The Pentagon’s campaign to break from decades of cost-plus contracting is reshaping how it buys everything from missiles and satellites — and now it’s touching a critical corner of the space business: the antennas used to control military spacecraft.
The Space Force is reopening a $1.4 billion program to build mobile ground stations used to track and command spacecraft, after initially awarding the work to a single contractor. The move reflects a broader effort by the Defense Department to diversify suppliers and reduce dependence on bespoke systems that are costly to produce.
The Satellite Communications Augmentation Resource program, known as SCAR, was launched in 2022 to ease pressure on the military’s aging Satellite Control Network.
That network is a government-owned global system of ground stations that performs tracking, telemetry and commanding, or TT&C, for military satellites.
Satellite control operations function separately from the missions the satellites carry out. Tracking determines a spacecraft’s location based on position and range measurements. Telemetry collects health and status data. Commanding transmits signals from the ground to control onboard subsystems such as power. Together, those functions ensure satellites remain in the proper orbit and perform as designed.
To do this, antenna location is critical. For some satellites, operators have only a brief window during each orbit to make contact before the spacecraft drops below the horizon.
The legacy Satellite Control Network terminals use large, mechanically steered parabolic dishes. Typically, one antenna supports one spacecraft at a time. As the number of satellites and operational tempo have increased, the network has become throughput-limited.
Contact with the satellite must be precisely scheduled, and the infrastructure does not scale easily.
Modern antennas sought
The SCAR program was created to help alleviate this problem and boost geosynchronous orbit communication capacity through electronically steerable phased-array antennas. Service leaders argued that the ground side of satellite command-and-control was becoming a pacing constraint just as the on-orbit enterprise was proliferating. The Space Force put the program under the domain of the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, or Space RCO, which handles mostly classified projects.
The Space RCO in 2022 awarded defense contractor BlueHalo a $1.4 billion contract to produce an estimated 12 ground terminals named BADGER, short for Broad Area Deployable Ground Terminal Enabling Resilient communications.
The contract was a so-called Other Transaction Agreement. These are flexible contracting instruments that allow the Defense Department to pursue research or prototype projects outside the traditional Federal Acquisition Regulation framework, often to attract nontraditional vendors and speed development.
Before the SCAR program was put on hold, BADGER ground stations for the U.S. Space Force were in production at AeroVironment’s Albuquerque manufacturing facility. Credit: AeroVironment
In practice, the SCAR OTA functioned more like a cost-plus development arrangement, giving the government flexibility to modify and customize the system as requirements evolved. The contract was later increased by $300 million to $1.7 billion.
To date, no BADGER units have been delivered and the Space Force is reassessing how to move forward.
“We have been in conversations with the SAE [senior acquisition executive] for a little while now, and we are going to move into a new acquisition strategy for SCAR,” Col. Owen Stevens, director of contracting at the Space RCO, said in January at the AFCEA Space Industry Days conference in Los Angeles.
“That new acquisition strategy will likely take the form of other companies building versions or variants of SCAR,” Stevens said.
Under the new strategy, the Space Force is looking to leverage commercial phased-array technology and walk away from a customized design.
Stevens said his office has been finalizing the strategy with the Space Force’s procurement leadership. “We will most likely introduce other vendors into the mix,” he said. The intent is to “strengthen manufacturing and supply chain resiliency in anticipation of surge production needs.”
The change followed discussions with Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the service’s military procurement deputy, who last year visited several commercial space companies and identified ground control stations as an area where the Space Force was not fully leveraging commercial innovation while SCAR was not performing as planned.
BADGER paused
In May 2025, drone and technology manufacturer AeroVironment acquired BlueHalo. In September 2025, the company announced its SCAR contract would switch to a fixed-price deal and that it would proceed with delivery of two units.
But in a regulatory filing Jan. 16, AeroVironment disclosed that the U.S. government “issued a stop work order on the company’s Other Transaction Agreement for the delivery of BADGER phased array antenna systems to support the Satellite Communication Augmentation Resource program.”
