The Senate passed a six-month continuing resolution, or temporary spending bill Friday, after Congress failed to reach a budget deal before a midnight deadline. The bill includes an extra $6 billion for the military, but otherwise freezes spending at the last fiscal year’s levels, or around $825 billion.

Considering Congress didn’t pass a supplemental defense bill, as it has in recent years for Ukraine, that amounts to a 10.6% drop in military spending, according to data provided by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

The massive cut comes at a bizarre moment for Pentagon spending, which is being pushed in multiple directions by multiple parts of the government.

On one side are those pushing to cut, or at least reallocate, parts of that budget. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said he plans to fire 5% to 8% of the civilian workforce and also shift around $50 billion in future funding requests toward his priorities. Add to that the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s attempt to slash the federal government, which is already identifying cuts to defense spending.

On the other end are officials calling for massive increases to the defense budget. Senate Republicans, including Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi, want to add $150 billion to the military starting in fiscal 2026 and are in negotiations to do so. The White House, meanwhile, has pledged to surge America’s sluggish shipbuilding industry and build a “golden dome” missile defense system so ambitious that a general last week likened its goals to the Manhattan Project.

“It’s pushing on the gas with one foot and the brakes with two feet,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, an expert on defense spending at the American Enterprise Institute.

Temporary spending bills, such as the one passed Friday, usually stunt the military’s growth, halting new programs and production lines. This one is different. In order to limit the damage to the military, the bill allows such flexibility for weapons programs included in the House and Senate’s proposed defense spending bills, which are now otherwise obsolete.

Congressional aides said these exceptions will help the Pentagon avoid the whiplash involved in these short-term spending bills, which have become a chronic issue as Congress fails to pass budgets on time.

Military leaders were less sanguine.

“We are seeing an enormous amount of threats emerging every single year, and it is very hard to get after those threats when you have to wait two to four years to get the budget,” said Gen. Michael Guetlein, vice chief of space operations, in a Senate hearing last week.

Appearing alongside him, the vice chief of naval operations argued that the lack of a full budget will further delay maintenance for America’s warships, one-fifth of which are on track to miss their schedules.

“It’ll certainly be a setback,” said Adm. James Kilby.

The Trump administration has promised a reindustrialization of America, and in response started slapping tariffs on countries from China to Canada to members of the European Union. Those last two include 25% levies on steel and aluminum, which will likely increase costs for American arms makers and, by extension, the Pentagon.

That said, analysts who study defense spending said it was still too early to tell how much those costs will grow.

“It’s unmeasurable” at this point, said Mark Montgomery, an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

A massive surge in the military’s budget, like Wicker is calling for, could help limit the issues caused by the continuing resolution’s sudden drop in spending, Montgomery argued. But military leaders would need to know how much money is coming and how it will be divided among the services.

Those factors haven’t yet been decided in Congress, and without answers, the Pentagon is planning its future budgets without knowing how much money it will have or what programs it might need to sacrifice.

“It’s pretty devastating,” said Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the Air Force’s acting head of space acquisition and integration.

The drop in funding is one problem, Purdy said, speaking with reporters last week. But a much bigger one is the stiff rules about how the military can spend its money, forced by temporary spending bills like this one.

The continuing resolution allots more authority than usual to the Pentagon, including the ability to carry over more money from the previous fiscal year without letting it expire. It also allows more flexibility for the administration to move around funds without Congress’ approval.

But the extent to which that freedom will help is not yet clear, leaving officials like Purdy confused and discouraged.

“If we’re not allowed to move money where we need to move with congressional approvals … we’re basically just going to run off a cliff on many programs, and we’re going to be all-stop across the board,” he said. “It’s going to be kind of a disaster.”

In a memo dated March 6 and released publicly Friday, Hegseth directs all DOD components to use the Pentagon’s Software Acquisition Pathway, as well as other authorities created to leverage commercial capabilities — all in an effort to speed up the process for fielding software-heavy systems.

