This will be the eighth mission for the Boeing-built space plane, which has served as an on-orbit, experimental testbed for emerging technologies being developed by the Pentagon and NASA. The platform is designed to conduct long-duration flights before returning to Earth, where it can be repurposed for future missions. The system has already spent more than 4,200 days in space, according to Boeing.

Personnel are currently preparing the vehicle — which will fly with a service module — for another launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, according to a press release issued Monday. Mission partners for OTV-8, as the effort has been dubbed, include the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Silicon Valley-headquartered Defense Innovation Unit.

The service module will expand capacity for laser comms demonstrations, per the release.

Laser communications demos in low-Earth orbit “will contribute to more efficient and secure satellite communications in the future. The shorter wavelength of infrared light allows more data to be sent with each transmission,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman wrote in post on X.

“We’re also demoing the world’s highest performing quantum inertial sensor ever used in space. Bottom line: testing this tech will be helpful for navigation in contested environments where GPS may be degraded or denied,” he added.

According to Boeing’s press release, the mission will include the first in-space demonstration of a “strategic grade” quantum inertial sensor.

“OTV 8’s quantum inertial sensor demonstration is a welcome step forward for the operational resilience of Guardians in space,” Space Delta 9 Commander Col. Ramsey Hom said in a statement. “Whether navigating beyond Earth-based orbits in cis-lunar space or operating in GPS-denied environments, quantum inertial sensing allows for robust navigation capabilities where GPS navigation is not possible. Ultimately, this technology contributes significantly to our thrust within the Fifth Space Operations Squadron and across the Space Force guaranteeing movement and maneuverability even in GPS-denied environments.”

The launch date is targeted for Aug. 21, according to Saltzman.

During the space plane’s most recent mission, which started in 2023 and wrapped up earlier this year, efforts included experimenting with operating in new orbital regimes, testing space domain awareness technologies and investigating radiation effects, according to officials.

For the mission before that, the X-37B spent a whopping 908 days in orbit.

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In receiving the patent, which was issued Tuesday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the leaders behind Data² hope to help open the black box of AI to inject more trust in the adoption and use of the technology, particularly in high-stakes mission sets like defense, intelligence and national security.

“These are organizations that, at the end of the day, have a low tolerance for failure, especially in the defense and in the intel space. Wrong answers have real consequences,” CEO Jon Brewton told DefenseScoop. “But what this means is they can finally build and deploy AI that they can trust and use to make mission-critical decisions. And I think that’s a real differentiator, because we’re not talking about just generic chatbot features. What we’re really talking about is building systems that are getting more reliable and have a systematic process for creating trustworthy outputs.”

Brewton, a former airman, founded Data² with Chris Rohrbach, a retired Navy SEAL commander, and Eric Costantini, a Marine, as well as Jeff Dalgliesh, with whom he worked in oil and gas, another industry that was key to the company’s inception. Additionally, the organization’s advisory team features members like former Federal CIO Suzette Kent and Nancy Morgan, a former chief data officer of the U.S. intelligence community. Early on in 2023, when the group was launching what would become Data², they took the idea through the Catalyst Accelerator program with the Air Force Research Lab and Space Force, and introduced a proof of concept associated with the intel community.

That subject matter expertise has been key to the company’s journey, particularly in understanding the gaps it is trying to fill for the services Brewton and his co-founders once served in.

“We rely on our subject matter expertise and our backgrounds to point us and narrow our focus around what we really pay attention to,” Brewton said, adding that they are targeting “high reliability industry applications” in sectors like defense, intelligence and finance.

He continued: “The future we’re trying to build is one where a military commander on the field can trust the AI-generated battlefield assessment, so cybersecurity analysts can rely on AI to respond to threats in near real time. We’re really trying to make AI trustworthy for governments, so that they can use it in those mission-critical areas, and so that people and machines can really start to make better decisions together… [and] so that they can start generating value from the data that they already have in this technology and capability.”

Brewton explained that the patented capability was built to be technology agnostic and can work with any AI model or ecosystem, because it uses “knowledge graph” tech on top of an organization’s existing data, “grounding the AI in a fact base” so that “every AI-generated answer is anchored in verifiable, traceable source data with citations down to the data record level.”

Despite major progress, today’s foundational AI models still have major limitations that cause hallucinations and are often unreliable, which is a concern for defense officials.

For that reason, Brewton said, Data² took a data-focused approach to “solve for the lack of sort of trust, transparency and explainability.”

