IN Brief:
- SciTec has received a $93.704 million Space Force ground-radar digitisation agreement.
- The work centres on a common architecture and design for upgrades to legacy radar systems.
- Digital commonality could reduce repeated integration work as processing, software, and computing are refreshed.
SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company, has secured a $93.7 million US Space Force agreement to modernise ground-based radar infrastructure through a common digital architecture intended to support future upgrades across legacy systems.
The firm-fixed-price other transaction agreement covers ground-based radar digitisation and the development of a common architecture and design for radar upgrades. Space Systems Command in Colorado Springs is the contracting activity, placing the work inside the Space Force’s requirement to sustain and modernise sensors used for national-security missions.
The programme addresses a familiar problem in ageing radar infrastructure. Antennas, transmitters, buildings, power systems, and other physical assets can remain useful long after analogue electronics, processors, proprietary interfaces, and computing hardware have become difficult to support. Replacing an entire radar simply because part of its processing chain is obsolete can be considerably more expensive than separating the enduring hardware from electronics that need to change more frequently.
Digitisation creates that possibility by moving more signal processing, control, and data handling onto modern computing architectures. The potential advantage is not only improved performance, but a more manageable route for future upgrades as processors, storage, networking, and software evolve.
A common architecture is intended to reduce fragmentation between radar sites. If multiple systems can share processing patterns, data interfaces, development tools, and software services, some future changes can be engineered once and applied more broadly rather than recreated independently for each installation.
That objective becomes harder when legacy radars were designed in different eras for different missions. Systems can vary substantially in frequency, antenna design, timing, signal formats, environmental constraints, local infrastructure, and operational requirements. The common layer therefore has to abstract enough of those differences to enable reuse without concealing performance-critical behaviour from the engineers responsible for the sensor.
SciTec brings experience in missile-warning and defence software, remote sensing, space-domain awareness, and high-volume data processing. Firefly describes its processing capabilities as spanning cloud, on-premise, and edge environments, which is relevant to radar sites where latency, classification, network resilience, and continuity requirements can limit how far data processing can be centralised.
Modernisation also changes the test burden. A digitised radar cannot be validated simply by confirming that information reaches a new display. Engineers have to demonstrate that detection performance, timing, track quality, false-alarm behaviour, and interfaces remain within operational requirements across representative conditions.
Where software takes on a larger share of signal processing, regression testing and configuration control become recurring sustainment activities. Every change to algorithms, operating systems, processor hardware, or interfaces has the potential to alter behaviour elsewhere in the system, requiring a controlled evidence trail rather than an assumption that newer computing automatically produces equivalent radar performance.
Cybersecurity is inseparable from that engineering. Moving from isolated or proprietary processing towards more networked digital architectures can improve maintainability and data sharing, but it also introduces interfaces that need protection. Software provenance, patching, access control, identity management, logging, and supply-chain assurance become part of radar sustainment because the operator has to trust both the sensor data and the computing chain carrying it.
For the industrial base, common digitisation shifts part of programme value away from one-off hardware replacement and towards software development, modular computing, interface engineering, integration, testing, and long-term support. That can make upgrades more repeatable, although it will depend on the government maintaining sufficient architectural control to prevent a new generation of proprietary dependencies from replacing the old ones.
The award also broadens Firefly’s national-security portfolio beyond launch vehicles, lunar systems, and spacecraft. SciTec gives the group a software and sensor-processing business whose work sits much closer to existing ground infrastructure and defence data systems.
The contract value is fixed at $93,704,410, but neither SciTec nor the Space Force has publicly detailed how many radar sites will be covered, which installations will be modified first, or the operational deployment schedule. Those gaps make it premature to draw conclusions about the final scale of site work or hardware replacement.
The architectural direction is clearer. The programme is intended to preserve useful radar infrastructure while providing a more common digital foundation for upgrades. The test will be whether that foundation can accommodate the differences between legacy sensors without becoming another integration layer that is expensive to modify.
If it succeeds, later processing and software changes should require less radar-by-radar engineering. For strategic sensors whose physical infrastructure remains valuable, that offers a practical route to extending service life while moving more of the modernisation cycle into software and modular computing.
