The command recently produced its first-ever strategies for experimentation and AI and machine learning, Gen. Stephen Whiting said Tuesday — a step toward addressing operational needs by trying out capabilities that are available today from both traditional defense companies and new entrants to the market. The experimentation strategy was completed in December 2024 and the AI strategy was just signed out in March.

Both strategies prioritize missions like missile defeat, enhanced battlespace awareness, cyber defense and space control — a term the Defense Department uses to encompass the offensive and defensive capabilities needed to ensure the U.S. and its allies can safely operate in space.

Speaking at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Whiting highlighted a slew of recent efforts — including one by Space Command’s Marine Corps component designed to fast-track commercial space domain awareness capabilities. The component found an off-the-shelf capability and, through rapid experimentation that was coupled with funding and testing, helped inform a plan to field a military-tailored solution by 2027.

That capability, Whiting said, will help Space Command better track missile threats from China.

Space Command is also using Palantir’s Maven Smart System to operationalize space combat concepts. It has integrated the AI platform — which integrates software with advanced digital capabilities to help operators distill sensor data and make faster decisions — into its Joint Operations Center, or JOC.

The JOC provides a joint operations floor for multiple services and agencies to integrate data and decision-making. The center is using Maven to streamline tactical information between Space Command and its subordinate operations centers, Whiting said.

Separately, Space Command has been testing a capability to fuse missile warning and missile defense data in a way that gives operators a single picture of the threat environment. Whiting said the command has since developed an initial data integration layer and plans to install it at the JOC. As it expands on the pilot, the plan is to iteratively feed new capabilities to the center.

Whiting also announced a new pilot program to demonstrate sustained space maneuver. In partnership with the Space Force’s innovation arm, SpaceWERX, Space Command plans to award 10 firms contracts worth $1.9 million each.

“This effort will continue to invest in the most promising technology from commercial industry to help us solve the sustained space maneuver challenges so we can bring this joint function to the space domain,” he said.

The missions are part of a surge in NRO launches, the agency’s Director Christopher Scolese said Tuesday in a pre-recorded message posted to the agency’s website. In the last two years, NRO has launched 150 satellites — at least 100 of those flying last year alone.

Details about NRO’s proliferated constellation — which the agency developed over several years, largely in secret — are tightly held. But its mission is, in part, to provide rapid data collection and delivery across multiple orbits. Scolese said its performance to date is “setting a new standard for data collection, speed, and responsiveness.”

“This enhanced constellation is already shortening revisit times and increasing observational persistence, delivering enhanced coordination and empowering faster data processing, fusion, and transmission speeds,” he said. “All with greater resilience and security.”

These capabilities make it “harder for our adversaries to hide,” Scolese added, and allow NRO to provide insights to users on the ground in seconds.

The NRO designs, launches and operates spy satellites for the U.S. government. In recent years, it has expanded its use of commercial services to enhance and augment the capabilities provided by the satellites it owns and operates.

While officials haven’t identified which companies are building its new satellite constellation, Reuters previously reported that Northrop Grumman and SpaceX are involved in the effort. The agency has said the constellation will have a hybrid architecture, indicating it likely involves a mix of defense and non-traditional firms.

The agency plans to continue building out the constellation with launches through 2029, Scolese said.

Along with its heavy focus on launch, the NRO is also investing in improvements to the ground systems that operate those satellites. That includes upgrading data processing and cybersecurity capabilities and using machine learning and advanced data and analytics to improve satellite tasking and data collection and processing.

The eight spacecraft, built by SpaceX and L3Harris Technologies and launched in three batches over the last year, make up the agency’s so-called Tranche 0 Tracking Layer. The systems will demonstrate the ability to observe and collect information on missiles launches.

In order to draw data from a test flight, the agency’s satellites must be positioned over the area where the test is taking place — typically Vandenberg Space Force Base in California or another Defense Department site. Derek Tournear, SDA’s director, told reporters April 10 the first tracking satellites have been collecting and transmitting, but their position has yet to align with the timing of a missile launch.

“We’ve been teamed very closely with [the Missile Defense Agency], which has actually been adjusting some of their launch times for some of their testing to make sure we have good overflight of our satellites so we can see their tests,” he told reporters during a briefing at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “We expect that to come up pretty quickly.”