“Ultimately, what we found out very, very early on in the process, which informed the patent that we developed, is that better data architecture, better data structure, is really the key to unlock how you can grow in explainability, traceability and transparency — not better models,” he said.

Currently, the business approach of Data² is to partner with larger technology vendors, like Amazon, Microsoft, Dell and Nvidia, with large footprints through which it can offer its services in the broadest way possible with some “brand equity” and association with “some of the industry’s most trusted technology partners, top-tier technology providers to the U.S. government at scale.”

“It’s not limited to a data architecture, it’s not limited to a data type, it’s not limited to a large language model, it’s not limited to an environment,” Brewton said. “We’ve tested fully cloud-hosted environments, all the way down to a completely air-gapped deployed edge kit.”

While the plan moving forward is to continue to lean into that partner ecosystem to make headway with defense and intelligence activities, Brewton said, acquiring the patent “really substantiates what we believed all along was a really transformational approach to how to scale AI, especially in these mission-critical spaces.”

“Our patent really represents sort of a first step towards making AI usable by governments and other highly regulated organizations,” he added.

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Kickstarted by DIU in 2021, the HSA program is developing a space-based architecture that can rapidly deliver critical warfighting data by combining commercial-built technologies with military and civilian space assets. Companies contracted under the program will spend the next year prototyping their capabilities at multiple operational demonstrations to lay the foundation for an operational pilot architecture to be ready by 2026, according to DIU.

While HSA is being led by DIU, the Pentagon’s tech innovation arm is working closely with the Space Force, the Air Force Research Lab, combatant commands and other military organizations on the effort.

“Together with DIU we’re accelerating the integration of commercial capabilities through HSA demonstrations and pilot efforts to scale quickly into a resilient, multi-orbit architecture supporting the DoD’s vision for seamless, uninterrupted global communications. These efforts exemplify the power of whole-of-government and industry collaboration in delivering real-world capability at speed,” Lt. Col. Tim Trimailo, director of Space Systems Command’s Commercial Space Office (COMSO), said in a statement. Trimailo recently took the helm at COMSO following the departure of Col. Richard Kniseley in April.

The 12 new firms added to HSA include Capella Space, EdgeCortix, Eutelsat America Corp./OneWeb Technologies, Fairwinds Technologies/AST Space Mobile, Illumina Computing Group, Lockheed Martin, MapLarge, SES Government Solutions, Skycorp, SkyFi, Ursa Space Systems and Viasat.

DIU already had 12 companies working on the project after handing out initial contracts in 2022: Aalyria Technologies, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Kuiper, Anduril, Astranis Space, ATLAS Space Operations, Enveil, Google, Palantir, Planet Labs Federal, Microsoft and SpiderOak.

The upcoming prototype demonstrations will occur across U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. European Command, U.S. Central Command and U.S. Southern Command, DIU said in a news release. Specifically, the vendors will develop and demonstrate different technologies that enable space-based data collection, transport, processing and dissemination to various military units.

“The HSA network has the potential to increase network resilience by employing multi-path routing of communications to optimize data transport and mitigate adverse effects caused by weather or other obstructions,” the DIU release stated. “HSA seeks to integrate commercial persistent sensing, data fusion, high-performance edge compute and resilient data transport capabilities to significantly enhance real-time access to information.”

The HSA team is also preparing to activate a “live hybrid network for demonstrations, exercise support, and further integration of tactics and warfighting capabilities,” per the release.

Over the last few years, the Space Force has sought to take advantage of the rapidly growing commercial space industry as a way to incorporate the latest technologies and capabilities into its systems. The service’s 2024 Commercial Space Strategy calls for commercial solutions to be integrated into a “hybrid space architecture,” while also identifying seven mission areas where commercial capabilities are most beneficial.

“DIU’s ability to rapidly integrate and deliver a hybrid space network architecture is testament to its process of allowing commercial innovators to solve complex problems at speed and scale by applying their solutions to DOD’s problems,” Steve Butow, director of DIU’s space portfolio, said in a statement.

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In 2023, Bonnell was tapped to serve as AFRL’s first-ever chief information officer and director of the laboratory’s Digital Capabilities Directorate, where she led the lab’s information technology strategy and overall modernization efforts. According to a Tuesday post on LinkedIn, Bonnell is now working at OpenAI as a partnership manager, a position she took on in March.