“The Department of Defense has been slow to recognize that software-defined warfare is not a future construct, but the reality we find ourselves operating in today,” Hegseth said in the memo, which is addressed to all senior Pentagon leaders, combatant commanders and field activity directors. “When it comes to software acquisition, we are overdue in pivoting to a performance-based outcome and, as such, it is the warfighter who pays the price.”

Senior defense officials told reporters Friday the memo is the first of what will likely be a series of steps from Hegseth, who has said on several occasions he wants to change the way the military buys and builds both software and hardware. The officials requested anonymity to speak freely about the secretary’s guidance.

The Defense Department created the Software Acquisition Pathway in 2020 as the recommended approach for buying software. The pathway offers a tailored acquisition mechanism, recognizing that software can’t, and shouldn’t, be procured under the same process as an aircraft or ship.

DOD program offices adopted the approach fairly broadly, and today 82 programs representing each of the military services are using the pathway to buy a range of capabilities — from command-and-control systems to cyber. The problem, according to one official, is that the pathway hasn’t been combined with other authorities designed to attract and take advantage of commercial capabilities.

Those authorities include an approach championed by the Defense Innovation Unit called a Commercial Solutions Opening, a type of solicitation that allows startups and non-traditional defense companies to sell products and services to DOD. DIU also leverages a contracting tool called Other Transaction awards, which isn’t subject to the same regulations as a standard contract and allows the government to award contracts on faster timelines.

As part of Hegseth’s memo requiring use of the Software Acquisition Pathway, he calls for acquisition organizations to make Commercial Solutions Openings and Other Transaction contracting approaches “the default” for buying capabilities.

“Department components are prohibited from implementing further guidance on this point that would set out restrictive measures, guidelines, frameworks, directives or policies other than required by statute,” he said.

The under secretary of acquisition and sustainment, as well as DIU — because of its experience with these tools — will craft an implementation plan over the next month.

DIU expects to see an uptick in the number of program offices wanting to work with the organization to procure software using these methods, one official said. As part of the implementation plan, the department will identify what resources DIU will need to support the increased workload and help train acquisition officials on how to use these authorities.

“The combination of DIU innovation with acquisition modernization is creating a streamlined mechanic to both deliver capability fast and simultaneously open up the industry base to a broader audience,” one official said.

Jennifer Swanson, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for data, engineering and software, said the effort will shed light on how the service’s acquisition and logistics enterprise could take advantage of generative AI tools to make processes like contract writing and data analysis more efficient.

“The pilot’s not just about increasing our productivity, which will be great, but also — what are the other things that we can do and what are the other industry tools that are out there that we might be able to leverage or add on,” Swanson said June 18 at Defense One’s Tech Summit in Arlington, Va.

The Army is the latest Defense Department agency to announce efforts to experiment with generative AI. The Air Force and Space Force last week unveiled their own experimental tool — the Non-classified Internet Protocol Generative Pre-Training Transformer, or NIPRGPT. And in 2023, the Navy rolled out a conversational AI program called Amelia that sailors could use to troubleshoot problems or provide tech support.

Swanson said she’s optimistic about the potential for generative AI, especially for laborious specialties like contract writing and policy where automation could release some strain on the Army’s workforce.

“In the area of contracts and in the area of policy, I think there’s a huge return on investment for us,” she said. “Might [AI] one day be able to write a contract? We hope so. But we’ve got to pilot and test it and make sure everybody’s comfortable with it first.”

The large language model the service will use for the effort is different from systems like ChatGPT, Swanson said, because it is trained on Army data. It will also provide citations that indicate where the data it provides originated, a feature that will help the service fact-check that information.

The pilot is part of a broader effort within the Army to identify both the pitfalls and the opportunities that come with widely adopting AI tools. In March, the service announced a 100-day plan focused on reducing the risk associated with integrating AI algorithms.

As part of that exercise, Swanson said, the Army reviewed its spending on AI research and found that testing and security are the two biggest gaps toward fielding these tools more broadly. The service also identified 32 risks and 66 mitigations it can implement to reduce their impact. Further, it created a generative AI policy that it will apply to the pilot in order to set parameters for the effort. That policy includes a requirement that there be a “human in the loop.”