He noted that the satellites are also scanning global “hot spots” for missile activity as they orbit the Earth.

One constraint with the initial demonstration tranche is its limited number of satellites. The agency doesn’t expect to reach global coverage, which will require about 40 spacecraft, for a few years. Four of the eight spacecraft in orbit are sending data — the latest satellites, launched in February, are still moving through their checkout phase — which means SDA can only provide about 10% of that coverage.

Another limiting factor is that the Tranche 0 demonstration satellites are transmitting more data to the ground than the operational spacecraft will. That’s because the agency wants to collect as much information as possible during its demonstration phase, Tournear said. The amount of data being offloaded means the dissemination process takes longer.

“It takes one to two days after we take an image of an event to get all of those data down to then run through the algorithms,” he said. “That’s why these targets of opportunity are unpredictable — because we can’t get the data down to look and then retest it.”

The agency’s missile tracking layer will eventually include at least 100 satellites. Tranche 1 will add 35 spacecraft, and Tranche 2 will include another 54.

Tournear said the agency will set the number of spacecraft for Tranche 3 later this year, a decision determined in part by congressional feedback on its fiscal 2025 funding request, which includes $1.7 billion for the effort.

“The baseline plan has been 54, very similar to the Tranche 2 plans,” he said. “As we go through the budgeting process for this year … we’ll see whether we stick with that 54.”

Tranche 3 satellites will have similar capabilities to earlier satellites, Tournear added, noting that the performance improvement will come from having more capacity in orbit.

“It’s going to be continuing to build out off of Tranche 2 tracking to get towards that number of 100 satellites,” he explained, “adding in more of those missile defense satellites as we go to make sure that we have enough coverage for the missile defense mission by the 2030 time frame.”

Senior leaders from several countries spoke to this issue at this week’s Space Symposium, a major annual convention for space leaders. Gen. Stephen Whiting, the commander of U.S. Space Command, for example, invited Germany, France and New Zealand to join Operation Olympic Defender, the U.S.-led multinational space operation. John Plumb, the outgoing assistant secretary of defense for space policy, expressed confidence that the department’s Allied by Design approach to allies and partners would succeed. He noted the successes, such as “our entirely new space classification policy,” but also noted continuing challenges.

The discussion at Space Symposium demonstrates the mixed success of U.S. efforts to build relationships with allies and partners on space initiatives. While the DOD’s work to strengthen allied space cooperation is significant and welcome, it remains insufficient to achieve stated policy objectives and ensure the level of allied integration necessary to prevail against future threats.

There are entrenched organizational, regulatory and practical challenges that limit cooperation, which will require sustained, high-level collaboration and change. We continue to believe that increased cooperation between DOD and intelligence community leaders is needed to address these challenges, and that the United States should increase transparency with allies about both the realistic constraints as well as its commitment to deeper engagement.

These challenges — and recommendations for action — are documented in Rand’s report “Allied by Design: Defining a Path to Thoughtful Allied Space Power,” published earlier this year. We found that decades-old policies and unresolved organizational divides within and outside the DOD contribute to confusion among allies about U.S. space priorities.

These policies and varying organizational priorities within the DOD and intelligence community stem from real questions about which organizations should be in the lead and when and whether it is in the United States’ interest to deepen cooperation, given risks of the loss of sensitive information and becoming overly dependent on allies.

Organizational dynamics, including the multitude of offices in the department involved in allied issues, do pose challenges, but that should not prevent the various U.S. entities from finding ways to work together to solve problems. This is demonstrated by the revised DOD security classification policies and progress observed in coordination between the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Space Command and the Space Force.

However, many issues require coordination from outside of the DOD. One such critical area is revising rules and procedures for sharing classified information with allies and partners — an issue beyond recent policy changes on the DOD classification of space information.

The DOD and intelligence community have separate policies on sharing classified information with allies. The DOD policy, for example, dates from the 1970s from the National Security Council and requires military organizations to gain permission from foreign disclosure officers to release documents. The intelligence community’s different procedures for marking documents often lead officials to overclassify information and limit sharing.

Further, as Plumb noted in his remarks at Space Symposium, data collected from space “is differently classified if the DOD is flying the satellite” rather than the intelligence community.

Beyond the rules, staffs face practical challenges: The relevant information technology systems often make it challenging to seamlessly communicate with even the closest allies. Allies consistently made it clear to us that the inability of the United States to share information frustrates cooperation.

