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The U.S. Space Force has launched two new GPS III satellites with provider SpaceX since December 2024, with the most recent launch taking place May 30.
Within the past six months, the U.S. Space Force has coordinated the launch of two next-generation GPS III satellites at a rapid pace not often expected from the U.S. government.
On Dec. 16, 2024, the service launched the seventh of 10 GPS III satellites on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral SFS, Florida, about five months after calling up the spacecraft and bringing SpaceX on board as the provider. On May 30, the team launched GPS III space vehicle (SV)-08 via a Falcon 9 rocket, this time with just a little more than three months of planning time.
Specifically, the Space Force issued a call-up letter to GPS III manufacturer Lockheed Martin for SV-08 on Feb. 21, and to SpaceX on March 7, for a launch on May 30. The service said the typical time frame from call-up to launch for such a mission is 24 months.
The rapid turnaround for these two GPS III deployments indicates that the Space Force is taking seriously the directive to move faster to launch national security space payloads, and that when push comes to shove, its industry partners are also stepping up to deliver.
Those two spacecraft were originally scheduled to fly on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket, which was still awaiting Space Force certification for Vulcan to support National Security Space Launch (NSSL) missions, months later than planned. The Vulcan rocket is now certified for NSSL missions as of March 26, and is contracted to launch the final two GPS III satellites as well as the first GPS III Follow-On spacecraft.
The biggest lesson learned from the December 2024 launch, known as a “Rapid Response Trailblazer” launch, “is that we can do better, and we can challenge the traditional launch timelines,” Space Force Col. Andrew Menschner, Mission Delta 31 commander at Peterson SFB, Colorado, told reporters ahead of the SV-08 launch.
The service benefited from several factors to pull off those timelines, notably “the foresight” to have the GPS III program qualified for multiple launch vehicle providers, Menschner added.
“That brought a flexibility to the GPS program that just isn’t present in some other satellite vehicle programs,” he said. “That’s a tremendous lesson learned that we’re passing on to our other Space Force and Department of Defense counterparts, and I think you’ll see a lot of that in the future.”
To achieve that faster timeline, Lockheed Martin had to pull the spacecraft out of storage and perform final integration and testing processes, before shipping the satellite across the country from Littleton, Colorado, to the Cape for final processing, said Malik Musawwir, Lockheed Martin Space vice president of navigation systems. That process can take around five months, but the company completed it in about three months, he noted.
Having several spacecraft completed and staged in Lockheed Martin’s facilities also enabled the quick launch provider and time frame shift, and offered an extra level of resiliency that is not currently typical for Defense Department launch programs, Menschner added.
The Space Force awards missions based on timelines that reflect when the spacecraft is expected to be ready to launch, so “that tends to be the driver,” Walt Lauderdale, mission director and chief of Falcon systems and operations for the Space Force, told reporters. That concept can be applied to more than just the GPS program, especially if future planning means more spacecraft are completed up front, he added.
Lockheed Martin is also applying lessons learned from the two rapid GPS III launches to its own processes. One example is making sure that its spacecraft are launch provider-agnostic–meaning its payload interfaces are adaptable for integration with a range of launch vehicles–and having its GPS production line humming, Musawwir said.
Finally, the Space Force benefited from SpaceX’s increasing launch cadence for its Falcon family of launch vehicles. The May 30 GPS III launch was the company’s 65th Falcon launch of 2025, and SpaceX is pulling a second stage off of the production line every 2 1/2 days, said Anne Mason, SpaceX director for NSSL mission management.
While SpaceX has long supported the Space Force in performing mission assurance and independent hardware verification tasks, the two recent GPS III launches were an opportunity for SpaceX to perform those activities “on a compressed timeline,” Mason noted.
Lauderdale cautioned that three-five months from call-up to launch is not likely to become the Space Force’s regular cadence. “But we are demonstrating what it would take in order to respond to something unexpected,” he said.
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