Overview
- The Department of the Air Force, in Wednesday’s Space Symposium keynote, said it awarded a base IDIQ contract and set a vendor pool for satellites that track moving aircraft from orbit, with the first operational increment now in competition.
- The FY2027 budget asks for about $7 billion to start buying these airborne moving target indication satellites, moving the effort from prototypes to procurement.
- Leaders said on‑orbit demonstrations show the physics work for tracking fast aircraft from space, and they framed the next hurdle as building the system affordably and at scale through open competition.
- The budget again leaves out procurement money for the E‑7 Wedgetail radar plane even after Congress put about $1.1 billion into prototypes last year and the Air Force awarded $2.3 billion to Boeing for development.
- A late‑March Iranian strike that heavily damaged an E‑3 Sentry at Prince Sultan Air Base sharpened concerns about vulnerable radar aircraft, which officials say is driving urgency for more survivable, persistent sensing from space.