Inked by Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman and NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth during the annual GEOINT Symposium in St. Louis, Missouri, the MOA outlines the boundaries between NGA’s operations and the Space Force’s nascent Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking (TacSRT) program — putting an end to a two-year turf war over which organization should purchase commercial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance products and deliver them to combatant commanders.

“What [the agreement] really reflects is the quality of collaboration and every echelon that was necessary to work through these procedures,” Saltzman said in a statement. “I’m excited about this because of what it represents, and that’s really industrial strength collaboration.”

Whitworth first shared news of a drafted MOA with the Space Force in April during an interview with DefenseScoop, noting that moving forward NGA will work closely with the service to ensure the organizations weren’t “paying twice” for commercial ISR.

In a statement, Whitworth called the finalized agreement “a new standard for collaboration.”

While the full text of the MOA was not made public, the document outlines a “governance framework” between the intel agency and the Space Force by detailing the roles and responsibilities each organization has in providing commercial ISR to military leaders, an NGA spokesperson said in a statement to DefenseScoop.

Furthermore, a Space Force spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the MOA requires the service to collaborate with NGA support teams to “ensure data purchases and derived products … conform to consistent, mutually agreed upon National System for Geospatial Intelligence standards when applicable.”

The accord also states the Space Force will “coordinate processes and procedures for dissemination and releasability of products,” and submit a report to NGA each quarter that describes the service’s efforts to minimize overlapping efforts, the spokesperson added.

Disputes between the Space Force and NGA first arose when the service kicked off TacSRT in 2023. The program established a marketplace where combatant commanders can directly buy and rapidly receive “operational planning products” — including unclassified imagery and data analytics — from commercial space providers. 

Although Space Force officials have touted the success of TacSRT and begun efforts to scale it, the program caused some tension between the service and the intelligence community.

Under current Pentagon-IC policies, NGA holds responsibility for acquiring commercial ISR products and determining who across the government receives them. At the same time, the National Reconnaissance Office is tasked with buying commercial remote sensing imaging and sharing it across the department and intelligence community.

Space Force leaders have claimed that TacSRT is not meant to step on the toes of NGA and NRO, but instead serve as a complement to the intelligence community’s work.

During a hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Saltzman said the program “fills a niche where you have unclassified capabilities that can get quickly into planners’ hands.”

Now that the Space Force has finalized an agreement with NGA, the service is expected to also reach a similar arrangement with the NRO.

When asked by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., about progress on the Space Force’s work with the intelligence agencies on Tuesday, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink emphasized that foundations for collaboration have been laid — but “the devil’s in the details.”

“We’re just starting to feel good now and starting to do experimentation with [TacSRT] now, using tools to allow that to happen,” Meink said. “There’s obviously still a lot of work to go, but I think there’s been great progress made, and the fact that we already have systems that we can start doing testing work and start doing exercise will be critically important.”

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Col. Rich Kniseley, director of the Commercial Space Office (COMSO), told reporters Thursday that the service will stand up CASR pilots across three mission areas in 2025. One program will focus on small launch and is anticipated to kick off before the end of fiscal 2025, while the other two — satellite communications, and tactical surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking — are expected to be ready by December, Kniseley said.

The program’s growth comes just two years after the Space Force first conceived it as its own version of the Air Force’s Civil Reserve Air Fleet. Under CASR, the service can contract space-based services from commercial vendors during peacetime, which could then be used to augment and support military operations in the event of crisis or conflict.

In March, the Space Force launched CASR’s pilot phase when it awarded contracts to four commercial vendors to provide space domain awareness capabilities. The agreements cover an initial three-month period of performance and include peacetime and pre-priced surge capabilities, as well as the ability to conduct wargames with vendors, Kniseley said.

“What that allowed us to do is to start exercising some of the processes while we are still working in the background with some of the more challenging aspects of CASR, whether that’s prioritizing capabilities for US government use [or] denial of service,” he said during a media roundtable at the annual Space Symposium.

