offerings that were being proposed was technically useful. The question was, could the DoD break our habit of addiction to exquisite sensors that cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a copy and get to something that for like the commercial folks where we are going to do the bare minimum, we are going to not try and aggregate requirements together and do everything with one vehicle. We're going to try and do one thing, do it well enough to address the mission. Know that we're leaving performance on the table. That's a really hard concept for people in the aerospace industry, certainly the DOD aerospace industry,

to accept that we're going to leave performance, possibility, and potential on the table. But do it for a price point that enables proliferation. So we started with an objective of building a $3 million satellite. started with an objective of building a three million dollar satellite uh you know payload bus uh command and control node uh all of the hardware costing three million dollars and then we knew that if we could fit 30 or so of them on a launch vehicle that would make launch costs if you simply took the Falcon 9 launch cost divided it by 30 you'd get roughly three million million in launch costs. So we were looking for a $6 million satellite in orbit. So the on-station cost deployed of $6 million. And that was the real question. Was industry going to be willing to try and hit that price point? Could we get something feasible that actually got

the DOD's interest as far as a technical capability at that price point? So those were the real questions that we set out to address in phase one. And we got phenomenal participation from industry. There was lots of, you know, we read a lot of proposals, a lot of very, very good proposals, you know, A lot of very, very good proposals, you know, and literally had our pick of mission areas and companies with lots of options and trade space in which to investigate. And so fundamentally, industry came through and said, you know, million, million and a half per payload is very challenging. But we're willing to try and take that on. Like everything, as we watch and start to learn the things that we didn't know at the beginning and the industry learns right along

with us, there's been some cost growth there. So we're not going to get a payload for a million dollars. We're going to get a payload for $2 million. I'm very happy with that. Certainly, you wouldn't have gotten that if you started higher than a million dollars, we're going to get a payload for $2 million. I'm very, very happy. Certainly, you wouldn't have gotten that if you started higher than a million dollars as the target. You wouldn't have ended up at $2 million. So everyone expects that's the way it goes. And we know that when SMC or SDA or any of the other acquisition organizations start levying their requirements, the costs are going to go up with that. So we just needed to set the lower flag at a point where you got something reasonable and could build upon. And when you were all said and done, you still ended up at that swap C point that enabled proliferation. So we've had more, you know, our payloads are taking more

power than we wanted 50 watts in our BAA. That turns out to be our single most limiting case. It's really hard to do just about anything for 50 watts. You know, so payloads ended up in the 200 watt class. Very reasonable, enables proliferation. Solar cells remain expensive. Yeah, they're the single biggest cost on the program right now is your solar arrays but it still enables the proliferation

because 200 watts is not that much power for a spacecraft in this day and age and so fundamentally that has all been very very successful we're getting a lot of really cool capability across multiple mission areas in that sort of, you know, $2 million, you know, first article, all of the challenges that go with building something for the first time pushes some of those, some of the payloads go up a little bit more to three or four for the first article, but they all even on our limited quantities, we're seeing nice, you know, reductions in price, coming back down to sort of that $2 million price point. The capabilities that you targeted here, I could, I've got the list of contractors that have been announced, it seems like the last year, it's been every two weeks, there's like, Oh, someone else is working on blackjack. There seems to be, know the three primary things are communications uh missile tracking and then navigational uh that was the

most recent announcement i think was the position navigation timing um was that north of grumman my memory is yes um those three areas and you touched on this a second ago was it were those the capabilities that fit the the budget that you had, or did, were those selected by the program as areas of interest, given the fact that, you know, GPS and SIBRs are very expensive satellites and seem like good things to, you know, show some capability on the smaller cost end of things. I'm just curious how those were selected. So we started with what industry proposed with what is, what provided the most value to the warfighter. So space has traditionally been focused on strategic requirements.

The fact that we weren't trying to address a specific mission when we started gave us the flexibility to say, you know, if we can break this price point of traditional geo, large, exquisite spacecraft, maybe we can do more missions from space. And wouldn't it be nice to demonstrate tactical missions for tactical users as opposed to strategic users with our demo? They're fundamentally currently today, I believe, an underserved community from the space architecture. And so it's always nice to bring new capability to an underserved community or user base. Right. You quite honestly, you get a lot of positive support for folks who have always been told, no, they're a low priority. And all of a sudden you're like, this is for you. You know, and so it allows us to build a lot of advocacy that will actually have tangible benefits, you know, with the way that the U.S. Joint Force operates.