The generative AI pilot will lead into the next phase of the effort — a 16-month focus on how to use the technology operationally. Findings from that work will inform the Army’s budget for fiscal 2026.

“So the 100 day plan is setting the conditions — where are we at — and then the 500 day plan is really about operationalizing it,” she said.

Florent Groberg, vice president of strategy and optimization at private investment firm AE Industrial partners, said that as the Army moves through these review processes and experiments with AI, it should be transparent with industry about what it wants and then move quickly to leverage the tools companies are developing.

“To me, it’s really understanding the framework of what you want to accomplish,” he said during the same panel with Swanson. “Put some boundaries out there and then go do it.”

NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said May 6 the Joint Mission Management Center will integrate data collected from the Defense Department, various intelligence agencies and international partners. While the center, dubbed JMMC, is still in the concept phase, he said the agency is working quickly to get it up and running.

“Integration is the right thing to do,” he said in a speech at the GEOINT Conference in Orlando. “The JMMC is going to be the way of the future for us in this regard. It will be critical to unifying DOD, IC and allied GEOINT collection operations that deliver decision advantage at speed and scale during competition, crisis and combat.”

NGA is the intelligence community’s lead organization for analyzing satellite imagery and turning it into usable data. Whitworth said the need for a collaborative center is being driven in part by an increasingly dynamic threat environment that requires better data from multiple intelligence sources.

Government agencies have a tendency to manage data in stovepipes, he noted. NGA wants JMMC to provide a place for distinct space organizations to stitch together a more complete picture from the intelligence they gather – one that relies less on assumptions and more on trusted information.

“Space is a vast domain where many organizations operate, but it’s no place for a stovepipe – or multiple stovepipes,” Whitworth said. “It requires a joint or integrated approach, were we all work together.”

JMMC will not only provide a venue for collaboration, it will also take advantage of advanced intelligence collection capabilities, he told reporters in a briefing after his speech.

“It’s going to rely on better and better speed based on better and better code,” Whitworth said.

Space acquisition chief Frank Calvelli said today that while he stands by the fixed-price construct for much of the Space Force’s portfolio, there are some programs that require a more nuanced approach.

“I haven’t said I’m going to build the next-generation Battlestar Galactica, that’s never been built before, fixed-price,” Calvelli said at a Feb. 23 Center for Strategic and International Studies event. “We look at each acquisition individually and then we try to marry up the best strategy. When we’re doing smaller footprint systems using existing technology, fixed price works fine.”

Under fixed-price contracts, companies are responsible to cover any unexpected costs incurred during a development program. The deals are designed to reduce risk to the government, but can cause problems for industry when challenges arise.

One well-known example of this is Boeing’s development of the KC-46 tanker. The Air Force awarded the company a $4.9 billion fixed-price contract for the effort in 2011, but the company has racked up $7 billion in cost overages due to design and production issues.

In a series of earnings calls in late January, several large defense firms said they were concerned about the Defense Department’s use of fixed-price contracts. Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet said the deals lead companies to “take tremendous risk on cost and pricing.”

Northrop Grumman’s top executive, Kathy Warden, said the company has passed on high-profile defense programs due to that risk, and Chris Calio — chief operating officer at RTX and the company’s soon-to-be CEO — expressed similar sentiments.

Since Calvelli took the lead of the Space Force acquisition office in 2022, he has issued multiple memos highlighting acquisition practices that can drive speed into development programs. His vision is for the service to buy smaller systems that rely on existing technology under fixed-price contracts that push for a program to be fielded within three years of an initial award.

“When you’re using fixed price, you’re not doing the first-of-its-kind or inventing something new,” he said. “And so, I’m a little bit confused by some of the bigger primes who say they’re against that. They should not be against that.”

Calvelli acknowledged that not all programs fit that mold. He offered as an example the Space Force’s Evolved Strategic Satellite Communications program, which will provide secure, survivable communications capabilities for strategic missions. The satellites carry complex requirements and are designed to withstand a nuclear attack.