Denise Pacioni, AeroVironment’s head of investor relations, said the company and the Space Force are in renegotiations.
“We’re not delivering, we’re not collecting revenue, we’re taking a pause,” she told SpaceNews. “We’re working with the customer to make sure that we are providing them exactly the requirements that they believe they need going forward.”
Pacioni said that SCAR activity is on hold because the government no longer wants a cost-plus arrangement and intends to change the technical requirements so the BADGER ground station can be produced under a commercial model for a fixed price.
Under the original contract, “there was a lot of design change throughout the process, wanting to add capabilities,” she said. That added time, cost and complexity, prompting the government to issue the stop-work order as a mechanism to renegotiate.
Pacioni said she could not discuss what changes might be made to the BADGER ground station but suggested “that you’re probably going to see a reduction in capability, because they realized that they don’t need all these extra things.”
The government’s priorities, she noted, include better pricing, faster production and ensuring the systems are transportable for deployment in different regions.
The restructuring of the SCAR program aligns with an ongoing shift in defense procurement in which “they’re looking for companies to invest more internally on the product,” Pacioni said. AeroVironment plans to expand production capacity and sell units at fixed prices, she added. “I can broaden my market base. I can now sell this to other customers.” By simplifying the product, she said, “we will be able to produce them faster.”
The fact that the contract was paused rather than canceled “speaks volumes to the fact that they do need our product. They do want our product,” she said. “I think they’re just trying to get it at the right price.”
If SCAR is reopened to other vendors, Pacioni said the company expects the BADGER terminal to remain competitive. “We’ve been working with the customer. We know exactly what they want.”
Opening the program to competitors is consistent with the Pentagon’s push to avoid single-source dependence.
Reliance on a single vendor, Pacioni said, is “not in the nation’s best interest.” Further, “it really keeps everyone on their toes. It keeps everyone at the forefront of the most advanced technology.”
New solicitation coming
A draft request for proposals for the restructured SCAR effort could be published as early as this summer, followed by a final RFP later in the year, according to the Space RCO.
The office issued a request for information in May 2025 seeking industry feedback on the maturity and commercial availability of electronically steered radio-frequency arrays. The organization said the RFI was “informed in part by the anticipated near-term need for multiple antenna solutions that address Tracking, Telemetry, and Control (TT&C) capability needs across the U.S. Space Force.”
Industry responses, together with other market research, the office said, are being used to identify ways to expand production capacity and keep pace with evolving technology and mission needs.
Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, told SpaceNews that he expects the revised acquisition strategy will expedite delivery of phased-array antennas.
“There’s a good plan going forward,” he said Jan. 28. “I just got briefed from the Space Force on that plan, and I think we’re on a good glide path. We’ve really got to execute now and bring all that to fruition. But I appreciate the fact that they’ve really worked to address that.”
In parallel, the Space Force has been testing a more market-driven model through the Joint Antenna Marketplace run by the Space Systems Command. The brokerage-style framework allows military satellite operators to tap commercially operated antennas on a pay-for-use basis instead of building new government-owned stations.
In May 2025, the Space Systems Command awarded contracts worth a combined $17.6 million to Auria Space and Sphinx Defense to build cloud-based Joint Antenna Marketplace prototypes to connect military satellite operations centers with commercial antennas.
In late January, the startup Northwood Space announced it won a $49.8 million contract under the Joint Antenna Marketplace to augment Satellite Control Network capacity.
The company produces a multi-beam phased array called Portal that it says can support eight simultaneous links per site. It declined to comment on whether it plans to compete for SCAR.
“Northwood has demonstrated first-in-class commercial phased array capability, and we’re encouraged by the Department’s continued focus on bringing commercial innovation into national security missions,” a spokesperson said.
This article first appeared in the March 2026 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
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