So really, the payloads that were selected were based on their needs, you know, things that they told us were important. And so those fundamentally boil down to communications capabilities, you know, ISR capabilities, you know, what's over the next hill, where's our enemy, And then the PNT capabilities of where we are, right? Those are sort of the three fundamental needs that the tactical users wanted addressed. And so since we had payloads that addressed those, those were the ones that we fundamentally selected to go forward, you know, to explore. And so we've done payloads that we're going to demonstrate, we've done payloads that we're going to keep alive, sort of and continue on the M&S front, you know, knowing that these are useful mission areas, useful payloads for the tactical community. What we fly is not going to be what goes operational, but SMC and SDA are going to

do the traditional rack and stack of needs and figure out how many dollars should be allocated to a given need. And we want to make sure that we're still going to provide a breadth of capability and technical risk reduction across that area for them to choose from. Because I don't know, you know, whether comms or P&T or missile warning or ISR is going to come out as the top, you know, need when when folks are forced to actually say, you only get one or two, which one do you really, really want? So I want to make sure our bases are covered to hit as many of those as possible. And that's why you continue to see awards come out, you know, and sort of on that regular pace, sort of cadence as we work through all of the contracting actions,

right? You know, DARPA contracting is a fabulous job, but there's still a lot of work in writing a contract. You know, and so we continue to work through those so that we can continue to develop payloads and provide transition opportunities and capability to the folks downstream of us, even if it's not what we're actually going to fly on a given our blackjack actual debt. and I might have missed it in the flurry, is imaging. And that's interesting to me. You know, it might be something that is, you're leaving to the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agencies that have been engaging the commercial offerors out there, right? There's a lot of imaging companies,

just a new one every day, basically, at this point. But you've got Planet that has great coverage. You've got all these new synthetic aperture radar imaging companies that are beginning to offer services. And those other agencies are looking to source that commercially and see if that fits their needs. So I don't know how those trends intersect. Maybe there's imaging that's coming down the pipeline for Blackjack, or is it something that you think, there's enough trends in that area that maybe it's not where we can provide that best value for the money that you've got allocated your way. So we have one imaging payload.

You know, we start out with a program that was sort of set up as three phases. You know, phase one, up to preliminary design review, explore the trade space. Phase two, go and start to do the critical design, build the first article, phase three on orbit demonstration. But while we set that, you know, contractual construct up, not everything always fits into it exactly. So we actually have, the army asked us to look at, you know, imaging. So've got a payload that that we put in through from uh l3 harris uh that provides that but because it was added sort of after the first uh set uh but before we moved to phase uh two so to speak in the program the it's actually one contract that sort

of does both um and so well i don't believe we're going to actually fly an imager. We do have it in that sort of M&S. We looked at it, we proved it's feasible, right? Commercial world has also proved that it's feasible at this place. You know, we addressed some specific military needs with it and showed that it's feasible. So it's essentially on the shelf ready to go forward. Even if it didn't trickle out as a contract award, you know, that that hits Sam and everybody immediately grabbed and published in Space News. One of the contractors I wanted to talk about was Raytheon. They are providing the overhead persistent infrared payloads for the missile warning. They are also

contracted for the US Space Force's, you know, very expensive, pretty typical constellation there. Obviously, we can't get too deep into the technical details of how that thing works, but I am interested in the fact that they are contracted for the same role in both of these programs. And that just seems interesting given the trade-offs and given the comparisons that we all can make between these programs. Is that, was that something that they just turned out to be the best offer? Or is there something interesting about seeing how a contractor can deal with programs of these different, you know, shapes and scales? I think fundamentally what it is, is Raytheon has certainly some national expertise in the

area of IR, you of IR missile tracking. And while they're very good at building the exquisite systems, an open question that we had is, how are the big defense companies going to be able to respond to Blackjack, to the Blackjack architecture, to the paradigm and everything else? And Raytheon, to their credit, stepped up, said, hey, we know we can build these really expensive ones, but we've got a group of engineering folks here that fundamentally believe that Raytheon could credibly provide at a much, much lower price point,

maybe not all the same exquisite capabilities that you get off of the really expensive payload, but address that military need of missile warning, missile tracking from a LEO constellation and do so at an affordable price point. And so it was really, you know, we knew that missile warning, missile defense was one of the mission areas we wanted to explore. And, you know, we actually selected two companies, it was Collins and Raytheon to build or conduct phase one for that. And then when it was all said and done, Raytheon came out and was selected for the phase two as well. And that was based purely on the technical merits of their offering. You know, the Collins folks have a really, really good offering. You know, they were just a little

bit behind on the schedule side of things when it all was said and done, that we looked at it. It's like, you know, since we only, we've got a finite budget like everybody else, and we can't take both of them all the way to, you know, to building a set of payloads, you know, the Raytheon schedule was deemed to be lower risk, you know, when we looked at it in our evaluation. And so that's why they were selected. They both offer very credible technical capability. They both have a really, really good management and company support. But Raytheon had been spending a lot of money and effort looking at the Leo stuff. And so they were just fundamentally a little bit further ahead in their payload concept at the start of phase one from their own investments.

