Greater Collaboration, Acquisition Reform Needed to Deliver Commercial Innovation Faster to the Warfighter
Every week, the head of U.S. Space Force’s Space Rapid Capabilities Office is briefed on the growing number of capabilities that adversaries like Russia and China are launching in the space domain.
“It’s a little discouraging to see the pace and scale in which capabilities are being fielded into a domain that threatens the Space Force posture and our commercial capabilities,” said Kelly Hammett during last month’s ASCEND panel on navigating the evolving threat landscape.
That view was shared by Victor Vigliotti, director of USSF’s Front Door office. “What keeps me up at night are adversaries’ ability to integrate commercial solutions into the space-warfighting architecture, like refueling on orbit,” while the U.S. defense community plans to accelerate its pace of innovation through commercial innovation adoption, Vigliotti remarked.
Greater Collaboration & Information Sharing
To help move commercial/government collaboration forward faster, Vigliotti said Front Door launched a rapid communication platform, Orbital Watch, earlier this spring to enhance unclassified threat-information-sharing with commercial space companies. Space Force Intelligence publishes an unclassified threat fact sheet, sharing it with over 1,200 commercial space providers from the Front Door catalog.
Through the Orbital Watch initiative, government organizations can disseminate threat information while letting it help inform how commercial industry partners develop more resilient systems and solutions.
Hammett observed that the Space Force also has made a large shift to take a very public tack to point out the threats and educate people at unclassified venues and conferences.
Responding to a lot of demand signals “to go fast and keep up,” Hammett noted, “We have tried to be first adopters for sustained space maneuver and for dynamic space operations…for the types of capabilities that we will need to compete and eventually win if we go into conflict in space.”
Streamlined Acquisitions, Prioritizing New Players
A key strategy includes stimulating the industrial base and bringing in new entrants, he added, noting that the U.S. government has begun to remove barriers for non-traditional entrants. His office now has prioritized identifying new players with technology capabilities with whom to partner.
For his office’s last three acquisitions, Hammett’s team used the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Part 16 acquisition, a non-traditional vehicle known as a fair opportunity proposal request.
“It takes a lot of the paper and time out of the process,” he said. “Instead of 500 or 2,000-page proposals that take a year and a half to review, we issue a 10-page RFP, giving you 30 days to come back and convince us you’re an A-team player.”
Based on the quality of the RFP, companies can get invited to present and show that they can deliver their solution to the government.
“It’s a much closer partnership with the industrial partners,” Hammett explained. “There’s a lot that goes into this in terms of rightsizing the requirements, the acquisition approach and picking the right teammates who are willing to jump into the trenches,” he added.
Game Changers: Digital Engineering, AI
In terms of tech trends that are game changers to address today’s threats, the panel’s sole commercial representative, Al Tadros, CTO of Redwire Space, pointed to digital engineering.
“Digital engineering has a huge amount of capability in our industry that’s really under-recognized,” he said.
Redwire is leveraging digital engineering for upfront ideation, concept development, and requirements generation, as well as to support program execution and autonomous operations, including testing responses to cyber threats, counter threats and war-game scenarios. The tools have enabled the space infrastructure company to build confidence both with customers and employees that its approach is the right one.
“I’m a guidance, navigation, and control engineer by training, and traditionally space has been conservative in regards to autonomy,” Tadros noted. “[Industry players] want the operator in the loop; they want to go into safe mode; they want to investigate before taking any action”—mindsets not conducive to today’s warfighting environment and combat mindset, Tadros said.
Tadros added that artificial intelligence (AI) remains a key focus for Redwire.
“It helps operators operate in a degraded environment, not only in a single platform but also in a total constellation or joint domain environment such as what is required by Golden Dome, where threats are rapidly evolving and capabilities from space, air, and ground are all tasked in order to address the threats,” he said.
Tadros predicts that without digital engineering and certain AI techniques, the United States will be “vastly behind in our capabilities to address those threats.”
