02/24/2026

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By Sandra Erwin

Welcome to this week's edition of SpaceNews' Military Space, your source for the latest developments at the intersection of space and national security. In this week's edition: Space Force eyes growth as workload expands; new questions on in-orbit refueling; as satellite imagery becomes abundant, companies compete on economics and speed.

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Gen. Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations, speaks Feb. 23 at the Air & Space Forces Association's Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. Credit: Jack Dempsey, Air & Space Forces Association

Top leaders say Space Force must scale up

The Pentagon's smallest military branch is signaling it needs to grow.

Department of the Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said on Monday that the U.S. Space Force is preparing for sustained expansion as its mission set broadens and operational demands rise — a shift that will require more personnel and a more technically skilled workforce.

Speaking at the Air & Space Forces Association's Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado, Meink said one immediate priority is expanding the Space Warfighting Analysis Center, or SWAC — the service's in-house analytic shop responsible for force design and long-term architecture planning.

How the future force is structured, he said, "will be critical as the Space Force expands even faster in the next few years."

The Space Force, established in 2019, has roughly 10,000 uniformed Guardians and about 5,000 civilian employees. Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Shawn Bratton in remarks at a SpaceNews event last month suggested the service could double in size over the next decade as operational requirements increase.

Meink didn't provide specific growth targets but said he has spent "many hours" with Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman discussing how to scale the workforce as the joint force becomes more reliant on space-based services and new missions emerge in missile defense and targeting.

'They need more of everything'

Saltzman, speaking after Meink, framed the issue as a structural imbalance. The Air Force outnumbers the Space Force by more than 30 to one, he said, yet Guardians must provide capabilities that underpin nearly every joint mission worldwide.

The service's roughly 15,000 total personnel must integrate with a joint force of about 1.3 million. And because of its lean design, Saltzman said, the Space Force has little surge capacity.

"We can't afford to waste energy or resources," he said. "We don't have the capacity to surge hundreds of guardians to fill capability gaps until a solution arrives."

Looking to 2040

Much of that planning is being informed by the ongoing "Objective Force" study, led by the SWAC, which is designed to define what the Space Force should look like in 2040.

"For the last year, a small team of expert analysts and strategists have been defining our future operating environment for 2040," Saltzman said. The team reviewed public and classified intelligence, assessed new mission demands and modeled scenarios around emerging technologies and adversary behavior.

Those scenarios were tested in workshops with military, industry, commercial space and allied experts.

"By 2040 we expect a strategic shift in space warfighting," Saltzman said, pointing to artificial intelligence operating on orbit, autonomous systems capable of acting with minimal human input, proximity operations and new centers of gravity such as on-orbit servicing, space commerce and cyber capabilities.

"It's a comprehensive accounting of systems, units, personnel, numbers, facilities, all of the support requirements needed and the timelines of when we need them," Saltzman said. That's work that will shape recruiting, training, exercises, readiness goals and, ultimately, budget and acquisition priorities.

The new EO arms race: cost, cadence and AI

The latest announcements from the Earth-observation sector point to a clear throughline: the era of scarcity is over.

Commercial satellite imagery is no longer the bottleneck. Pixels are becoming cheaper and more abundant. The competitive edge now lies in who can deliver persistent coverage at a sustainable price — and who can turn imagery into decisions fast enough to matter.

Three companies that made news this week — Remondo, Vantor and Satellogic — illustrate that reality. Each is attacking a different layer of what has effectively become the modern EO "stack:" collection economics, AI-enabled analysis and productized monitoring.

The economics of EO

Israeli startup Remondo is betting that the next price war will be fought in hardware design, specifically optics.

The company says it can deliver sub-30 centimeter imagery from low-cost satellites in low Earth orbit, challenging the long-standing tradeoff between ultra-high resolution and affordability. Historically, sharper imagery required larger mirrors, bigger buses and expensive, bespoke spacecraft. Remondo's answer is what it calls the "Partial Aperture Imaging System (PAIS)" — an architecture that replaces a single large mirror with a ring of smaller mirrors.