Boeing and Northrop Grumman have been developing prototype satellites since 2020 and the service expects to choose a single provider and begin production in 2025. Calvelli said that because the program was conducting early design and prototype work, the service considered a fixed-price contract as part of its acquisition strategy. However, it appears a cost-plus deal, which covers a company’s expenses as well as some profit, may be a better fit.

“Had we built a real payload or actually built the prototype of a satellite, then maybe it’s time to go off and do something fixed price,” he said. “As we revise the [acquisition strategy,] we are looking at going more towards the traditional cost-plus model.”

The California-based company, founded in 2021, develops orbital transport vehicles, which transfer spacecraft into different orbits. In January, SpaceWERX — the Space Force’s innovation arm — chose Impulse to support its tactically responsive space efforts.

“With the two awards from SpaceWERX and the guidance from General Raymond, Impulse can help bring the government closer to its goal of unlocking a more responsive space profile,” chief executive Tom Mueller said in a Feb. 21 statement.

Raymond was the first chief of space operations, overseeing the creation of the Space Force and leading the organization from 2019 to 2022. He oversaw the service’s pursuit of tactically responsive space operations, which emphasizes the need to quickly respond to threats in orbit.

In a statement, Raymond highlighted Impulse’s work in this area.

“This innovative company, led by our nation’s leading propulsion experts, is focused on responsive space mobility,” Raymond said. “I look forward to working closely with the team to advance our nation’s freedom to maneuver in the domain which is so vital to our national security.”

Impulse’s contracts with SpaceWERX center on rapid refueling operations and further development of its Helios engine. The company is also pursuing commercial applications for its technology.

Since retiring from the military, Raymond has joined private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, serving as senior managing director for supply chain and strategic opportunities. He also is a board member at Axiom Space, a commercial human spaceflight company.

“We have this wonderful vision, lots of great programs that we have teed up,” Andrew Hunter told reporters at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here. “[We] still need that FY24 budget to make it real.”

The Pentagon is now operating under its third continuing resolution of fiscal 2024 as Congress continues to draft defense spending legislation. The latest stopgap deal, passed in January, funds the government through March 8.

Like a traditional CR, the measure pauses funding at the prior year’s levels — fiscal 2023, in this case — and prevents the Pentagon from starting new programs and increasing procurement quantities for existing efforts. While the department is accustomed to operating under a continuing resolution for at least a portion of each fiscal year, the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act adds a twist.

The law stipulates that all federal agencies would face a 1% cut from fiscal 2023 funding levels if the government was still operating under a CR on Jan. 1, 2024 — which it was. However, the language includes a four-month grace period, so while that initial deadline has passed, Congress has until April 30 to approve FY24 appropriations and avoid slashing the executive branch’s spending.

While lawmakers tend to reach an annual appropriations agreement by March or April each year, Air Force officials signaled a growing concern that Congress could miss the late April deadline.

During this week’s conference, the Department of the Air Force distributed a fact sheet outlining the impact a 1% cut would have on its two services, the Air Force and Space Force. The measure would reduce the service’s buying power by nearly $13 billion and put $2.8 billion in space modernization projects on hold. It would also limit production increases for key programs like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Small Diameter Bomb and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, and delay seven Space Force launches, according to the department.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in keynote speech Monday that the congressional funding standoff has caused significant delays to his vision for modernizing the service. When he took on the role in 2021, he revealed seven “operational imperatives” meant to inform Air Force and Space Force budget priorities.

Initiatives driven by those priorities, 19 of which were included in service’s FY24 budget request, have yet to be fully funded.

“It would be very disappointing to me to have been in office for an entire administration and have never received any of the needed resources to be competitive — resources that we identified in the first six months I was in office,” he said.

Key among those efforts, Kendall said, is the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which will field fleets of drones powered by autonomous software and designed to fly alongside crewed fighters.

The service hopes to narrow its pool of potential CCA providers from five companies to two or three in fiscal 2024, but that timeline depends on when funding is available.

