05/05/2026

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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: Funding for national security space in 2027 is estimated at $84 billion; new warnings to policy makers in the "State of the Space Industrial Base" report; defense and intelligence leaders talk commercial integration

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President Trump has nominated Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess to become the next chief of space operations. Schiess, now the Space Force’s deputy chief of operations, has spent much of his career in missile and space assignments, including command roles overseeing launch operations, missile warning and satellite systems. He previously led U.S. Space Forces–Space, the service component to United States Space Command, where he was responsible for day-to-day military space operations worldwide. Credit: U.S. Space Force

Analysts identify $84 billion in 2027 funding for national security space

The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2027 defense budget would put more than $84 billion into national security space programs, according to a new analysis by the aerospace and defense consulting firm Velos.

The figure shows the Pentagon’s space spending goes well beyond the Space Force’s already record-setting request.

The Space Force accounts for the largest share, with a proposed $71.4 billion budget. But Velos identified billions more in space-related spending spread across the Defense Department, including $4.5 billion tied to Golden Dome, $3.4 billion in the Air Force budget, $2.3 billion in the Navy budget, $1.6 billion in the Army budget and another $1 billion across other Pentagon and Marine Corps accounts.

The largest single category is a $23.8 billion bucket for classified programs, which includes Golden Dome, a planned layered missile defense architecture expected to rely in part on space-based sensors and data links to detect, track and counter advanced missile threats.

Focus on satcom

One area to watch is satellite communications. Velos estimates $12.6 billion in the Space Force budget is for satcom programs, including the emerging Space Data Network, a hybrid multi-orbit transport mesh in low Earth orbit that would serve as a communications backbone.

The portfolio includes both satellites and user equipment needed by the services.

The Space Data Network request includes $1.5 billion in mandatory research and development funding, and $165 million in discretionary funding for space and ground development.

A separate procurement account includes $1.56 billion in mandatory funding for proliferated low Earth orbit satcom, a program also referred to as MILNET. The request also has $800 million in mandatory funding to bring on additional Space Data Network backbone vendors. The current pLEO satcom program includes SpaceX Starshield satellites and user terminals.

The budget increases funding for the Evolved Strategic Satellite Communications program, or ESS, the Space Force’s planned successor to the Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite system for nuclear command, control and communications.

There is $1.8 billion in discretionary research and development funding for ESS, a $727 million increase over fiscal 2026, plus $279 million for advanced procurement. Space Systems Command awarded Boeing a $2.8 billion contract in July 2025 for the first two ESS satellites, with options for two more.

Narrowband satcom also gets a boost. The budget includes $856 million in discretionary research and development funding, a $440 million increase over fiscal 2026, to support design and production of two Mobile User Objective System service-life extension satellites.

New report: U.S. space leadership at risk due to bureaucratic bottlenecks

A new assessment of the U.S. space sector delivers a pointed message to Washington: the country’s biggest risk in space isn’t a lack of technology but the government’s ability to keep up with it.

The 2025 State of the Space Industrial Base report, compiled by NewSpace Nexus with input from government officials, contractors, startups, investors and academics, argues that the U.S. is struggling to translate rapid commercial innovation into deployable national security capability.

The report notes that the Pentagon has embraced commercial integration in principle but execution lags intent. Program timelines remain slow, requirements are often over-classified, and contracting practices still favor incumbents.

According to the report, in mission areas such as space-based communications and in-space logistics, the government has yet to define a clear end-state architecture that would guide investment and integration. The report frames this as a policy failure: without a “North Star,” acquisition becomes reactive, and commercial innovation risks outpacing the government’s ability to absorb it.

The report points to China’s influence in technical standards and Europe’s push to establish its own regulatory frameworks and sovereign constellations. At the same time, U.S. tariff policy and regulatory uncertainty are nudging some partners to diversify away from American suppliers. The risk is not only lost market share but a gradual erosion of U.S. influence over the rules and norms that will govern space activity in the coming decades.

Taken together, the picture is less about a single policy issue than a system that has not kept pace with the commercialization of space. The government is signaling a preference for commercial solutions, but has yet to align its regulatory authorities, acquisition practices and long-term architectures to make that operational.

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GEOINT 2026: National security leaders talk commercial integration

At the GEOINT Symposium in Denver this week, officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency said a key priority is to integrate commercial capabilities into national security applications.

Stephen Winchell, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, outlined a strategy to move away from treating space as a collection of isolated, high-risk experiments. Instead, he intends for DARPA to leverage the fast-moving private sector.

As private companies are now leading in launch and satellite manufacturing, the U.S. has a unique opportunity to turn commercial scale into both a military and economic advantage, he said.

The agency is advancing Space-WATCH, a program designed to create a real-time picture of low Earth orbit by using a marketplace model to incentivize commercial satellite operators to share data from their onboard sensors.
He said DARPA is prioritizing foundational "building blocks" like on-orbit maneuverability and large-scale assembly. This includes a robotic servicing mission with Northrop Grumman slated to launch this year to repair satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
Winchell also expressed interest in a “Grand Challenge” for cislunar navigation — tracking trajectories between the Earth and the moon without GPS — and even conceptual studies on stabilizing asteroids to jump-start an in-space resource extraction market.

NGA managing expectations on AI

Brett Markham, deputy director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, provided a pragmatic assessment of the agency’s digital transformation, stressing that while AI is critical, it is not a panacea for global surveillance.

Markham cautioned that the goal of "knowing everything all the time" remains beyond current reach. The agency’s focus is not on total omniscience but on latency reduction, using AI to compress the time it takes to get data to analysts from hours down to minutes.

A cornerstone of the NGA’s strategy is the Luno program, which shifts the agency from buying raw satellite imagery to purchasing finished intelligence products, such as change detection and facility monitoring, from a variety of commercial vendors.
Because the government cannot build frontier AI models from scratch, the Pentagon finalized deals on May 1 with OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon to deploy advanced AI on classified networks.
To keep pace with adversaries like China, the NGA has established a Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) aimed at reducing procurement timelines from years to weeks or even days.

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