CEO Ido Priel argues that the main barrier in this market has always been cost, and the company plans to deploy small satellites equipped with PAIS payloads to push below-30 cm imagery into a lower-cost model.

If Remondo can execute on its plan, that would increase competitive pressure on incumbents and accelerate the commoditization of optical imagery. In other words: if top-tier resolution becomes widely accessible, differentiation shifts downstream.

AI inside the fence

That downstream shift is where Vantor is positioning itself.

Vantor signed an agreement with Google to integrate Google Earth AI imagery models into its imagery and data platform, with the ability to deploy those models in classified and air-gapped environments. In the government market, that detail matters. Many advanced AI tools run in commercial cloud environments, but the highest-paying intelligence customers operate in secure, sovereign networks where cloud-native solutions can't simply be plugged in.

Vantor aims to serve as the bridge — making advanced geospatial AI usable inside those constraints while allowing customers to fine-tune and retrain models on sovereign data, alongside Vantor imagery and third-party sources.

The bet is that as imagery supply rises, the premium shifts to systems that reduce labor and latency. Automation that works inside secure environments becomes a differentiator.

From tasking to monitoring

Meanwhile, Satellogic is trying to change the commercial model itself.

On Monday, the company unveiled Aleph Observer, a platform designed to move customers away from ad hoc satellite tasking toward persistent monitoring.

"Traditional Earth observation models require customers to request imagery on a site-by-site basis, manage tasking priority, and absorb rising costs as monitoring needs grow," the company said.

Aleph Observer is Satellogic's attempt to reframe the product around predictable coverage across defined areas of interest. Instead of ordering images one collection at a time, customers receive ongoing monitoring designed to detect change over time.

The company argues this reduces analyst overhead and supports faster, more confident decision-making across defense, intelligence, civil government and commercial use cases.

CEO Emiliano Kargieman said customers "are not interested in simply buying images," he said; they're responsible for "high-quality awareness at scale" and acting on change.

Taken together, these moves highlight both intensifying competition and a maturing industry that is moving from selling pictures to selling awareness.

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Orbital refueling: Space Force tests the market

The U.S. Space Force is asking the industry for insights on how in-orbit satellite refueling will move from concept to market formation.

Earlier this month, the Servicing, Mobility and Logistics office within Space Systems Command issued a request for information seeking "technical concepts and approaches to refueling services for prepared clients in orbit." The RFI asks industry how such services could be operational by 2030.

"The RFI is a very positive step," said Clare Martin, senior vice president of Astroscale U.S.

In 2024, the Space Force selected two refueling ports — RAFTI and PRM — as preferred interfaces for satellites that may receive fuel on orbit. The decision gives satellite builders and servicing companies clearer design targets.

RAFTI, short for Rapidly Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface, was developed by Orbit Fab. PRM, or Passive Refueling Module, was developed by Northrop Grumman.

Astroscale's refueling vehicle, Provisioner, uses RAFTI and is preparing for a geostationary mission that will attempt hydrazine refueling of a U.S. military satellite.

But standards alone do not guarantee a viable market. Tanker availability, propellant alignment, pricing relative to satellite replacement and survivability in a contested domain remain open questions.

Toward 'refueling as a service'

From an acquisition perspective, the goal is to enable service contracts. "It is a good sign that the work they're doing now is going to move beyond this initial phase and into the future," Martin said.

The broader architecture remains unsettled. Companies including Astroscale and Northrop are developing shuttles that would travel between client satellites and fuel depots. For PRM-equipped spacecraft, Northrop has developed an Active Refueling Module. Orbit Fab has built a GRIP nozzle system compatible with RAFTI.

"You could have a client vehicle go straight to a depot. You could have a depot come to a client. Or you can have the service shuttle move between the two," Martin said.

That flexibility introduces supply-chain complexity. Providers must source hydrazine, coordinate with launch companies, assess orbit transfer options and manage launch availability.

"So it's a whole industry solution that would be required," she said.

Astroscale says integration and testing are underway and expects to be ready to launch Provisioner this year, though timing remains under discussion.

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