“The role [at AFRL] was truly one in a lifetime — serving the national security mission alongside some of the most brilliant scientists, engineers, and digital visionaries in the country,” Bonnell wrote. “From cybersecurity to networks and infrastructure, from enterprise service design to pushing the frontiers of AI, I couldn’t be more proud of what we built together—or more confident in the team carrying the mission forward.”

While at AFRL, Bonnell was at the forefront of the lab’s push to develop new artificial intelligence capabilities for warfighters. She was instrumental in launching the Air Force’s experimental generative AI chatbot known as NIPRGPT — a model that has since been scaled to other organizations across the Defense Department such as the Defense Information Systems Agency.

“Helping to launch one of the first human-machine teaming research platforms in DoD, built with open-source tools and volunteer effort, was a career highlight. So was advancing AI adoption across the force, making the theoretical practical,” Bonnell wrote.

Before joining AFRL, Bonnell was Google Public Sector’s emerging tech “evangelist,” where she helped the Defense Department and other federal agencies adopt new capabilities such as cloud, AI and zero-trust cybersecurity strategies.

As she returns to the private sector, she expects to dive deeper into artificial intelligence capabilities and explore how the technology can contribute to public service, she said on LinkedIn.

At OpenAI, Bonnell will “support extraordinary public sector organizations like the U.S. National Labs to research and apply frontier current and future AI models to the grand challenges of research, science, innovation, and national security,” she wrote.

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Pending accreditation, the chatbot will be deployed to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and allow users to experiment with genAI models on the Secure Internet Protocol Router (SIPRNet), Jeff Marshall, director of DISA’s Hosting and Compute Center, said during a webinar broadcast Tuesday by Federal News Network. The platform is currently in the accreditation stage and is expected to open up “within the next month or so,” Marshall noted.

The capability was developed in close collaboration with the Air Force Research Lab, which launched its own experimental generative AI chatbot for the Department of the Air Force on unclassified networks — dubbed NIPRGPT — last year. Similar to AFRL’s program, AFRL and DISA are using the effort to evaluate and expedite delivery of commercial AI tools, but the agency’s initiative will be in classified realms, Marshall said.

“We’re not trying to deploy this on our own. We’re not trying to make it a production system. This is [a research-and-development] system that we’re using for Indo-Pacom in order to test large language models overseas,” he said.

Across the Pentagon, organizations have looked to capitalize on commercial large language models and other artificial intelligence capabilities. Although there have been various efforts over the last few years — ranging from task forces to experimental platforms — the department is still learning how the technology can be best used to improve back-office and tactical operations.

Marshall noted that DISA’s SIPR-based LLM will largely help “facilitate that demand signal of, what does an Indo-Pacom commander need and want to utilize AI for? And then, how do we then shape that to what industry can actually provide for us at scale?”

DISA plans to host the chatbot on one of the two Joint Operational Edge (JOE) cloud environments it has deployed to the Pacific. Initiated in 2023, the JOE cloud effort seeks to stand up commercial cloud environments at the agency’s overseas data centers, allowing DISA to place cloud-native applications in locations outside of the continental United States. Along with JOE, the agency is also providing its private cloud capability known as Stratus to areas overseas.

To date, DISA has put two JOE cloud nodes at Indo-Pacom and one at U.S. European Command, and will soon deploy another node in Southwest Asia, Marshall said.

Moving forward, DISA is looking to potentially provide additional JOE cloud environments in Europe in order to support operations for U.S. Africa Command, which is headquartered in Germany. But Marshall emphasized the agency is doing so while balancing demand signals with available resources.

“Let’s don’t just throw it all out there one time and hope that it sticks to the wall,” he said. “We’re taking in the demand signal, we’re making sure that there is a valid need that supports us doing the deployment and then, of course, there’s a budget to cover it.”

Updated on March 26, 2025, at 10:35 AM: This story has been updated to clarify AFRL’s role in the new chatbot initiative and to remove “acting” from Jeff Marshall’s job title.

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During the test, the contractor for the first time connected its hybrid SATCOM terminals to two commercial internet satellite systems — one stationed in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and another in geosynchronous orbit (GEO), according to the firm. The demonstration was the company’s first for AFRL’s Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI) effort, also known as Global Lightning.

“Northrop Grumman is responding to the U.S. Air Force’s need for rapid deployment of resilient communications to develop and field the technologies required by our warfighters to meet today’s challenging missions,” Steven Conn, the company’s director of advanced communications and signals intelligence, said in a statement. “This successful test, leveraging a diverse team of commercial and defense SATCOM providers, is critical for the pace of maturity on the Global Lightning program and the ability to begin flight testing in the near future.”