“We’re moving ahead with a sense of urgency on CCAs,” Kendall told reporters Tuesday. “As a preamble, everything depends upon FY24 being appropriated.”

For the Space Force, which requested $30 billion in FY24, the automatic cuts have an outsized impact. The $2.8 billion in stalled modernization projects represents nearly 10% of the service’s total budget.

The Space Force’s budget has nearly doubled since it was created in 2019, and Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told reporters Feb. 13 that funding delays are having “an acute effect” on the service as it continues to grow.

“Our ability to do all the missions that are required is being severely impacted by not being able to get the resources that we’ve asked for,” he said.

The office is the service’s hub for commercial engagement, partnering with several other programs and initiatives, including SpaceWERX — the Space Force’s innovation arm — and Space Systems Command’s Front Door, an online portal companies can use to connect with the acquisition community. It’s also leading the establishment of a Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, an effort to scale up its use of commercial capabilities during a conflict.

The Commercial Space Office’s creation came amid a push within the Space Force to strengthen its partnership with commercial industry. Officials have called for the acquisition workforce to consider opportunities to buy services and systems from industry — rather than build a bespoke government satellite — wherever possible.

Col. Richard Kniseley, who leads the office, recently sat down with C4ISRNET at the Space Mobility Conference in Orlando, Florida. He talked about the office’s accomplishments over the last year and its priorities for 2024.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

What has your office done since its creation last year?

We marched forward with the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, and stood up that task force with many Department of Defense subject matter experts to really flesh out that framework. That all culminated in a successful briefing to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall around September where he said: “Go forth and prosper.” He considered this good news and a step in the right direction, especially as we’re looking at great power competition.

The SSC Front Door has been meeting with many different industry members every day. This past August, we onboarded a new website and share tool. Since then, we’ve met with over 200 industry members. The goal of that website was to have faster response time, to make sure that we were assessing industry, understanding their maturity levels, and then understanding the mission areas they can play in so that we can get them to the right mission area owner.

Our alignment with SpaceWERX has proved very successful. We aligned a SpaceWERX challenge with one of our first reverse industry days out of the gate, which was alternative positioning, navigation and timing. The goal of that was to seed industry, but also to keep a lot of the conversations going and mature capabilities.

We also awarded, out of the Commercial Satellite Communications Office, the Proliferated Low Earth Orbit contract, which was a $900 million [indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract]. It went out to 20 different vendors and covered many different mission areas. We didn’t want to hone in just on commercial SATCOM, so we opened it up to alternative position, navigation and timing, as well as space domain awareness, to name a few. The goal out of that was to capitalize on dual-use capabilities.

So we are not slowing down in 2024; it is going to be a very busy year, and we’ve already got a number of different things on the horizon.

How do you expect the Proliferated Low Earth Orbit contractor pool to grow? What value will that bring to the Space Force?

While it was awarded to 20 providers, we are onboarding new providers. In fact, we have an onboarding period right now, which ends in May, where new providers can reach out to the Commercial SATCOM Office and be evaluated as a provider on that contract.

It allows the contractors to propose areas where they can benefit the Department of Defense. It’s a very open contract, and it allows us to work and reach out with a lot of those providers. But that contract also allows us to combine a lot of different requirements across the Department of Defense into one award, so that we’re not doing one award, one award, one award. The first task order that got awarded to SpaceX combined requirements from over 70 different agencies.

So it’s the ability to get better pricing and economic order quantity by combining a lot of those requirements. It allows us to get more providers on, understand their capabilities, and get those commercial capabilities out to the warfighter and better integrated across the space enterprise.

The Space Mobility Conference saw a heavy focus on space servicing. What is your office doing in this area? How are you engaging with the companies developing these capabilities?

A great deal of the companies that have been coming through the Front Door that we have been meeting with have been companies aligning themselves with servicing, mobility and logistics. So whether we have companies that are looking at the refueling aspect of it, companies that are looking at the repair aspect of it or even the maneuverability aspect of it — there is a great deal of innovation and expertise in those different areas.