And that really showed through with how quickly they were able to progress to an actual critical design. It'll be interesting to just track the two programs as they're both running parallel. The other one, a little bit longer timeline, but I'll be curious to see anything that comes out of that. The other thing that I wanted to talk about was PitBoss, which is the autonomous orbital operations that are built into each satellite. Seeker Engineering is working on that. I'm curious how that's going. It seems like something that is obviously it leans into much larger constellations than the initial rollout of Blackjack, but it's something that is worth developing given the fact that you're talking about how this rolls into the future and different

proliferated constellations are going to be, you're going to be adding a zero or two to the initial rollout of Blackjack. And it makes a lot of sense for that. So how's that stuff been going? So I would say that overall, Pit Boss is going really, really well, right now, some folks get the wrong impression of, you know, what we're actually going to be able to do with Pit Boss and the the time and resources allocated. Ultimately, we want to provide as much capability to our transition partners as possible. Because if you look at it today, satellite, certainly on the DoD side, it's operators per satellite, not satellites per operator. And if we start flying hundreds of satellites per constellation, and we start being able to build out four constellations of LEO satellites for what it currently costs to build

out a GEO constellation, we will consume the entire Space Force's billet structure just to operate them unless we take a really hard look at how much smarts we put on the spacecraft itself. Secondly, as you move from GEO, which stares at a region of the Earth 24-7, never moves, versus the LEO satellites that are constantly whizzing overhead, you have a place where we don't want to burden the tactical user with understanding what satellite satellites coming overhead, when, who has the data, how the data is being moved, which means we need to put a lot more intelligence into the constellation in order to essentially provide a seamless space service to

the tactical user, rather than a satellite service off of a specific satellite. And so that's really where, you know, besides the price point, that's really where the S&T has to get advanced if the DoD is going to use these constellations. At its heart, Blackjack is not about providing, you know, OPIR or missile warning or missile defense. We're about burning down the technical risk on how the DoD can operate these large constellations. We need a payload to do that. So we're going to go pick a payload that is useful to the military. You know, we need to show that it can be done at a price point that enables the military to do this. But the technical piece that we don't have today is that, you know, sort of constellation level command and control that

is in an autonomous manner that allows it to be affordably operated um and essentially move the humans up so that they're focused on the strategic problems not the day-to-day you know does the satellite have enough power is a reaction wheel you know showing a little too much where are the bearings going some you know stuff like that that currently we spend a lot of human effort on, on our existing exquisite spacecraft. You know, these need to become almost, you know, disposable spacecraft. You know, hey, this spacecraft is getting sick. It's just on the wrong end of the statistical bell curve. It's okay. We got plenty of spares

it was less than you know six million dollars to put it up um let's replace it with a newer spacecraft and you know responsibly de-orbit that spacecraft open up its orbital slot slot the new one in there um you know the best analogy is sort of the cell phone right you know you've got iphone 4s 5s 6s you know the all operating seamlessly on the network and the newer phones have a lot more capability than the older phones but they all still work we want to enable that model for our transition partners where you have six satellite gets deorbited you put a new spacecraft in it has more capability or you're doing a periodic constant refresh, bringing new capability up into the constellation. And I would love it to see where, you know, we are actively long-term, the operational folks are actively deorbiting

fully functional spacecraft because there is a better one that is sitting there and we're doing it at a price point that's affordable for the nation. Because that will really allow us to provide the services that I think we should be able to provide to the tactical users. The last thing I wanted to ask before we get you back to your day is, and you mentioned a couple times the Space Development Agency and the overlap there. They're working, I don't know if it's directly in parallel, but very quickly alongside on their own constellation. They've got a lot of contracts out for what they call the transport layer and the tracking layer that's communications and then the missile warning

layer as well um how do those two programs run next to each other is there overlap i think from the outside it's easy to like forget oh wait no that's the other one that's the one that's for this face like they just seem so similar and and I want to know what that interaction's like. And if there's, you know, you mentioned resource sharing and knowledge sharing at the end of a project, but how is it when you're running parallel like this? So we have really good relationships with both SDA and SMC. So when Blackjack started, the Space Development Agency didn't exist. So all of our, you know, we stood up the program as a partnership with SMC. They've been fabulous partners,

you know, and they will continue to be a partner. And, you know, it's well above my pay grade to figure out who's going to buy what system in the future. But the joy of being on the R&D side is that doesn't actually matter. They both are very supportive of the program. We're well aligned with both of them. And so what we do can transition to either or both of them. So it's a great place to be from an S&T perspective. And the fact that not only do I, I'm not looking for a transitioning partner. It's, it's, I don't even just have one. I've got two, you know, fully engaged transition partners. You know, the start, the founding of SDA shared a lot of the Blackjack vision because Dr.