At the July demonstration, Northrop Grumman established connectivity between its hybrid SATCOM terminals to a commercial proliferated LEO communications provider at Ku frequencies, as well as with the ViaSat F1 satellite in GEO at Ka frequencies. The event validated ubiquitous communications and the ability to rapidly switch between constellation systems and orbital regimes, according to the organization.

Global Lightning looks to leverage commercial space internet services to establish path-agnostic communications for warfighters. The program is linked to the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort, which aims to connect disparate systems across the battlespace under a single network to enable rapid data transfer between all warfighting domains.

AFRL has given awards to various defense contractors and commercial SATCOM providers for the effort in recent years. In 2023, Northrop Grumman received a four-year, $80.3 million contract from the research lab to execute the demonstrations as part of its “call 3” phase that will demonstrate connectivity between military platforms and commercial space internet constellations across two use cases — communications in the Arctic region and airborne comms.

L3Harris also received a three-year deal worth $80.8 million to perform work on the call 3 exercises for Global Lightning. The company announced Sept. 10 it had completed a critical design review for its Rapidly Adaptable Standards-compliant Open Radio (RASOR) capability that will be used to test connectivity between military platforms and commercial space internet.

“Following this successful CDR, we plan on conducting integrated hardware testing within the next year to support Air Force flight tests currently scheduled to begin at the end of 2025,” Adam Milner, L3Harris’s senior manager of space networks, said in a statement.

Viasat, SES Space & Defense, SpaceX, OneWeb and Telesat are among the commercial SATCOM providers that have been contracted for the Global Lightning program since it began.

Meanwhile, AFRL is already looking forward to future demonstrations. Viasat announced Tuesday that it received a $33.6 million contract from the research lab to develop and deliver active electronically scanned array (AESA) systems as part of Global Lightning’s “call 4” phase.

The commercial AESA antennas are expected to support communications for tactical aircraft and enable connectivity across multiple frequencies, orbits and commercial networks.

“We believe hybrid resilient communication solutions are central to future government mobility operations and our teams are committed to continuing to help solve these multi-band, multi-orbit, multi-constellation interoperability challenges with high performance, cost-effective capabilities,” Michael Maughan, Viasat Government’s vice president of space and mission systems, said in a statement.

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The so-called “sprint week” is scheduled for Sept. 9-13 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and will address human-machine teaming capabilities that can help battle managers make faster and better-informed decisions when engaging with targets, according to a request for information posted to Sam.gov on Thursday.

The event will support the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) effort, which is the Air Force’s contribution to the Pentagon-wide initiative known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).

CJADC2 is an approach to warfighting that aims to enable data to move more effectively across distributed networks of sensors and weapons, allowing military leaders to quickly ingest information about incoming threats from multiple sources and take informed actions to defeat them. The various networks would be connected by faster communications, processing and decision-making systems supported by artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. 

AFRL’s upcoming sprint will focus on “Generating BattleCOAs” — one of the specific ABMS subfunctions that largely “explain the comprehensive set of battlespace information elements and decisions [a human-machine team] must make to battle manage the battlespace,” according to the RFI.

Specifically, it involves determining what existing weapons systems and effects would be needed to support battle managers in operations, effectively creating various courses of action that represent the steps, weapons and other tools that are needed to eliminate a threat. The RFI noted that this process currently involves numerous personnel and very little human-machine teaming capabilities.

“To win against a peer adversary, the joint force must achieve decision advantage by equipping human-machine teams with automation to sort through complex and high-volume battle management decisions with faster tempo and improved decision quality,” the document states.

During the first three days of the planned sprint week, invited participants will be able to quickly iterate and refine their human-machine teaming solutions against the Generating BattleCOAs problem set. The final two days will allow Air Force operators to test the refined solutions in a series of experiments.

“The goal is to compare decision performance against a baseline and provide measurable changes in decision performance of the human-machine team,” the RFI noted.

Experiments during the event will address a series of considerations outlined by AFRL — including how fast the capabilities can make decisions; how accurate and error-free those decisions are; how confident human operators are in the human-machine teaming solution; and can the service measure utility, cost and risk with a Generating BattleCOAs “instance.”

Vendors interested in participating must reply to the RFI by Aug. 9.