What we’ve been doing is assessing these companies for their maturity level, but also one of the functions of the Front Door is to take a look at the investments in those companies — venture capital and also any potential nefarious capital. We do want to be investing in companies that are on the up and up. But at the same time, we’re also looking at companies where the government can be one of many customers and not just be a crutch to lean on.

We’ve been bridging that gap between the companies and the mission areas. We’ve been introducing a lot of great companies to the Assured Access to Space team — so looking for investment opportunities there as well as working with the Space Systems Integration Office. They are looking at the overall enterprise and where does servicing, mobility and logistics fit into that overall architecture.

You can only imagine what those capabilities will do for the mission because you will be able to refuel some of our [high-value] space vehicles, which allows them to stay on orbit longer and do more mission passes.

Some of the technologies that are coming into play have a lot more size, weight and power so that while they can be carrying space vehicles to many different orbits, these things can also carry gas cans on them. They have more abilities to stay on orbit longer. You can even deploy them, and you don’t even need to use the space vehicles right away; they could just sit there in a loiter state, which kind of lends itself a little bit more to the logistics side of the house. You could save the gas on those space vehicles and have them ready, which also lends itself more to a tactically responsive space standpoint.

What are the most important parts of the Space Force’s upcoming commercial space strategy?

It’s going to do two things. One, it’s going to be a very clear message to the government that because of the threats, we need to change how we do things. Resting on building everything in house is just not palatable anymore. We need to integrate with commercial [sectors] at better scale. It recognizes how the commercial industry is innovating every single day. A lot of the expertise is out there.

What the strategy is also going to do is be a signal to industry of areas of importance to us. We’re not going to prioritize areas, but it will be very clear some of the areas that are very important to the government. Throughout the strategy, there will be kind of a mixture of strategy, but also some implementation. So there’ll be some actions that will be in that strategy, and then it will also be further fleshed out with implementation plans that will be released after the strategy is released.

The Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, or CASR, framework received approval last fall. How is your office implementing that?

My No. 1 focus is working with [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] and the National Space Council on a threat-sharing model. The Department of Defense has a few of them that we are exploring.

We are working to develop a surveillance plan for CASR membership. That’s really going to lend itself into the reliability construct, ensuring they stay in good standing as a member. Are they still investing in their cyber capabilities? Are they able to surge or adhere to the contract as planned? And even looking at some of their manufacturing capabilities. Once we get you to that membership, we need to make sure you’re ready for what that potential bad day might be.

We’re also integrating right now with tactically responsive space [team]. We want to inject CASR fundamentals and exercises into one of their next capability exercises. I could easily see a scenario of a surging of capability, or even potentially taking space vehicles off a production line for a CASR need. That’s really going to help us exercise the contract and the concept of operations.

We are starting to develop the concept of operations, partnered with U.S. Space Command, primarily looking at commercial satellite communications as the first one. Putting that to paper is going to help us work toward exercises as well. But then after that, it’s really working on securing funding.

When will you start putting companies on contract for CASR?

We’re going to start fleshing out the contract pieces a little bit more this year.

I promised this to industry: We will still have a couple more industry offerings so that I can be completely transparent with them before they start seeing this in contracts. I almost want to get a litmus test from them and make sure that I’m going down the right path, especially as we’re starting to develop our incentive plan.

I’m going to potentially have something this year, but probably 2025.

You previously said it’s important to have a sustained budget line, or program element, for commercial space capabilities, including CASR. Where does that effort stand?

I’m anxiously waiting on the appropriations bill. If all goes well, the appropriations bill could be the mechanism that starts the commercial space program element. There was some language in the Senate Appropriations Committee markup that pretty much allows for the creation of it, and I just want to see if that language makes its way through. Those dollars were specifically targeted at commercial surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking, so that would be a budget activity created under the commercial space piece. We’re waiting to see the outcome of that one.

What other efforts would receive funding under that new budget line?

We’re definitely looking at the funding of some enterprise capabilities, like funding for exercises, funding for threat sharing — all of that.

