Braxton Taylor
The space industry is waiting for the Space Force and intelligence community to come to an agreement over buying commercial satellite imagery and related analysis—a fight, some say, that is preventing troops from making the fullest use of orbital capabilities.
Currently, the National Reconnaissance Office is in charge of buying intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance imagery from commercial space providers, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in charge of purchasing analytic products. But in the five years since the Space Force was created, the young service has increasingly pushed for funds and leeway to work directly with commercial firms, arguing that it can more quickly get important information to combatant commands.
Earlier this year, Space Force launched a $40 million pilot program to show just how fast it could move information and insights from orbiting sensors to troops on ground. It began soliciting bids for “tactical surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking,” or TacSRT, through a “marketplace,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told reporters last month.
“What TacSRT is doing with this pilot in particular is: we simply ask a question into the marketplace: ‘Hey, what generally does it look like around Air Base 201? Are there any items of interest, trucks, that are massing? Is there a huge parking lot? Do we see people milling around?’ We simply ask the question. And commercial industry provides us products that try to help us answer the question,” he said.
Saltzman has emphasized that the pilot program buys analysis based on imagery but not images themselves, carefully skirting NRO’s territory.
Executives with commercial space companies that have participated in the pilot’s marketplace call it revolutionary. Some jobs have moved from a work statement announcement to the start of a mission in as little as 24 to 72 hours.
But these executives say that unless TacSRT gets more funding, and the intel community gives more leeway to the Space Force, commercial companies and combatant commands could suffer.
Under the current NGA-centric process, it can take weeks for military analysts in a relatively quiet command—i.e., anywhere that’s not China, Ukraine, or the Middle East—to hear back on a request for satellite imagery, said Joe Morrison, the vice president of remote sensing at Umbra, which operates a synthetic aperture radar constellation and provides data to analytics firms in the TacSRT program.
Morrison said the current system was designed to manage requests for a scarce number of very-high-quality, very-much-in-demand “national assets”—not to draw efficiently on commercial offerings to make sure all needs are met in timely fashion. He said this has discouraged analysts from even putting in a request for imagery or insights, which has artificially depressed apparent demand for them and has “hamstrung” Umbra’s ability to demonstrate its utility.
“If there’s one way in which the inability for us as a nation to come to terms on Title 10 versus Title 50 has probably hurt Umbra—and really the commercial remote sensing industry in the United States more generally—is that we haven’t been able to show how effective we can be as quickly as we were able technically because of the vestigial bureaucratic processes that are set up in order to avoid government waste, which is a good reason to set them up, but the reality on the ground is changing faster than those policies can change,” Morrison said.
NGA officials have recently pushed back on allegations that the agency moves too slowly: “My inbox would be full of emails if we were failing in this regard—and it is not. I do not get negative reports from the COCOMs on our timelines,” NGA director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth told reporters in August.
Decision time
While officials in the intelligence community and Space Force generally agree that they will need to use commercial capability, especially in wartime, the entities still have to draw lines over who has tasking authority for specific situations and who is in charge of the COCOMs’ needs. And it’s not easy to change the culture of the intel community, which for decades has only been trusting systems made in-house.
“It’s only natural for an entity in the IC that’s used to building really badass systems and is anointed on behalf of the entire government to do it, to bristle at the fact that someone else is going to come in and say they have a new way of doing things. For sure, there will be resistance when Space Force tries to scale it, if for nothing else other than it’s going to require moving someone’s cheese,” said Eric Jensen, CEO of ICEYE U.S., a subsidy of a Finnish SAR imagery provider that participates in the Space Force’s TacSRT program.
Despite this reticence, Jensen said, there has to be policy change so the Space Force can provide surge capacity to the COCOMs when they need it—and to support commercial-space companies like his.
“The question is: is the government going to continue to support the crossing of the chasm where these companies are able to truly operationalize their capabilities in a way that is well defined? I think that that’s been painful for companies that, like us, can move very quickly, but are somewhat beholden to the government’s bureaucratic timelines,” Jensen said.
Programs like TacSRT are key to incubating space startups that can work quickly, said Derek Tishler, founder of analytics provider BoxMica, a five-person company whose 2024 revenue has largely come from TacSRT jobs.
“With a few million dollars, a half dozen or more companies like ours would flourish and imagine if it’s a little bigger budget when it comes to things like TacSRT,” Tishler said. “The NRO might not be working at such a small contract level, or a lot of those organizations, so I really hope there’s a place for both, and then they can meet in the middle ground where everyone gets a little bit more money and a little bit more opportunities.”
He said he hopes the Space Force gets “a lot more leeway” to work directly with commercial firms.
A potential compromise would see the NRO keep the high-resolution, exquisite capability and hand the tactical ISR mission to the Space Force, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. But that would likely require intervention by higher levels of government.
“I would think that is something the next administration should tackle and the National Space Council, but I’m not optimistic that they’re going to reach any kind of a consensus on how to do this going forward in the near future, so I think we’re going to be stuck in this bureaucratic paralysis where what’s suffering is the Space Force’s ability to do its job and the warfighters ability to leverage commercial space to the fullest extent,” Harrison said.
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