Recognizing that these are deeply rooted issues that require coordination between the DOD and intelligence community, our report proposed that the deputy secretary of defense and the director of national intelligence form a focused working group to address this topic. We originally recommended engagement at this senior level prior to the announcement of the revised DOD classification guidance because only the secretary and deputy secretary oversaw DOD stakeholders involved in space issues.

Accounts of the DOD’s progress to date indicate that progress required “herculean” efforts of working closely with the DOD, the State Department and the intelligence community at senior levels, which enabled Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks to approved the DOD’s new policy on the classification of space information.

The progress to date, as well as ongoing delays in revising intelligence community rules, suggests continued engagement at senior levels between DOD leaders and their Office of the Director of National Intelligence counterparts will be necessary to achieve interagency progress.

As we described in detail in our report, the road to thoughtful allied space power is steep and requires commitment to make progress. Whatever happens, the United States needs to be more transparent and consistent with allies and partners about the realistic prospects for cooperation. Being forthright about the prospects for cooperation will enable allies and partners to make choices about their own investments and operations that will strengthen future coalition capabilities.

Andrew Radin is a senior political scientist at the think tank Rand, where Bruce McClintock is a senior policy researcher and leads the Space Enterprise Initiative. They are lead authors of the Rand report “Allied by Design: Defining a Path to Thoughtful Allied Space Power.”

The Commercial Space Office, led by Col. Richard Kniseley, will replace the Commercial Services Office, which was established just a year ago. The organization will bring together several other initiatives, including SpaceWERX — the service’s technology hub — and Space Systems Command’s Front Door, an online portal companies can use to connect with the acquisition community.

The office will also lead the Space Force’s efforts to create a Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve to leverage companies’ space capabilities in a crisis. In an April 18 interview at the Space Symposium here, Kniseley told C4ISRNET he’s working to craft a framework for the program by this summer.

“We have got to get these capabilities integrated in peacetime so that the warfighter has a chance to use it, so that we can integrate them into exercises and wargames to really make it part of the architecture,” Knisely said.

In the same wide-ranging interview, Kniseley discussed his plans to expand the Space Domain Awareness marketplace — which allows companies to compete for space data contracts — to other mission areas and laid out his priorities for the new office.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When was the Commercial Space Office created and where will it be headquartered?

It was officially stood up [in April], and I’ve already started aligning the processes and the offices. The actual headquarters for the Commercial Space Office will be in Chantilly, Va.

In fact, in June, we’re opening up our Commercial Collaboration Center in Chantilly, and it’s this perfect sweet spot to have it because it’s right next to the National Reconnaissance Office. It’s right near the Space Development Agency, you have NASA nearby along with other mission partners. But also it’s in a good sweet spot of industry as well.

Just having it out there is going to be a benefit to all of us because at the end of the day, I look at this commercial space office as a collaboration amongst everybody. And we were already building those relationships with NRO as well as the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency — understanding what contracts they had available so that we’re not recreating contracts, but we could tap into those other areas with the appropriate funding and the requirement from the warfighter.

What are your initial priorities in the Commercial Space Office?

Some of them are a little early on, but from a strategic standpoint, transitioning the Commercial Satellite Communications Office away from the Defense Information Systems Agency. Right now, organizationally, it is under the Space Force, but we are still utilizing DISA for contracting. To make this office work, we’re standing up a working capital fund, which we are anticipating by the end of September.

That’s going to allow us to really get after those other mission areas going forward. What we’re doing with DISA is anything that is ongoing or if they were already in source selection, we’re letting those go through. But soon new procurements, those will be actually coming through the Commercial Space Office contract.

When it comes down to the commercial space office, the biggest thing I want to do is make deliberate investment in commercial that’s just really going to get after what the warfighter needs. Because the feedback I’ve gotten from the commercial entities is they want to get involved. They want to be good partners. It’s really all about a partnership. And the way to do that is to really show that you’re deliberate in building that. The best way to do it is through investments. So, aligning contracts and aligning the right funding to do this.

How will your efforts be funded? Will that come from the program offices you’re working with?

