WASHINGTON — Pentagon officials have called attention to DoD’s must access industrial space industry services. Nonetheless, little or no of the Space Force’s budget is being allocated to some of these services, an area industry and budget analyst said May 2.
Industrial space services — enabled by increasingly capable small satellites and cheaper access to orbit — include imagery, space surveillance, weather data, broadband communications and others that may very well be procured as a substitute for traditional acquisitions.
What the Space Force budget shows is that, apart from satellite communications, only a few technologies today are bought as services, analyst Mike Tierney, head of legislative affairs on the National Security Space Association, said at a briefing on Capitol Hill.
The Pentagon’s funding proposal for fiscal yr 2024 seeks $30 billion for the U.S. Space Force, which DoD called its largest ever space budget.
Most of that funding is for the event and procurement of next-generation satellite constellations and other systems that the federal government owns and operates. Tierney said it’s difficult to quantify spending on industrial space services because there is no such thing as a separate funding line for that. He estimates it is just a small fraction of overall spending.
“It’s a good query, and definitely a matter I get quite a bit,” said Tierney.
“I’m all the time looking inside these buckets for industrial activity that meets the expectations of what the industry thinks a industrial capability is,” he said. “But we’re talking about really a fraction of the totality of that $30 billion.”
Tierney said there may be a mismatch between the industry’s expectations of DoD as a customer of economic space services and the actual dollars which can be being spent on these emerging technologies.
“There stays a disconnect between what industry wants and believes the department must be doing relative to industrial space investments,” Tierney said. “And I feel there’ll proceed to be that friction between what the industry wants and what the federal government is willing to let go.”
Tierney said one among the federal government’s reservations about industrial systems is network security. “Each time you bring up industrial services in these conversations, that is commonly a priority,” he added.
The use of economic services will likely grow over time,“but there’s still a strategy to go from what I feel the industry is in search of.”
Space Force office to purchase industrial services
The Space Systems Command based in Los Angeles last yr stood up a Industrial Services Office — recently rebranded because the Industrial Space Office — within the Washington D.C. area.
The office, run by Col. Richard Kniseley, materiel leader at Space Systems Command, was created to work out what services may very well be bought from the private sector to complement or replace government-owned systems.
But making that transition could take years until procurement cycles and DoD’s budget process meet up with users’ demands, said the acting deputy director of the Industrial Space Force Jeremy Leader.
Speaking last month at an AFCEA Los Angeles event, Leader said there are sectors of the space industry developing technologies of interest to the federal government but for which a industrial market doesn’t yet exist.
An example of that’s on-orbit satellite services and alternatives to GPS navigation, he said. “DoD can have to be an anchor tenant for some time until a industrial market emerges … The intent is to assist create those markets.”
He said the establishment of a Industrial Space Office was in response to the emergence of “corporations and capabilities that we hadn’t seen before.”
A lot of the industrial space office’s efforts now are on contracting for satellite communications and for space domain awareness data.
There are still obstacles to purchasing services which can be mostly bureaucratic. “A few of them are of our own making,” said Leader. “We actually wish to put our money where our mouth is. It just takes just a little bit longer with the budget cycles.”
Not much will change until “we bake these industrial capabilities into our force designs, and into our budgets. It must be a part of the baseline,” he said.
Once there may be a budget line item for a industrial service, Leader added, it can be “very clear for industry and for this system executive officers to have the opportunity to execute.”
“If folks don’t have their very own dedicated line item for industrial capabilities inside their mission area, it makes it type of convoluted to try to search out where that industrial money is definitely available,” he noted. “So even when I consult with a PEO who’s willing to do some things commercially, it’s hard to get that message when you can’t point to a line item within the budget.”
