Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems on May 1, 2026 was awarded a $27,456,111 modification for the Space Fence System (AN/FSY-3), bringing the cumulative contract face value to $66,142,810. Work is performed at Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, with a completion date of October 31, 2027. The modification covers continued operations, maintenance, and sustainment services for the radar system that is now the primary sensor for cataloging resident space objects in low Earth orbit — and increasingly, in higher orbital regimes where the new commercial mega-constellations are concentrated.
What Space Fence is and what it replaced
The AN/FSY-3 Space Fence is an S-band ground-based radar on Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific. It achieved initial operational capability in 2020, replacing the Air Force Space Surveillance System (AFSSS, colloquially "the Fence") — a VHF continuous-wave radar that had operated since 1961 and was decommissioned in 2013. The gap between AFSSS decommissioning and Space Fence IOC was covered with degraded capability from legacy sensors; Space Fence closed that gap with a system capable of detecting objects roughly 10 cm in diameter or larger in LEO — considerably smaller than the 30 cm threshold of many legacy sensors.
The practical result was a dramatic expansion of the public space object catalog. When Space Fence reached full operational capability, it began adding thousands of previously untracked debris objects. This matters because conjunction screening — the analysis that tells satellite operators when two objects are on a collision course — depends entirely on catalog completeness. Untracked objects cannot be screened for; a single 10 cm fragment from a historic fragmentation event carries enough kinetic energy to destroy an operational satellite.
Space Fence in the mega-constellation era
The orbital environment in 2026 looks radically different than it did when Space Fence was designed in the 2010s. SpaceX's Starlink constellation now exceeds 6,000 active satellites; Amazon's Kuiper is in early deployment; the Space Development Agency's Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) Transport Layer is growing toward 1,000 satellites; OneWeb, Telesat Lightspeed, and Chinese commercial constellations add thousands more planned nodes. Every one of these satellites generates a debris risk, and the interaction among them creates a conjunction problem of unprecedented complexity.
Space Fence's S-band frequency provides a discrimination capability that older radar systems cannot match — it can distinguish closely spaced objects and characterize the tumble-state of debris more accurately than VHF or UHF radars. For the 18th Space Defense Squadron, which manages the space catalog, Space Fence data quality is the primary determinant of how many false-alarm conjunction warnings operators have to evaluate every day.
The Kwajalein sustainment economy
Operating a complex radar system on a remote Pacific atoll requires a substantial supporting infrastructure. Kwajalein Atoll (formally Kwajalein U.S. Army Garrison, USAG-KA) hosts not only Space Fence but also the Reagan Test Site — one of the primary locations for ballistic missile defense testing — and a community of approximately 1,200 U.S. civilians and military personnel. Sustainment for Space Fence at this location involves:
- Specialized electronics technicians and RF engineers who must either reside on-atoll or rotate on extended TDY assignments
- Parts logistics that rely on air freight from Honolulu and the continental United States — lead times measured in days, not hours
- Diesel power generation and facility maintenance for the radar array itself (a large structure with significant cooling and power requirements)
- Information systems connectivity to the Space Operations Command network via the Pacific fiber and satellite communications architecture
Commercial space situational awareness: the parallel market
Space Fence data flows into the Space Force's 18 SDS space catalog, which is the authoritative source for conjunction screening. But a parallel commercial SSA market has developed alongside government capability: LeoLabs (Menlo Park, CA) operates a global network of phased-array radars and sells conjunction data and debris tracking to commercial satellite operators; Slingshot Aerospace and ExoAnalytic Solutions provide electro-optical tracking and analytics. These commercial firms pay for access to government-derived data where it's available, compete on timeliness and value-added analytics, and are increasingly integrated into the conjunctions workflow for commercial mega-constellation operators.
Contractors providing data analytics, conjunction screening software, and orbital mechanics modeling services to both Space Force and commercial operators find themselves in an unusually dual-use market — the same algorithms and engineers serve both government and billion-dollar commercial customers.