I look at my office to do a lot of the execution. I will be looking at the program executive offices — and I think this is even coming down from Space Force leadership — to look at their mission areas to really understand . . . how mature is the market right now? And also figuring out what are those inherently government missions or capabilities that need to be built in house and what can commercial take on today?

The way I look at it, especially with this conflict that’s coming [with China], we have got to get these capabilities integrated during peacetime so that the warfighter has a chance to use it, so that we can integrate them into exercises and war games to really make it a part of the architecture. You don’t want to try and do that while you’re in conflict. This is the time to do it so that if a crisis, heaven forbid, ever kicks up, you know it’s there and you know how to use it. And it becomes almost part of your lexicon.

The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit works closely with companies and program offices to help get commercial technology to the warfighter. How will your office collaborate with DIU?

We talk constantly on many different issues. I’ve been working with them on their hybrid space architecture, and some of the companies that are a part of that capability. And really, I see so much utility in some of the capabilities that can help us get after so many things that we’re trying to do. So I’m working on one effort right now to get them hooked up to the Naval Research Lab testbed, so that we can really prove out that capability. And then I think a lot of these are going to migrate to a live demo.

So, you would be connecting DIU’s hybrid space architecture with the NRL testbed?

I’m connecting certain pieces of it.

How is your office engaging with companies? And what feedback do you hear from them about impediments to working with DoD?

As I grow out the Commercial Space Office, one thing that we’ve done extremely well in my mind in the Space Force and definitely in Space Systems Command is to have industry engagements. We had 11 last year, which is huge.

We started with space-to-space communications in February of ‘22, and we had one almost once a month. That’s where we’ve been having a lot of conversation about our mission areas and posing our problems to them and, through a reverse industry day model, getting their feedback.

I plan to continue those. We mentioned the [artificial intelligence/machine learning] day in May. We’re going to do alternate positioning, navigation and timing in June. I think there’s gonna be a weather one because I see that as a big area that, why wouldn’t we go commercial?

Where I see industry getting frustrated is that there’s been talk, but they want to see action. They want to see deliberate integration and funding in commercial and getting those capabilities to the warfighter. So that is definitely what I’m going to challenge my team on and that’s where I see success — contracts and funding and capability delivery.

Where is some of this commercial integration happening already within the Space Force?

We talked about the success of the commercial SATCOM office. I mean, that’s about $1 billion dollars per year that executes through that office. I would like to do more with the Space Domain Awareness (SDA) marketplace, which is going to come under my office. There’s areas that I’ve got in my head of making it more of an investment in commercial while still ingraining that character and the discipline that we want out of the companies.

The work that’s being done with [U.S. Space Command’s] Joint Commercial Integration Office (JCO), that is actual operators utilizing that commercial capability — that is huge right there. That commercial capability is being brought in to utilize by operators and our allies alike.

I want to create other marketplaces for other areas so that I can almost replicate that SDA model and get it out to the JCO and start doing that type of stuff. If the warfighter has a requirement, I can throw it into that marketplace and have the competition there and then quickly get that capability out.

So far, according to officials, the arrangement has worked.

Space Force Col. Brian Denaro, Space Systems Command’s program executive officer for space sensing, and Army Col. Alex Rasmussen, program manager for the Space Development Agency’s second tranche of missile tracking satellites, told C4ISRNET that without regular collaboration with their respective teams and their counterparts at the Missile Defense Agency, they would likely have faced unexpected development challenges.

Within the combined program office construct, the agencies meet weekly through an integration working group to share technical information. They also convene quarterly “summits” to troubleshoot any challenges they’re facing and prioritize and assign tasks for the working group.

“There are absolutely things we would be missing,” Denaro said in an interview this month at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo. “Those groups have ferreted those things out and helped us get after them.”

The Pentagon’s space acquisition offices have struggled in the past to agree on their roles and align their work to avoid duplication — particularly within the space-based missile warning mission area. Lawmakers and watchdogs including the Government Accountability Office have criticized the department’s lack of coordination, particularly between the Missile Defense Agency and the Space Development Agency, which are developing sensors to track hypersonic missiles.

Last year, the Space Force’s program integration council — which includes officials from Space Systems Command, the National Reconnaissance Office, MDA and the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office — approved a strategy for the Defense Department’s future space-based missile warning satellites and ground systems.