Fred Kennedy started the Blackjack program at DARPA. He was the TTO office director at the time. And then he went and worked with Dr. Griffin to stand up the Space Development Agency. So a lot of the thinking from sort of senior leadership perspective, you know, transitioned directly over. Now, everybody's had their say since that time from me, from Rusty, from Dr. Leahy, the new office director on the Blackjack side, to Dr. Tournier over on SDA. So things have morphed and shifted and adapted to technology. But the vision of proliferated Leo very much is well aligned. Dr. Tournier and SDA is trying to solve an operational operational gaps

you know blackjack is an s t program our job is to burn down risk that then you know either sda or smc can apply to their own program record and so we proved that you know fundamentally industry was willing to respond to at the price point that would enable proliferation. So that allowed SDA to get started with how do they address actual, no kidding, user needs, user requirements for missile warning communication. While the DARPA Blackjack program continues to push

on that command and control, constellation level autonomy effort, which then ultimately I hope hope, will be available to roll in when SDA or SMC is ready to actually make the jump from their first limited constellations of regional coverage into more global constellations where you actually have a lot more satellites that require a lot more of that constellation level orchestration that has to go on. So on the outside, it certainly looks like there's a lot of parallelism, but it's actually probably one of the better cases, the DoD SMT community and the DoD acquisition community being well aligned from the beginning.

And that all comes from the fact that SMC was with us on this program from the very beginning. all comes from the fact that SMC was with us on this program from the very beginning, right? So we had our transition partner and the acquisition community, you know, hand in hand with us from the very beginning. And so you can't do that on every program, right? There's so many programs, you don't know which ones are going to succeed, which ones aren't. But we were really fortunate on this program to have that. And it's also probably probably a case that it's not like you're perfect parallel. It's not like you're finishing before they start. But being a little ahead, you know, the Raytheon anecdote that you mentioned about them working through phase one on their payloads, that's going to play in very quickly to a program right down the line. If your development

timelines are just a little bit offset, it's like, well, Raytheon figured out stuff that they can propose to the other projects that are going out there. So I think it's easy to think that like DARPA has to finish work to then hand off knowledge or technology to someone else. But really, it's like, well, you're developing a lot of capabilities that can flow, you know, between programs all over the place. So definitely a cool example. And I'm excited to just watch these. We're getting pretty close to launch, I guess we'll leave off on that. What's the timeline like there? We're looking probably for, you know, it's hard to say, right?

Predict launch dates. Yeah, I'm an S&T program, so I'm not only at the mercy of when my hardware gets done, but when I can get a ride to orbit and credit to SpaceX and their ride share, that makes life a lot easier than it used to be going secondary with SMC. But it's still, you know, there's a lot of factors beyond your control. So looking for June of 22 for our first, you know, blackjack launch. But I can't. It's in sand.

Maybe sand and a heavy wind would be a good way of describing it, right? You know, there's going to be challenges, and there's so much stuff just I don't control. So if SpaceX chooses to move the launch date, if we have a technical issue, yeah. But that's the date that we're pushing for with our performers. It currently lines up with an existing scheduled SpaceX

rideshare. So the stars appear to be aligning for June of 22, but I'm not going to promise that that's the date. Yeah, you're not placing any bets on that. Yeah, I would say that the only bet I will ever place is that a launch will slip.

Yes, exactly. Whether it's one day or... And cost will grow and mass will grow. Yeah, whether it's one day, one week, one month or something. But pretty much launches, it's a safe bet to bet that they will slip at least a little. Absolutely. Steven, thank you so much for joining us. I definitely enjoyed diving into this deeper,

and I'm sure everyone out there did as well. So thanks again. Thank you. Thanks again to Steven for coming on the show. That was an excellent conversation. I learned a lot. I'm definitely much more informed about Blackjack personally, which is helpful for the show in the future.

So I hope you are as well. Always a pleasure to talk to somebody deeply involved in these kind of programs that you don't often get a chance to talk about. So, that was definitely great. If you like this kind of stuff, if you want to keep it happening, head over to MainEngineCutoff.com slash support. Your

support there makes these kind of things possible. I'm so thankful for all that support. And with that, that is all I've got for you today. If you have any questions or thoughts, email me, Anthony at MainEng mainenginecutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. And until next time, have a good week.