Airbus U.S. Space & Defense announced today that it was awarded an Other Transaction Authority agreement by the Space Development Agency (SDA) in support of the Hybrid Acquisition for Proliferated LEO (HALO) effort. This award will allow Airbus U.S. Space & Defense to compete for specific prototype orders (POs) in the future.

“We appreciate SDA recognizing the versatility of our Arrow450 commercial platform to meet multiple mission applications, building on our work for SDA’s Tranche 1 transport and tracking layers and Tranche 2 transport layer,” said Debra Facktor, Head of U.S. Space Systems, Airbus U.S. Space & Defense. “We continuing to expand our design and manufacturing capabilities in Florida and are well positioned to produce buses at a scale that can be rapidly deployed for future orders.”

HALO is an acquisition approach to solicit POs and award rapid, affordable end-to-end mission feasibility demonstrations.

“SDA is proud to welcome 19 vendors into the first-ever HALO pool,” said SDA Director Derek Tournear. “This creative award solution enables SDA to quickly compete, build, and fly demonstration missions to burn down risk for the future of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. We also hope, through the HALO pool, to build a broader base of vendors that can compete for work on operational layers of future tranches.”

A key goal of HALO is to put in place a flexible and fast contracting mechanism to compete and award Tranche 2 Demonstration and Experimentation System (T2DES) and other SDA demonstration projects.