The strategy calls for a new approach to detecting and tracking missile threats from space, a mission the Space Force has traditionally conducted from geosynchronous orbit, roughly 22,000 miles above Earth. As Russia and China develop hypersonic missiles that can maneuver and travel at Mach 5 or faster, the strategy calls for improving U.S. defenses against those weapons by launching smaller satellites to more diverse orbits.

It also endorsed the creation of the combined program office and clarified responsibility for various elements of the architecture.

Under the strategy, the Space Development Agency is responsible for fielding smaller satellites that will reside in low Earth orbit, about 1,200 miles above the planet. Space Systems Command will continue to develop the GEO layer as well as a medium Earth orbit constellation, which will reside between LEO and GEO. The organization is also leading efforts to build a ground control segment that integrates systems from the three agencies.

MDA, meanwhile, is developing medium-field-of-view sensors through its Hypersonic Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program, or HBTSS. The sensors are designed track dimmer missile targets and send data to interceptors. The agency’s role is to demonstrate the capability, which the Space Force will ultimately take over and incorporate into the broader missile tracking constellation.

Denaro and Rasmussen said the regular working group meetings and summits have not only helped clarify roles among the agencies, but they’ve created a venue for them to learn from one another. For example, Rasmussen said that as MDA plans to launch its HBTSS satellites later this year and begins testing the capabilities in orbit, SDA will collect data from those demonstrations and opt to either integrate the sensors with its future satellites or continue to refine the technology.

“Even if HBTSS doesn’t end up in part of the future tranches, all that tech that they learned, all of that stuff that we were able to do in the demo, it’s absolutely advancing our mission,” Rasmussen said.

MDA officials have also indicated improved collaboration with the Space Force. In a March 14 budget briefing, the agency’s director, Vice Adm. Jon Hill, said the combined program office is helping the teams avoid “redundance and duplication.”

Denaro said because of the summits, SDA and SSC decided to co-fund technologies that both agencies will need for their pieces of the program. This includes capabilities like focal planes, which satellites use to collect real-time imagery, and crosslinks, which allow systems to communicate.

The collaboration has also helped address common supply chain issues. Over the next five years, the agencies plan to launch more than 100 missile tracking satellites combined, which means they need to be aware of any vulnerabilities within their supply base, Denaro said.

“We’re absolutely looking at the supply chain to make sure that . . . the supply chain is not a weak link in the chain, if you will, and that we’ve anticipated any potential disruptions or concerns on the supply side,” he said.

Rasmussen said the coordination among the agencies also helps industry view their work from an enterprise level and have a better sense of the various opportunities to compete for development contracts.

He said SDA and SSC have deliberately staggered their schedules, which makes competition “consistent and predictable.”

“That really tells industry, ‘Hey, make the investments. You know we’re going to compete this. You know we’re going to compete every tranche,’” he said.

The message was just a drill, according to CEO Bill Weber, one of many in recent weeks as the Texas-based company prepares to launch the Space Force’s mission known as Victus Nox ― Latin for “Conquer the Night” — to demonstrate the ability to build a satellite, integrate it onto a rocket and place it in orbit on rapid timelines.

Last September, the Space Force awarded Firefly a $17.6 million contract to provide launch services for the mission and entered a separate agreement with Millennium Space Systems, a Boeing subsidiary, to build a small satellite in just eight months that will fly on Firefly’s rocket. Millennium declined to provide the value of its contract.

Weber told C4ISRNET in an interview that the company will soon move out of the test phase and the alerts it receives from the service will no longer be practice runs.

“At some point, they’ll point at us and say, ‘You’ve got 24 hours — launch,’” he said April 17 at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo. “And then we’ll be ready.”

Millennium will receive a similar notification, signaling that the company has just 60 hours to ship the spacecraft to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and work with Firefly to integrate it with the company’s rocket.

The scant details about the timing of the launch order and the rapid delivery schedules are intentional, as the service wants the mission to closely resemble the operational conditions under which it would use the capability, dubbed Tactically Responsive Space, or TacRS.

Lt. Col. Mackenzie Birchenough, who leads the TacRs program, described the service as being in the “walk” phase of a “crawl, walk, run” trajectory. Victus Nox will be its second such mission — the first occurred in 2021 — and the Space Force is planning a third effort for next year.

“The ultimate goal for us is to get to an enduring TacRS capability by the 2025 or 2026 timeframe,” Birchenough said during an April 20 panel at the Space Symposium.