For the small launch pilot, the office will look to commercial launch providers already part of the Space Force’s Orbital Services Program-4 (OSP-4) program, which focuses on fast-turnaround launches of small payloads, Kniseley said. COMSO is partnering with Space Systems Command’s Assured Access to Space (AATS) directorate and the Space Safari program office for the pilot.

“It’s formulating a framework around launch, but small launch specifically,” Kniseley said. “Think of a call-up at a given point and some of the ongoing pieces. It will be a tabletop exercise more than anything, instead of an operational call.”

The pilot will align closely with the Space Force’s ongoing Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) initiative that aims to improve the service’s ability to respond to new threats on-orbit, such as by reducing time taken to launch payloads or prepositioning assets in space, Kniseley said.

He added that while the small-launch effort isn’t quite ready to serve as a mechanism for TacRS, the program’s managers are learning from COMSO’s pilot — including supply chain management and how it’s building the contracts to “surge and scale.”

Similarly, COMSO is looking to leverage the pool of vendors under the Space Force’s larger Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking (TacSRT) program for its upcoming surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking pilot, Kniseley said.

Broadly, the service’s TacSRT effort allows combatant commanders to quickly and directly purchase unclassified data from imagery and sensors collected by commercial satellites — but COMSO’s pilot will be framed through the CASR concept.

“What if we were to put a company on to provide X number of products during peacetime? If I want to scale that up, and as things go on and I’m going to be getting more and more requirements from the combatant commands — that’s the type of model and framework I’m seeing for that,” he said.

And while Kniseley didn’t provide specifics for the service’s SATCOM pilot plans, he said the mission area was the focus for the office’s first CASR wargame completed recently. The event was critical, as it gave COMSO a slew of action items and topics it needs to work on with commercial vendors as it builds out the program.

During the wargame, Kniseley exercised a forceful activation of CASR — representing a real-life scenario in which industry would be required to turn off capabilities to other customers to fully support U.S. military operations. The event allowed companies to coordinate together, while also giving them the opportunity to think about how they would work with their investors and other customers.

“I viewed that as a complete success because it wasn’t 100% successful,” Kniseley noted. “What I wanted to do was have nothing but commercial capability or vendors in there, and I wanted to start exercising the framework for CASR. I really wanted to key in on some of the aspects that we have questions on, and to have that dialog back and forth.”

As COMSO prepares to launch the three new pilot programs, the office is also conducting a study with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and the legal community on financial protection options for CASR vendors, Kniseley said. The results of the study should be released in the next few months to provide guidance on how the office plans to proceed, he added.

Overall, Kniseley said his office’s efforts to integrate commercial capabilities on a larger scale have garnered positive support from Congress. Before receiving $40 million in funds from the yearlong continuing resolution passed in March, lawmakers added $50 million to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for commercial space services, which was critical to getting COMSO initiatives like CASR off the ground.

He also pointed to President Donald Trump’s recent executive order calling for prioritization of commercial capabilities within the Defense Department as validation for COMSO’s work.

“[When] I look at the executive order, I look at it more as an exclamation point on a lot of the things that we’re doing,” he said. “But it will require additional budget. It will also require additional resources, and that usually means people, as well.”

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Initiated as a pilot effort in 2023, TacSRT established a marketplace where CoComs can directly purchase commercial imagery and related data analytics. In order to expand the program, the Space Force received an additional $40 million in funding as part of the continuing resolution passed by Congress in March. 

“The addition of this money represents a congressional vote of confidence in our efforts to tap into the commercial space market for the collective good,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Wednesday during his keynote address at the annual Space Symposium.

Saltzman and other service leaders have touted the success of TacSRT in recent months, especially the initiative’s ability to rapidly deliver critical information to warfighters. Through the program’s Global Data Marketplace, combatant commands can put in requests for “operational planning products” that include unclassified data from imagery and sensors collected by commercial space vendors. 

Col. Rob Davis, program executive officer for space sensing at Space Systems Command, told reporters Wednesday that TacSRT data is primarily being used to support humanitarian operations and monitoring of illegal fishing around the world. 

