One of the JCO's new missions will be gathering what the Space Force calls tactical surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking data from commercial remote sensing satellite operators, said JCO head Barbara Golf.
Orbital Insight's contract, worth up to $2 million, is focused on providing data and analysis about potentially threatening maritime activity in the Indo-Pacific.
The Sixth Domain is not defined by geography. It’s a new kind of conflict in which autonomy and networked systems allow thousand-dollar consumer electronics to destroy multi-million-dollar conventional weapons systems.
Lt. Gen. David Miller, head of Space Operations Command, said the ongoing tussle with the Intelligence Community is like when dogs first meet in a dog park. "The dogs like spend five minutes sniffing each other's butts. That's the phase I think we're in. We just need to get off that," he said.
More than a dozen sources tell Breaking Defense that tensions between the NGA and Space Force are rising on commercial ISR, with White House officials watching closely.
"We are clearly moving away from airborne ISR assets and moving into space. It's the absolute right thing to do from a resiliency and sustainability perspective," Air Force space acquisition czar Frank Calvelli said.
Space Systems Command's new Commercial Space Marketplace for Innovation and Collaboration (COSMIC) facility in Chantilly, Virg., will serve as the "physical headquarters" for the SSC Commercial Space Office.
Government can’t stop to update systems, so modernization has to happen without interruptions.
"The good news about this approach is this really fits my priority of speed, speed and speed," Frank Calvelli, space acquisition czar at the Department of the Air Force, said of the plan to have NRO take the lead with Space Force oversight and some funding.
"As an agency, we've been pretty clear that there really isn't a material difference ... between tactical ISR or strategic ISR. It's just ISR. It's taking pictures from space," said Pete Muend, NRO's director of commercial operations.
Another idea, said SSC's Col. Dennis Birchenough, is for SSC to serve as a kind of "matchmaker" to pair ISR sensor developers with commercial operators with capacity to carry payloads extraneous to their own capabilities.
The subcommittee is "encouraging the use of commercially available data" to help fill ISR gaps identified by military commanders, but there's also has concerns about overlap in acquisition of commercial ISR.
Breaking Defense Europe will launch May 4 with Tim Martin and Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo as co-editors.
"There is no 911 ... for us to call to get help," said J.R. Riordan, chief revenue officer at BlackSky.
Space Force is not a voting member of the new(ish) IC Commercial Space Council to improve coordination on commercial space policy -- but NRO and NGA are.
SWAC is not duplicating the functions of the joint DoD-IC Space Security and Defense Program, argues Gen. DT Thompson.