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Broadly, nuclear weapon effects testing refers to evaluations that can gauge how objects might respond to the outputs of a nuclear weapon. Since the U.S. halted full-scale nuclear underground testing in 1992, these assessments have been conducted with technological simulators.

Through a recently awarded Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract, announced Wednesday, Fuse is partnering with the innovation hub AFWERX and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to prototype and refine new nuclear effects testing options for military personnel.

“The current nuclear weapons simulators are old and aging out. They are also oversubscribed. The threat profile has also evolved. Fuse will provide modern threat simulators and increase testing availability at a fraction of the cost,” JC Btaiche, Fuse’s CEO and founder, told DefenseScoop in an email ahead of the contract’s announcement.

He did not confirm the exact value of the new SBIR deal. 

Still, Btaiche noted that he views it as “a modest contract to get our foot in the door into the [$127 billion] Programs of Record across the [departments of Defense and Energy] for nuclear simulation and effects testing, and fusion pulse power, authorized over the next 5 years.” 

Details regarding all of Fuse’s action items under this SBIR contract are sparse at the time of its announcement. 

According to a press release published Wednesday, the company has already demonstrated multiple pulsed-power prototypes. Through this contract, officials aim to further prototype additional solutions in the electromagnetic spectrum.

“The probability of a nuclear war is higher now than it has ever been. Russia is being more aggressive in showing off its strategic nuclear capabilities and we need to ensure that we are ready,” Btaiche told DefenseScoop.

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The demonstrations are part of AFRL’s Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI) program, which aims to leverage burgeoning commercial space internet services in order to establish resilient communications and data-sharing capabilities for warfighters. A notice on Sam.gov states the end goal is to establish “path agnostic communications” — or the ability to “reliably communicate to any location on the globe without explicitly specifying which nodes of a communication network to use.”

The program’s mission ties directly into the Pentagon’s vision for its new warfighting concept known as Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2). The effort seeks to connect systems that are currently siloed across the battlespace under a single network, enabling warfighters to quickly send and receive critical decision-making data.

The lab initially began DEUCSI in 2017 and has since given awards to several defense contractors and commercial satcom providers to work on the effort. Earlier this year, AFRL awarded Northrop Grumman and L3Harris individual contracts for upcoming experiments that will focus on connecting military platforms with different commercial satcom constellations located in low-Earth, medium-Earth and geosynchronous orbits.

Jenna Paukstis, vice president and general manager of Northrop’s networked information solutions division, told DefenseScoop that the company is building upon the program’s previous work that established a baseline capability and continuing it at a higher volume.

The contractor will be providing 20 open system processors and multiple antenna solutions that will be tested during two separate demonstrations with AFRL.

“One of the key things is that under this program, we’ll be able to build and test out our open system processors as well as our antenna solutions — both with the goal of providing beyond-line-of-sight capabilities to both air and ground forces,” Paukstis said Monday in an interview on the sidelines of the annual AUSA conference.

According to the Defense Department, Northrop received a four-year, $80.3 million contract from AFRL on June 2 for the DEUCSI demonstrations. The week before on May 25, the lab awarded L3Harris a contract worth $80.8 million to work on DEUCSI for three years.

The recent awards are part of the program’s “call 3” phase that is looking to establish the “ability to communicate with military platforms via multiple commercial space internet constellations in various orbital regimes using common terminal hardware,” according to the solicitation on Sam.gov. These will explore two use cases: fixed and mobile communications in the Arctic region and airborne communications.

Satellite communications in the Arctic are extremely limited for the U.S. military, as the connecting data links become unstable due to long distances needed to operate in the environment. But commercial space internet constellations — especially those in low-Earth orbit — may offer more reliable connectivity.

For demonstrations with Arctic communications, AFRL is looking for terminals “that provide for switching between multiple communications constellations while operating for long periods of time, potentially unattended, in the harsh Arctic environment,” according to the solicitation. The lab wants capabilities that could access multiple constellations or have the ability to switch between constellations within seconds.

As for airborne communications, AFRL is interested in connecting one or more Air Force aircraft to two or more commercial satcom providers using common terminals — reducing the amount of hardware modifications normally needed for this capability.

According to the lab’s solicitation, it wants to test multi-orbit, multi-constellation communications capabilities on at least five different types of aircraft.

