Business
Space Force Lifted Anduril's SSN Contract Ceiling to $200M
A $100.3M modification in May doubled an IDIQ awarded in November 2024 to replace a 40-year-old data backbone. FY2027 budget justification documents carry no named line item for the replacement.
Anduril Industries received a $100.3 million Space Force contract modification on May 5, doubling its SDANet ceiling to $200 million total.
The base IDIQ, awarded by Space Systems Command on November 21, 2024, already carried the explicit label: SSN modernization. Its scope was to deploy Anduril's Lattice software to replace SDIN (the Space Defense Interface Network), the SSN's point-to-point data backbone, roughly four decades old.
The Space Surveillance Network monitors roughly 47,000 objects in orbit through radars and electro-optical sensors at sites from Maui to Diego Garcia. The $200 million ceiling is the price of replacing the data backbone that connects them.
ExoAnalytic Solutions, absorbed fully into Anduril in March, adds 400 consumer-grade geosynchronous-orbit telescopes to that network. Those sensors cover GEO at 36,000 kilometers, where most high-value U.S. defense and intelligence satellites operate.
What the FY2027 Budget Shows
The Space Force requested $34 million for commercial SDA data purchases in FY2026, against $738 million in total SDA funding that year, per an April CSIS analysis. The analysis flagged no significant commercial SDA boost in FY2027's $1.6 billion SDA proposal.
SDANet does not appear in FY2027 budget justification documents as a discrete program element. The IDIQ vehicle is what Congress authorized, in aggregate rather than by task order, so the $100.3 million ceiling increase required no new named-program vote.
The Golden Dome Layer
The 20 interceptor contracts awarded to 12 companies in April need to know where to point. Anduril's telescope network and Lattice platform are being built as that cue, providing tracking data at GEO altitude where intercepts would originate.
This amounts to a targeting architecture assembled outside the normal appropriations debate. Anduril holds the sensor infrastructure through a private acquisition and the integration contract through a ceiling bump; neither required a named-program vote from Congress.
Space Command set December 2026 as the mandatory deployment date. If SDANet meets it, the FY2028 budget request will confront a working $200 million SDIN replacement that was never voted on as a named line.