02/03/2026

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By Sandra Erwin

Welcome to SpaceNews' Military Space, your source for the latest developments at the intersection of space and national security. In this week's edition: the case for sustaining satellites in orbit and scrutiny for the Pentagon's missile-tracking satellite program.

If someone forwarded you this edition, sign up to receive it directly in your inbox every Tuesday. And we're eager to hear your feedback and suggestions. You can hit reply to let me know directly or DM me on Signal @SandraErwin.43.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went on a test flight in Florida on Monday on an F-5 fighter flown by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. Seen here is the Artemis II Space Launch System rocket at Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center, which will take four astronauts around the moon. Hegseth later delivered remarks at Blue Origin's rocket factory near KSC. Credit: @NASAAdmin

Military leaders make case for in-space logistics as questions persist

U.S. military space leaders are making a more urgent case for in-space refueling and servicing, arguing that satellites can no longer be treated as expendable once they reach orbit. But inside the Pentagon, the push is running up against skepticism over cost, survivability and whether orbital logistics delivers more military advantage than simply buying more satellites.

In a speech last week, the head of U.S. Space Command, Gen. Stephen Whiting, argued that on-orbit logistics is no longer a futuristic concept, particularly for high-value national security satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

"While getting to space is crucial, we also need capabilities to sustain our assets once they are in orbit," Whiting said.

Satellites today operate until they run out of fuel or failed. As space becomes a contested military domain, he added, the Pentagon needs a sustainment and mobility infrastructure to support satellites

The countercase inside the building

Not everyone is persuaded. Skeptics inside the Pentagon argue that resilience might be achieved more cheaply by recapitalizing satellites or designing systems that are intentionally more disposable, rather than building what amounts to an orbital logistics tail.

These doubts show up most clearly in the requirements and programming process. Speaking last week at the Space Mobility conference in Orlando, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, military deputy in the office of the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said the service still has not answered the hard questions in a way that survives internal budget reviews.

Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Shawn Bratton has framed the issue in terms of proving the value proposition and the cost-versus military- advantage trade. Purdy, an early advocate of military adoption of space logistics, put it more bluntly: Unless refueling and servicing can be shown to help the U.S. beat China in a conflict, the Pentagon's budgeteers view this as a "science project."

Money, analysis and a timing problem

There are signs of momentum. Purdy said. Congress has added funding for space mobility and logistics, including $20 million in fiscal year 2025. For 2026, the Pentagon requested $48.5 million under the APFIT program — Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies — for an "augmented maneuver vehicle for satellites."

The Space Force is preparing to kick off a Small Business Innovation Research challenge focused on space mobility and logistics, Purdy said. But that effort is now on hold pending congressional reauthorization of SBIR, which expired Sept. 30.

Even with funding, the analytical bottleneck remains. The Space Force relies on the Space Warfighting Analysis Center to generate the data needed to justify requirements and programs of record. Given that SWAC has limited resources, Purdy said, the kind of deep wargaming needed to prove the utility of orbital logistics could take years.

Industry asked to help make the case

Given those constraints, Purdy told industry it cannot wait passively for government analysis. "Industry likely needs to lead with ideas … and help us with deep analysis and wargaming level analysis," he said, suggesting firms tap venture capital and private equity backing to fund that work.

He also warned companies to think hard about reliability and availability. Military operators, he said, have a "very real and valid concern" about whether a commercial service would actually be there when needed.

"There's a difference between vision and analysis," Purdy said. "In the Department of War, in the budget process, vision doesn't count. You need analysis."

He described the broader dynamic as a chicken-and-egg problem: investors want a government anchor customer, while government acquisition leaders want evidence of commercial maturity and investment before committing.

Industry: we're already investing

Ron Lopez, president of Astroscale U.S., said commercial firms are putting their own money into capabilities they believe the Space Force will ultimately need.

Astroscale has signed an agreement with the Space Force to co-invest in a refueling vehicle scheduled to fly a demonstration later this year. He emphasized that government demand is "absolutely critical to establishing what I call the virtuous cycle where we can show investors that the market is real."

And having the government as an anchor tenant now, he said, allows companies to prove utility to risk-averse commercial operators and unlock additional private investment.

Tom Martin, senior director of national security programs at Blue Origin, echoed that view, linking Space Force needs in GEO to broader commercial ambitions.

Companies like Blue Origin, he said, are investing in logistics chains to support a permanent lunar presence and eventually Mars. "If we're bringing up thousands of tons of cryogenic propellant in the future, how is the government going to think about leveraging that?" he asked.

Blue Origin is developing a multi-purpose vehicle called Blue Ring for mobility and logistics in GEO. "Clearly, industry is stepping up and developing these capabilities," Martin said. Whether there are commercial markets that can sustain them on their own "is a bigger question."

He argued the U.S. is at a familiar inflection point where government demand funds infrastructure that later supports commercial models. "Right now, we're really looking at the government as an anchor tenant, and really having that first use case," he said.

Keeping the market informed

Col. Scott Carstetter, director of servicing, mobility and logistics at Space Systems Command, said his office is trying to keep industry aligned with military needs and potential market opportunities.

"We want industry to go out and find ways to be profitable in this arena," Carstetter said. Where interests align, he added, the Space Force wants to be transparent about what it is looking for and where opportunities are likely to emerge.

For now, the gap between vision and analysis remains the central hurdle. Until orbital logistics can be translated into wargame results, cost curves and requirements language that budget officials accept, refueling and servicing might continue to live somewhere between operational necessity and science project.

