The Space Force has proven the government can launch a sat on short notice—but you can’t launch what you haven’t built.
How we got here: The military and intelligence communities are taking a page from the commercial playbook, pivoting from expensive, exquisite satellites to the proliferated constellations pioneered by SpaceX. This switch provides disaggregation, resiliency, and deterrence by denial—an adversary may be able to take out one satellite, but it becomes more difficult to take hundreds or thousands off line.
The Space Force is also pursuing resiliency through tactically responsive space. The idea is simple enough: launch on demand to reconstitute or augment on-orbit assets, ideally deterring an enemy from targeting satellites if it feels its rival will launch another one within a few days to replace it.
But tactically responsive space is built on the premise that satellites are just waiting to launch. Or satellites are assumed to be built on demand on a short timeline and ready to launch within hours or days. Both assumptions are incorrect unless it is a small, low-complexity satellite built for a five-month demonstration (like Victus Nox, DoD’s 2023 demo to launch on short notice with Firefly and Millennium Space Systems).
In the storeroom: One way to fix that is penning acquisition contracts that pay companies to build—and store—satellites for tactically responsive space missions a few years later. That means accounting for the cost of maintaining satellites (such as battery conditioning) and storing them on orbit (which will impact mean life expectancy) or in resource-constrained commercial or government facilities. Either option presents non-mission value costs to keep the satellite in standby or launch-ready condition.
It’s difficult to imagine these “wait costs” being palatable to government appropriators year after year.
Production line: An alternative approach is build-on-demand—though this assumes there’s an industrial base ready and able to do so.
From authorization to delivery, it takes an average of five years to build a satellite. This is neither tactical nor responsive.
One limiting factor is long-lead parts—or parts that take a long time to procure due to supplier limitations. Single-board computers, for example, can take upwards of 18 months to get delivered, at which time manufacturers can start integration into a spacecraft flight computer.
The defense industrial base is challenged by this today even without widespread proliferated constellations. Proliferated constellations only create an increasingly long backlog of parts demand the US industrial base is not designed to support.
With the US Space Force and the IC shifting to mega constellations, the requirement for numbers of parts will grow accordingly, and the delivery timelines for parts will be extended even longer as agencies duel for priority delivery.
The bottom line: The idea of proliferated constellations is a good one. Tactically responsive space is desirable, given the increased perception of an impending space conflict causing non-reversible damage to space systems. However, with full-funding requirements and new start limitations in federal budgets that never get passed on time, handcuffed acquisition strategies and supply chain timelines will limit the agility of space system developers to deliver anything on accelerated timelines.
The solution is straightforward. The space community needs acquisition authorities to start long lead procurements for new starts on timelines that meet the mission need. This requires budget predictability and governmental financial incentives for the industrial base to respond to capacity projections for proliferated constellations.
For now, as we sit under yet another continuing resolution, compounded by an election year, we must make our peace with sitting in the traffic jam.
Dr Matthew Jenkins is an adjunct professor at George Washington University, and the opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of George Washington University or the Department of Defense.