An “enduring” capability would be used for two primary purposes: to quickly launch satellites in response to threats in space — whether man-made or environmental — and to augment a system that was degraded or destroyed, she said. That could mean having a spare satellite on orbit that could be turned on or maneuvered into position as needed, working with commercial partners to buy data in a crisis or, as in the case of Victus Nox, have a satellite on the ground that’s ready to be launched on demand.

“I think we’re moving away from what the idea may have been in years past of you’re just going to buy a bunch of satellites and they’re going to sit in some actual barn somewhere . . . to the idea that we can pull something off that production line very quick and have it ready to go,” Birchenough said.

While a 24-hour turnaround time is the goal for Victus Nox, Birchenough said she expects the service will, one day, move even faster.

“If you ask folks out here today if they thought it was realistic that we’re going to hit 24 hours sometime in the next six months, I would probably get some varying responses,” she said. “I think being able to shorten those timelines is definitely possible. And from an operational standpoint, I think the need is going to be less than 24 hours in the future.”

Despite the failure, service officials told C4ISRNET they’re hopeful about the rocket’s future and what the test flight means for the launch industry more broadly.

Col. Jim Horne, deputy director of operations for the Space Force’s Assured Access to Space directorate said when innovators like SpaceX, which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk, attempt groundbreaking technological advances, even an unsuccessful test is a chance to learn.

“I think that’s one of my favorite things that companies like them have done is teach us that we need to learn from our mistakes and not fear them,” he said during an April 20 interview at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo. “Take acceptable risk, learn from it and move on. They’ve proven that you can accelerate innovation.”

Col. Mark Shoemaker, vice commander for operations at Space Launch Delta 45 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, said he views SpaceX’s Starship launch as an accomplishment.

“They will say they were successful, and I would agree,” he said in the same interview. “I’m sure they learned a lot from that.”

SpaceX planned for Starship, a 400-foot-fall rocket that can carry 150 tons to orbit, to fly to a suborbital altitude of 235 km above Earth in its debut mission. Four minutes into the flight, it began to tumble in the air after several of its engines failed. The Washington Post, citing a statement from the Federal Aviation Administration, reported that Starship’s Automated Flight Termination System, designed to disable a rocket that malfunctions in flight, destroyed the launch vehicle.

The Defense Department has been closely watching SpaceX’s work on Starship as it considers a future requirement for rapid cargo delivery.

In 2020, U.S. Transportation Command signed a cooperative research and development agreement with the company to gain insight into the rocket’s development. Two years later, the Air Force Research Laboratory awarded SpaceX more than $100 million to provide flight data from Starship launch attempts to support its Rocket Cargo effort, which is studying the feasibility of using rockets to carry personnel and cargo around the globe.

Whether SpaceX’s unsuccessful attempt will impact the Space Force’s goal to operationalize a Rocket Cargo capability by 2026 is unclear and will likely depend on the cause of the failure and how quickly the company recovers.

SpaceX has two more Starships on hand but hasn’t indicated when it will attempt another launch. John Insprucker, an engineer for the company, said during its live webcast that the flight achieved its objective to provide data the company can learn from.

“It is the first test flight of Starship, and the goal was to gather the data,” he said, adding that after the dust settles, SpaceX intends to “clear the pad and get ready to go again.”

Col. Richard Kniseley, head of the Space Force’s new Commercial Space Office, said his team is working to establish this construct so that the Space Force has a capability in place to quickly access commercial capabilities before the next U.S. military conflict.

“We have got to get these capabilities integrated in peacetime so that the warfighter has a chance to use it, so that we can integrate them into exercises and wargames to really make it part of the architecture,” he told C4ISRNET in an April 18 interview at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo. “This is the time to do it so that if a crisis, heaven forbid, ever kicks up, you know it’s there and you know how to use it.”

Kniseley said the framework will address five “cornerstone” elements of creating what the service is calling a Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, or CASR: contracting, programmatics, policy, operations and industry feedback.

The service is looking to the Air Force’s Civil Reserve Air Fleet as a model for crafting a commercial space surge capability. Through the CRAF, the Air Force has contracts with commercial airlines to provide extra airlift capacity to support military operations or humanitarian missions.