And while the pilot version of TacSRT initially supported U.S. Africa Command, leaders at other combatant commands are leveraging the program’s marketplace as well. For example, U.S. Central Command also purchased commercial data analytics during construction of the Joint-Logistics-Over-the-Shore pier in Gaza, and TacSRT provided U.S. Southern Command with real-time tracking of wildfires in South America, according to the Space Force.

As it looks to scale TacSRT, the service is still figuring out the best ways to operationalize the program, Davis said.

In the TacSRT Tools Applications and Processing Lab, “we are doing the development of additional techniques, partnering with industry, partnering with [Space Force] component field commands … to develop new tools that we can then operationalize, as well,” Davis said during a media roundtable. “We continue, in that more developmental space, to do ad hoc support through that experimental space to answer questions that combatant commands have.”

With plans to expand TacSRT, the Space Force is also working with the intelligence community — including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office — to delineate roles and responsibilities for purchasing commercial imagery. 

Under current Pentagon-IC policies, NGA is responsible for buying analytical models and ISR products from commercial providers, as well as determining who across the government receives the packaged data. At the same time, the NRO is tasked with acquiring imagery from commercial remote sensing satellites and disseminating it across the Pentagon and intelligence community. 

However, the Space Force’s TacSRT pilot caused some tension between the service and intelligence agencies — with some concerned that the Space Force’s acquisition and distribution of space-based commercial imagery is a duplication of NGA’s and NRO’s work. 

But after years of back and forth, NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth told DefenseScoop in an interview that the agency and the Space Force have drafted a “memorandum of agreement” over the relationship between NGA and TacSRT. The service is also finalizing a similar agreement with the NRO, according to a report from Breaking Defense.

Whitworth explained that in his role as functional manager for geospatial intelligence, he is charged with oversight of both the Defense Department’s and intelligence community’s acquisition of space-based ISR from commercial satellites. To that end, his responsibility moving forward will be reporting on the use of commercial imagery in warfighting — including via TacSRT — to lawmakers while also involving the Space Force, he said.

“This fits beautifully into being that integrator, and Congress feels the same way from a stewardship perspective,” Whitworth said. “So getting to that issue [of] we’re not paying twice, keeping that denominator involving TacSRT officially in our world and vice-versa is healthy.”

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Established as a pathfinder program earlier this year, the TacSRT pilot allows the Space Force to purchase “operational planning products” from commercial industry that includes unclassified space-based imagery of specific regions and subsequent analysis of them. The pilot initially focused on U.S. Africa Command and has supported a number of operations since it began — including the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Air Base 201 in Niger, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Tuesday during AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.

“The goal was to complement the exquisite work done by the intelligence community with unclassified operational planning products delivered on tactically relevant timelines,” Saltzman said during his keynote speech. “It was a pathfinder, with the idea being that we could expand the program if it proved to be value added, and that’s exactly what it did.”

Saltzman said the average time it took for operators to receive operational planning products was about three-and-a-half hours after collection, noting that the timeline had decreased to 90 minutes towards the end of the withdrawal.

Now that it has proved TacSRT’s mechanisms work on relevant timelines, the Space Force is looking to expand the pilot to other combatant commands — and it needs more funding to do so, Saltzman noted.

“As we go to maybe more full expansion, it’s about how much money do we want to put into what we’re calling the ‘commercial marketplace,’ which allows our Commercial Services Office to purchase these products from commercial providers,” Saltzman told reporters during a media roundtable. “So, the next step is just getting more money so we can expand that to other commands.”

Through the TacSRT marketplace, the U.S. military can ask commercial providers to provide operational planning products of a specific region. The Space Force reprogrammed $25 million in its fiscal 2025 budget request to fund the pilot’s architecture and ability to purchase information packets, according to budget documents.

Saltzman didn’t provide any additional information as to how much funding would be needed to expand the TacSRT pilot, nor which areas of operation it would expand to.

He emphasized that the Space Force isn’t buying unclassified imagery alone, but also detailed analysis of the images.

“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 missing? Is there a huge parking lot, do we see people milling around?’ We simply ask the question, and commercial industry provides us with products that try to help us answer the question,” Saltzman said.

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