[7] The Space Development Agency (SDA) was established in 2019 by Mike Griffin with his appointment to Under Secretary of Defense (R&E) by President Donald Trump.

[8] Griffin was a long time advocate for low Earth orbit constellations to eliminate U.S. vulnerability to ballistic missiles with his work on space-based interceptors for the Strategic Defense Initiative and Brilliant Pebbles in the 1980s.

[9] Later, the United States and other countries developed hypersonic weapons, which Griffin argued were thermally dimmer and could only be reliably tracked by low-flying satellites with infrared sensors, creating a need to resurrect such programs.

[10][2] In addition to hypersonic weapons, the memorandum establishing the SDA also calls for a new space architecture "not bound by legacy methods or culture" that provides unifying command and control through a cross-domain artificial intelligence-enabled network.

[2] Development is to follow the spiral model,[b][c] incorporating learning from previous iterations and launching new satellite replacements regularly as the useful lifetime of each is relatively short.

[17] Political and administrative opposition to SDA came from 24th Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson who argued that "launching hundreds of cheap satellites into theater as a substitute for the complex architectures where we provide key capabilities to the warfighter will result in failure on America's worst day if relied upon alone.

"[7] Members of Congress also gave concerns that SDA would drain resources and jobs from Air Force and questioned why DoD had to create a separate organization to circumvent its own procurement process.

Despite the pushback, the Pentagon did not require congressional authorization to create the SDA, and Wilson was overruled by Patrick M. Shanahan, who became acting defense secretary by appointment of Donald Trump.

The Union of Concerned Scientists warned SDA could escalate tensions with Russia and China and called the project "fundamentally destabilizing".

[22] Critics have reiterated longstanding concerns that ground-based lasers can easily "paint" satellites in low Earth orbit, temporarily blinding their sensors.

[23] Likewise, RF jamming is simpler when communication and radar satellites are in lower altitudes as less power is needed to saturate their low-noise amplifiers.

[28] In 2020, 13th Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Will Roper expressed interest in the SpaceX Starlink satellite internet constellation as a platform for the SDA.

[16] However, the initial launch slipped due to supply-chain issues for microelectronics such as radios,[32] software problems, and protests by Raytheon and Airbus over procurement and evaluation process.

[33] SDA industry partners now include SpaceX, L3Harris Technologies, Northrop Grumman, Ball Aerospace and General Dynamics.

[d][56][55] The Proliferated Warfighting Space Architecture (PWSA) will rely on these preliminary fire control satellites to perform the JADC2 concept.

These satellites will demonstrate the responsive (low latency) communication links of the Transport layer of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA).

SDA has been able to forgo a number of reporting activities by breaking up larger programs into numerous two-year rapid fielding projects that each qualify as MTAs.

The FY23 omnibus appropriations act, signed by President Joe Biden on 29 December 2022, levies new reporting and certification requirements on the Pentagon regarding the use of MTAs and other rapid prototype programs.