The Space Force met with industry in February to discuss the CASR concept and formed a task force soon after, Kniseley said. Based on initial work with policy and legal experts to understand potential barriers to relying on commercial assets for commercial missions, Kniseley said he’s optimistic that the service can establish a program within the next few years.

Incentivizing companies

“I’ve worked in the Pentagon before, so I’m as skeptical as anybody — there’s not much standing in my way on this one,” he said. “I think we have the right policy. And from a legal perspective, I think we’re good.”

Kniseley noted that there are still questions around how the Defense Department would provide protection and compensation for commercial satellites or ground systems targeted by adversaries, but said he’s confident answers are within reach.

Beyond policy, the Space Force is considering what missions might be best suited for commercial augmentation. It plans to use satellite communication as a “pathfinder” mission, but Kniseley said areas like tactical intelligence and space observation also make sense for CASR.

The task force is also considering how to structure contracts with industry and how to incentivize companies that participate in the program. The Air Force’s approach through CRAF is to offer companies intelligence updates that allow them to better understand what investments they need to make to offer capacity to the government, and Kniseley said that approach may work for CASR.

He said the most consistent feedback he’s heard from companies — both on CASR and in broader discussions about melding commercial and government space capabilities — is that they want to see action from the government.

“There’s been talk, but they want to see action,” Kniseley said. “That is definitely what I’m going to challenge my team on. . . . Success is contracts and funding and capability delivery.”

Lt. Gen. John Shaw, SPACECOM’s deputy commander, said he’s eyeing an initial in-space demonstration by 2026 and wants all future space observation satellites to be equipped for refueling or other life-extension capabilities by the end of this decade.

Shaw told reporters April 19 on the sidelines of the Space Foundation’s Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., the command is interested in any technology that will support “dynamic space operations,” its vision for satellites — particularly those surveilling activities and objects in orbit — that can maneuver to perform their mission.

Because fuel capacity often determines how freely a satellite can travel, equipping spacecraft with refueling ports and launching servicing systems to orbit is an attractive proposition for the command. But rather than dictate the parameters of the 2026 demonstration, Shaw said SPACECOM wants its industry and government partners to bring their own ideas to the table.

“We do not want to be solution oriented,” he said. “Show me something I can do that gives me an idea of what I’m trying to get to by 2030 and how we might solve this.”

Last fall, SPACECOM sent a request for information to other government agencies calling for ideas on how the defense department can realize this vision with existing resources and technology before reaching out to industry with a public solicitation.

Commercial collaboration

The command is working closely with the Space Force as they consider how to meet the need for in-orbit maneuverability. Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, who leads the service’s Assured Access to Space programs, said April 18 his team is working quickly to consider various solutions, particularly those being developed by commercial companies.

“We’re really looking at the commercial market,” he told reporters during an April 18 briefing. “It is amazing how many companies are into the on-orbit servicing and maneuver [mission.] It’s actually hard to keep track.”

Purdy said the Space Force is working in parallel to industry timelines and plans to launch a test mission in 2025 aimed at validating a refueling standard for satellites.

More than 40 companies attended an industry day the service held on the topic in February and the Space Force’s technology hub, SpaceWERX, is working with 125 teams from industry and academia to mature in-space servicing capabilities.

Companies including Orbit Fab, a space logistics business based in Colorado, plan to field space refueling services by 2025. The company, which is partnered with SpaceWERX, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, plans to create a logistics network in orbit consisting of reusable “shuttles” that move fuel from storage depots to satellites.

Larger, more traditional defense companies like Lockheed Martin are also investing in space logistics capabilities.

The company told reporters during an April 17 briefing that its Lockheed Martin In-Space Upgrade and Satellite System (LINUSS) program successfully demonstrated the ability to use small satellites to sustain “critical space architectures.” The spacecraft launched in November on a Space Force mission and started demonstrating maneuverability in early 2023.

Northrop Grumman has focused its space servicing efforts on extending the life-span of satellites through its Missile Extension Vehicle. The spacecraft has demonstrated the ability to attach to commercial satellites and provide fuel and thrust from its own supply.

Robert Hauge, president of Northrop-owned SpaceLogistics, told C4ISRNET April 17 that while the company is initially targeting the commercial market, the Space Force has been “receptive” to its capabilities.

“Our focus is getting our commercial capabilities out the door and mature and they’re watching very closely,” he said.