Although Paukstis could not confirm the timeline or offer specific details about the demonstrations, she said the company will initially be connecting to ViaSat, SES Space & Defense and SpaceX’s new Starshield service — and there’s a possibility more commercial satcom providers could be added in the future. The experiments will focus on all three orbital regimes, she noted.

“The importance of connecting across the three is really for that resiliency,” Paukstis said. “We talk a lot about resilient connectivity, even if you’re just talking about air-to-air — not just air-to-space or air-to-ground. And so you get that resiliency by having that diversification.”

She emphasized that Northrop’s work on the upcoming demonstrations will focus on specific objectives that will allow warfighters to have decision advantage in contested environments. 

“The first is making sure the warfighter can securely share that data — so that seamless sharing of information, and then really synchronizing operations at mission speed,” Paukstis said. “The second thing is to be able to leverage open architecture and configurable systems so that you can more rapidly integrate, whether it’s into an airborne platform or ground vehicle.”

Another crucial component of DEUCSI will be the ability to offer cost-effective communications by leveraging already existing commercial satcom solutions in different orbital regimes, Paukstis added.

“It ties directly to … how do you create that digital battle network using a dynamic, scalable, resilient architecture that pulls into the commercial industry business, as well as our security awareness and mission expertise that Northrop brings for the internet of warfighting things,” she said.

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“Without engagement with [commercial industry], we don’t even know how to write the best requirements that we can. And so I would just ask that, don’t let the bureaucracy scare you,” said Col. Edward Ferguson, chief of Spacecom’s advanced warfighter capabilities and resources analysis division and director of the command’s Space Technical Analysis Group (STAG).

Speaking on Thursday during a panel at Fed Supernova, a defense technology event in Austin, Texas, Ferguson said that on many occasions the tech brought forth by a commercial space company wasn’t a solution or method Space Command had even thought was possible.

“A lot of times, my mind’s blown. Like, I didn’t even know I could ask to do that … I didn’t know that somebody had solved that problem,” Ferguson said. “Please, come show us what the realm of the possible is, because there’s a good chance that we didn’t even know we could ask for that.”

With the recent standup of the Space Force and restoration of Space Command, the Defense Department has sought to take advantage of the rapidly growing commercial space sector and break down bureaucratic hurdles that can stifle innovation.

Spacecom has a branch solely dedicated to industry engagement that helps the command write relevant requirements that can then be developed by the services, Ferguson said. 

“If we write requirements for ‘unobtainium’ — that doesn’t help anybody,” he said. “We have to be familiar with what the technology is that’s out there so that we ask for good requirements, valid requirements that we can give to [Space Systems Command] and they can go find stuff for us.”

The Space Force also has its own Commercial Space Office underneath its acquisition organization, Space Systems Command. The service can also tap into its innovation hubs dedicated to partnering with technology startups, such as AFWERX and SPACEWERX.

After rebranding the Commercial Space Office in April to focus on a broader range of missions, the office is now interested in tapping into the current commercial space market as well as creating new markets, Jeremy Leader, deputy director of the organization, said during the panel.

“It’s not just what we go out and buy commercially, but when we build things where we’re a monopsony or we’re the only customer, we build them in a manner that helps create a future marketplace where we can be one of many customers,” Leader said. “We just have to be very conscious about how we do that and not create barrier after barrier, but ensure that the barrier of entry is as low as possible across as many mission areas as possible.”

Leader pointed to in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing as one area where the Pentagon can be an early customer to a nascent commercial market. By getting those companies up and running now, the Space Force can help lay the groundwork for future on-orbit servicing businesses.

Accelerating space-based capabilities through commercial partnerships is imperative to maintaining space superiority as adversaries like China continue to proliferate their own technologies on orbit, Shawn Phillips, chief of the Air Force Research Lab’s rocket propulsion division, said during the panel.

“We have to really team with industry to deliver a capability now,” Phillips said. “That’s the only success we have right now.”

At the same time, it’s critical to find a balance between adopting capabilities that address current threats and developing future tools, he added. Gateway organizations like AFWERX and SPACEWERX are critical in cultivating technologies that will address mid- and long-term challenges, he said.

Despite the bureaucratic hurdles, Ferguson said all the organizations at Space Command and the Department of the Air Force are aiming to “make the solution as easy as possible.”

“Find the right commercial office — there are a bunch of them,” he said. “We’re all committed to solving this problem of [effective space order of battle and architectures]. And so if we don’t have the solution … we will point you in the right direction to be able to get that taken care of, because this is absolutely something that we can’t do on our own as the department.”

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