The need to reverse aggregation of missions onto single absurdly large satellites, another malady of the government space business, has been highlighted by senior leaders for a generation. The disastrous impacts on seemingly endless cost plus development contracts, mystifyingly lengthy schedule delays, and on-orbit operational risks now being realized with Chinese aggression have been well documented over the years. Active disaggregation, reversing accumulative trend over the last 35 years, has been advocated for by generals and senior civilians alike dating back as early as 2010. But it has never happened.
This month, the Space Force has announced that the time has finally come to begin what has been desperately needed for fourteen years. Many remain cynical, refusing to believe that the most harmful effects of the military space industrial complex will ever be fixed. This writer is not. Much like I knew the leaders who identified this problem years ago, I know today’s leaders are every bit as sincere in wanting to fix this endemic problem.
Reversing this evolved problem cannot happen through a gradual de-evolution. The problem exists because of sustained benign neglect by government strategists. It came because of an incentive structure centered around of cost plus contracting with guaranteed fees piled on top. That, combined with absentee Air Force leadership on addressing this issue, encouraged a Pentagon culture of rewarding perpetual development contracts instead of delivery of satellites that support warfighting commands. As different projects stayed in development for decades, the complexity increased, as did the technical risk. This equated in major schedule delays and cost overruns, the so-called Nunn McCurdy breaches that Cristina Chaplain of the GAO notoriously highlighted in her years as its acquisition director. And as fewer satellites of increasingly larger size were eventually launched, General Hyten’s infamous “fat, juicy targets” became the buzzwords that succinctly captured a serious operational worry that is now a reality.
Even with all the additional funding piled on that further incentivized these overruns, no management attention short of platitudes has ever been given to this problem. To solve this problem, look to the successful recent models that have emerged almost by accident in the space leviathan now called the US Space Force.
A few are classified, but one agency has been very public about how it has largely broken out of the perpetual aggregation doom loop that has plagued everyone else. The Space Development Agency has been a beacon of hope for a new era of acquisition, headed by an agency director obsessed with delivering satellites on orbit in two years under fixed price, competitive contracts. SDA’s focus on schedule certain contracting by leveraging what is available with today’s technology is the essential ingredient, as is managing its customers’ expectations by only promising new capabilities onto future small satellites when available via his spiral development model.
For the Space Force to transform the rest of its missions, it must take up the same set of tasks. First, start with a clean sheet, not attempt a slight detour from a legacy program. The acquisition strategy must be based on what capabilities are needed that can be produced and delivered with today’s hardware technology, not science projects developed for a fictitious future. The team that builds that strategy cannot be the same engineers that created the aggregated mess that exists. Second, competitively award fixed price contracts to deliver mission capability, and on short timelines – the same two year deliveries Frank Calvelli has been demanding. Three, get out of the way while companies are completing the terms of those contracts. The days of government engineers playing armchair design engineer must end. Much like any other product or service the government buys, only pay them when they have successfully completed important milestones like delivery to the launch pad or to orbit. Four, relentlessly focus on what will be available off the shelf that can be included in the next set of fixed price competitions while simultaneously ensuring real warfighting capabilities are captured in the next spirals. The intersection of what capabilities the warfighter actually needs and what the industry can deliver feeds back into step two to repeat. Each of these four steps must be done continuously on rapid, fixed price contracts. No more cost reimbursed gravy trains.
Anything less than this will mean the new rhetoric is nothing more than empty posturing in an attempt to assuage Congress and commercial companies while virtue signaling to the warfighter they are “trying” to do something meaningful.
It has been a privilege to represent almost 60 companies over the last six years helping to lead the new SmallSat industry to fix what is broken in national security space. They, and the thousands of investors, supporters and enthusiasts cheering for them are leading the way for a new space industry. We are every bit as dedicated to national security as our predecessors who helped win the Cold War space race. Our wish is that this new generation of government leadership listens to us even more, not to those who created the aggregated mess to begin with.
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