A test case: De-orbiting as a service

One nascent category of in-orbit services now drawing attention from the Pentagon is the de-orbiting of satellites.

A mix of regulatory pressure and operational risk is pushing the issue up the agenda as low Earth orbit becomes more congested, commercial constellations proliferate and collision risks with debris objects rise.

That shift is reflected in a new solicitation from the Defense Innovation Unit, titled "De-orbit as a Service," which is seeking proposals by Feb. 13.

DIU acts as a front door for commercial and dual-use technologies, translating operational needs into rapid prototype efforts and awarding contracts using flexible acquisition authorities such as Other Transaction Agreements. If a prototype succeeds, it can transition to follow-on production or procurement without additional competition — a feature that makes DIU a bridge between early experimentation and real demand.

The de-orbit services effort is structured as a Commercial Solutions Opening, DIU's standard solicitation mechanism. It is seeking solutions that can safely engage "unprepared" satellites — spacecraft not designed for third-party interaction or controlled disposal — and reliably deorbit them to reduce congestion and collision risk. The emphasis is on systems that are mature enough to be prototyped and fielded quickly, not long-term research projects.

Under the CSO model, winning firms receive Other Transaction Agreements and, critically, a potential pathway to non-competitive production purchases if the capability performs as advertised.

This solicitation follows a recent $52.5 million contract award by the Space Development Agency to Starfish Space for end-of-life satellite disposal. The contract calls for Starfish's Otter spacecraft to capture and deorbit at least one military satellite from SDA's Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture in low Earth orbit, with a target mission around 2027.

Civil regulators, including the Federal Communications Commission, now require most LEO spacecraft to be disposed of within five years of end-of-life. At the same time, concern over debris growth and collision cascades continues to rise, creating pressure on both government and commercial operators to plan for responsible disposal.

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At Space Development Agency, speed comes with tradeoffs

A congressional watchdog is warning that the Pentagon's most ambitious effort to overhaul missile warning and tracking from space is moving faster than its underlying technology and management practices can support.

In a report published last week, the Government Accountability Office called on the Space Development Agency to be more "realistic and transparent" about the risks facing its plan to deploy a low Earth orbit constellation of hundreds of satellites to detect and track missile threats. The constellation, expected to cost nearly $35 billion through fiscal year 2029, is central to the Pentagon's effort to counter advanced weapons such as hypersonic missiles.

GAO said the program faces considerable risk because SDA is pressing ahead with successive satellite procurements while overestimating the maturity of critical technologies needed to deliver operational capability on schedule. The report focuses on the agency's Tracking Layer, which uses infrared sensor satellites to detect missile launches and track threats through flight.

A fast-moving architecture, with growing oversight concerns

SDA operates under the U.S. Space Force and was established in 2019 to break from traditional defense acquisition models. Beginning in 2020, the agency launched development of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, or PWSA — a network of hundreds of satellites intended to provide faster, more resilient missile warning and tracking than legacy systems operating from higher orbits.

The architecture is built in "tranches," with new generations of satellites acquired roughly every two years to refresh technology and add capacity. GAO found that this rapid, tranche-based approach has come at a cost. The watchdog said SDA continues to award new tranche contracts on a fixed cadence without maintaining an overarching, architecture-level schedule that shows how delays in one tranche affect the constellation as a whole.

At the same time, GAO said the Pentagon lacks a reliable estimate of what the full missile warning and tracking architecture will cost over its lifetime.

GAO also raised concerns about how SDA defines and validates requirements for the Tracking Layer. The agency has not sufficiently collaborated with the combatant commands that would rely on the satellites, GAO said, leaving warfighters with limited insight into what capabilities will be delivered and when—and increasing the risk that satellites are fielded without meeting operational needs.

An SDA spokesperson pushed back on parts of the report, saying the agency generally "disagreed with the specifics of many of the report's assertions; however, the agency will work through the report's recommendations to determine areas where we might improve our process, transparency, and warfighter capability delivery."

SDA leader explains the complexity

A senior SDA official recently highlighted the challenges inherent in the PWSA approach.

Speaking Jan. 22 at the AFCEA Space Industry Days conference, SDA technical director Russ Teehan said the agency's decision to build a constellation with satellites from multiple satellite vendors — rather than a single prime contractor — creates real systems engineering and integration challenges, even as it promotes competition and industrial base diversity.

In the Tracking Layer, "You have a data integration challenge and a fusion and a tip-and-cue challenge."

Teehan also pointed to complexity in the Transport Layer, the space-based data network that connects PWSA satellites. That layer must integrate military-unique communications networks and standards with commercial systems, requiring coordination across multiple government organizations.

"There is a lot of work between us, Space Systems Command and NRO [National Reconnaissance Office] on leveraging commercial architectures and making sure you can leverage the scale, speed, resilience, multi path opportunities that are created," he said.

For the Transport Layer, "our goal is to create enclaves that are interoperable with the PWSA architecture, but also interoperable with commercial architectures as they come online," Teehan said.

The ground segment with a multi-vendor structure is "really hard," Teehan said.

While he stressed that "our vendors are doing a great job," he acknowledged that the nontraditional approach carries risk. "There's going to be a cost, right? This bird might have a glitch, this bird might have an issue … when you have this many systems heading to orbit, we can't do the level of testing that we've done in the past."

SDA is moving quickly in an effort to "get stuff in the hands of the warfighter," Teehan said, but added that problems are inevitable. "And those are things that I look forward to working through with industry teams."

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