There will need to be an enduring CASR line in there to keep that overall enterprise together. Some of the biggest feedback we got from industry was that we need to understand what’s going on with the threat. And I totally resonated with that because that’s going to help them be more responsive to our needs. It’s going to help inform their business area. If they’re a CASR member, then that’ll help them indicate when a call-up might be OK.

The Dec. 28 mission was the X-37B’s seventh launch. The Boeing-built spacecraft serves as a testbed for new technologies for both the Defense Department and NASA. Its first flight was in 2010.

“This was a very important mission and our teams worked shoulder-to-shoulder to ensure a successful launch,” Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, commander of Space Launch Delta 45, said in a statement.

While details about the duration of its mission and most of the payloads X-37B is carrying are secret, one of its experiments is a NASA project called Seeds-2, testing how different seeds react to long-term exposure to radiation in space. The Space Force said in November the mission will also experiment with “future space domain awareness technologies.”

“These tests are integral in ensuring safe, stable, and secure operations in space for all users of the domain,” the service said.

The X-37B’s most recent mission, OTV-6, returned in November 2022. During that mission, the vehicle included a service module that allowed it to carry more experiments than previous iterations. Those included the Naval Research Laboratory’s Photovoltaic Radio-frequency Antenna Module experiment — which used solar power to create radio-frequency microwave energy — as well as two NASA projects similar to Seeds.

That mission also included FalconSat-8, a small satellite developed by the Air Force Academy.

Thursday’s mission was the second to fly on a SpaceX rocket and the first to lift off on the company’s Falcon Heavy vehicle. The United Launch Alliance’s Altas V rocket flew the first five missions, and the sixth was carried by SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

“We cannot waste time,” said Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall in a panel discussion at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum here.

In the last two years, the Air Force has introduced a set of goals meant to outcompete China’s military — among them systems like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, uncrewed planes meant to fight alongside F-35s later this decade. The CCA itself is an important platform, Kendall said, but more important is the larger goal it represents: finding faster and cheaper systems.

“The loss of time just from when we started this concept, when we came up with the idea to today, is two years,” he said. “If we don’t get a ‘24 budget, we may lose another year.”

Sitting next to Kendall on the panel, Heidi Shyu, head of research and engineering in the Pentagon, said the inconsistent funding has slowed the testing of hypersonics, another key technology.

The Defense Department’s Test Resource Management Center requested more funding for these efforts in FY24, but it can’t move forward without an appropriation. Shyu said her office will send Congress later this month a list of systems — with state-level data — of systems in her portfolio that would be affected by a yearlong continuing resolution, or CR.

“China spends an enormous amount of money on test assets,” Shyu told reporters. “This is where we have [a] shortfall.”

The U.S. government has been funded through CRs for the past two months, after a last-minute deal in Congress. These bills freeze spending at last year’s levels and halt new starts and new money.

The current short-term bill has a staggered expiration date, ending in mid-January and early February.

Because the government so often fails to pass funding bills on time, the Pentagon plans its budget knowing it may not be able to start new contracts in the first quarter. For that reason, Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told Defense News, the effects of these last two CRs have been limited.

That changes if there isn’t a spending deal by January or beyond, he said. In that case, Bush added, much of the Army’s plans for next year will be delayed.

“I have dozens of programs that are hitting important new milestones in FY24 in the areas of air defense, long-range strike, intel systems, TITAN,” Bush said, referring to the Army’s new targeting system planned for later this decade. “We’ve got a wide range of things that are right in the middle of either finishing development or going into production.

Adding to the urgency is part of a bill passed earlier this year to raise the debt ceiling: If all 12 of Congress’ appropriations bills aren’t passed before January, there will be a 1% cut in all government spending.

That provision has made it much harder for Pentagon employees to plan for future spending levels, said the Defense Department’s top acquisition official, Bill LaPlante.

“What we told everybody as they were building their budget [was] … remember, this is not like previous years,” LaPlante said in a gaggle with reporters. “There’s going to be some hard choices.”