A powerful new radar system designed to detect and track objects in distant orbits above Earth has passed a key initial test.
The “Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability,” or DARC, is a multi-site radar system being developed by the U.S. Space Force and its counterparts in the United Kingdom and Australia. Once complete, the system will consist of three separate sites spread out around the globe that will allow these three nations, who make up the the AUKUS security partnership, to keep tabs on what’s happening in geosynchronous orbit (GEO), which is found around 22,000 miles (35,500 km) above Earth.
The recent test took place at DARC Site-1 in Western Australia and saw seven of the site’s planned 27 antennae successfully track multiple moving satellites in geosynchronous orbit. The test also proved DARC is capable of “tracking spacecraft that present potential threats to space assets or the U.S. homeland and allies,” according to a statement from Northrop Grumman, who is helping develop the DARC network. According to the company, this new radar system will enable Space Force to track “very small objects in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) to protect critical U.S. and allied satellite services.” But protecting them from what?
Since the dawn of the space age, spacefaring nations have left one another’s satellites and spacecraft alone, but that age has come to an end.
As space continues to become militarized mostly by the world’s three preeminent space superpowers (the United States, China and Russia), these nations have been developing new spacecraft and missile technologies designed to deny, disable or degrade their adversaries’ satellites — or outright destroy them.
And it appears these same three superpowers are testing new spacecraft technologies that will allow them to conduct orbital warfare, meaning attacking one another’s spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit. Just this year, the U.S. Space Force published a new warfighting framework that describes both offensive and defensive operations and largely focuses on space superiority, which “may involve seeking out and destroying an enemy’s spacecraft.”
Russia has been testing so-called “inspector spacecraft” that allow it to get up close and personal with other satellites. The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Robert Wood, said the tests are likely demonstrating “a counterspace weapon presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit.”
In 2021, a Chinese satellite grabbed onto one of the country’s defunct satellites and towed it into a “graveyard orbit“; U.S. military leaders afterwards stressed to Congress that nothing is stopping them from doing the same to American spacecraft.
These developments are driving the U.S. Space Force to develop new capabilities like DARC to boost its space domain awareness, meaning its ability to detect, track and identify objects in space. And Space Force isn’t going it alone, as the international collaboration on DARC shows. “Space power is the ultimate team sport,” U.S. Space Force’s Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance B. Saltzman said at the Space Foundation’s 40th annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in April 2025. “The domain is too big, too complex, too dynamic, for a single nation to secure alone.”
And according to Northrop Grumman, DARC will enable the U.S., U.K., and Australia to work together to do just that. “Northrop Grumman’s DARC will provide a strategic advantage at a scale never before achieved in global space domain awareness,” said Kevin Giammo, director of Space Surveillance and Environmental Intelligence at Northrop Grumman, in a statement.
“Its ability to track multiple small moving objects over 22,000 miles above Earth will offer unmatched persistent and comprehensive capability as the world’s premier deep-space radar tracking system.”
DARC Site-1 is expected to be operational in 2026. A second DARC site (Site-2) is being developed in the United Kingdom and is projected to come online in 2028.
Site-3 will be located somewhere within the continental United States. It was previously scheduled to become operational by 2029, but a specific location has yet to be named. The U.S. Space Force tested a technology demonstrator at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in 2021.