Scaling Front Door
Vigliotti explained that a key goal of the Front Door program is reducing the traditional friction between industry and government to accelerate collaboration. He envisions consolidating commercial solutions identified by Front Door from a data vantage point and providing “a one-stop-shop not just for industry to go to share their capabilities with the government, but also for the government to identify solutions to their requirements,” he said.
Ultimately, the government hopes to make Front Door a resource for civil and intelligence organizations like NRO, NGA, and NASA, and eventually, to scale internationally with organizations like NATO.
“We [want] to be able to deliver those capabilities as quickly as possible — that way the warfighter can identify their needs, use one system to find those solutions and have all those capabilities associated with that to go after the threat,” Vigliotti emphasized.
According to Hammett, commercial data available today has enabled the United States for the first time to track adversaries like China as they make multi-orbit maneuvers or identify when they have placed space control capabilities in orbit. His office is working to “matriculate vendors with new concepts and capabilities through the system, so the government can connect capabilities to requirements identified by programs.
No More Reinvention
“We don’t want to reinvent capabilities on every program. That requires us to be smarter buyers,” he said.
A key acquisition strategy is matching subsystem suppliers to a prime and disallow reinventing something that has already been developed in the commercial marketplace. “It forces that kind of partnering at the prime sub program office level that isn’t always typical,” he noted.
Redwire, as a private sector firm, has proactively leveraged capabilities not only in industry, but also in federal labs, said Tadros. “We partner with Lawrence Livermore National Lab, with NASA Glenn [Research Center], with JPL, with MIT Lincoln Lab in pulling forward technologies and not reinventing things.”
He added that university research offers a powerful source of innovation, where institutions have “decades of developments,” but have been very intentional about focusing on the core research first rather than applying their breakthrough in the commercial market.
“There’s no need to go out there and reinvent things,” Tadros said. “We are fortunate to have a large pool of private investments that we can use in order to acquire companies, acquire capabilities, or invest organically in order to build a capability.”
Redwire’s acquisition of drone company, Edge Autonomy, is an example of that acquisition strategy. According to Tadros, Edge Autonomy works directly with DOD clients to deliver and field products, rather than seeking non-refundable engineering (NRE) dollars to complete an advanced product design.
Bottlenecks to Moving Fast
The panelists then addressed their number one bottleneck to bringing new innovations to orbit, with Vigliotti citing the bureaucracy and red tape that hinder “our ability to move quickly.”
“Space is dynamic—it moves quickly. If we leverage the traditional acquisitions process, by the time these capabilities are deliverable, they might no longer be relevant.”
Hammett said reforming the requirements process will help fast track capabilities. He cited as an example the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) exemption, which allows certain programs pursuing rapid acquisition pathways, often for prototyping or fielding capabilities quickly, to skip the usual documentation, staffing, and approval steps required for major defense acquisition programs.
Also, the FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act includes steps to cut red tape and accelerate the requirements process.
Tadros added that another bottleneck for the commercial space sector is the limited supply chain for volume production and manufacturing. “There hasn’t been a sustainable volume of orders and revenue for companies to sustain themselves.”
However, if true proliferation of space occurs, where there is a drop in prices and volumes reach thousands or hundreds of thousands of hardware, commercial space providers may face challenges, especially in the domestic supply chain.
Tadros reiterated that space will continue to be relevant, but “it needs to be relevant on a larger scale.” By that, he means that the commercial sector must be equipped to meet the government’s demand for proliferated autonomous vehicles as they head to thousands of units in operation.
Teaming Key
Asked what the single thing the industry must get right to ensure a secure and resilient space sector over the next five years, Hammett said it comes down to TTT&C —Teamwork, Trust, Transparency, and Commitment.
“We cannot be divided in our efforts; we cannot be working at cross purposes; we cannot be competing against each other; we cannot be refusing to accept commercial data…or to interoperate with other systems. It’s a full-up team sport—a national-level effort that is required.”
Learn more about how industry can get involved in addressing the threat at the
Innovation Summit on Layered Missile Defense, 11–12 September,
hosted by AIAA and The Aerospace Corporation.
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