Darwin McDaniel
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking proposals from interested vendors that could help build a new autonomous constellation of satellites for the U.S. military through a potential $38.5M contract.
DARPA said in a FedBizOpps notice posted Friday the Blackjack Pit Boss program will center on the development of a low earth orbit constellation designed to provide global persistent coverage to subscribers without human operators and ground-based payload data processing.
The agency will accept proposals for the project through March 29 and aims to launch 20 satellites between 2021 and 2022 to demonstrate the Pit Boss concept.
Selected contractors will work to develop the overall autonomy architecture, constellation integration schema and hardware and software components of the satellites.
DARPA also plans to issue separate announcements for launch services, ground systems and constellation flight operations support.
