4 Takeaways: Why Future Space Architectures Must Evolve Beyond Today’s Assumptions

Space missions are entering what Dr. David Voss calls the third era of space, a period defined by hybrid architectures, diverse phenomenologies and increased reliance on commercial and allied partners. Yet many of the tools and assumptions that shaped earlier eras were not designed for this level of complexity, creating challenges for how government and industry plan, analyze and acquire future capabilities.

Read our top four takeaways from our conversation with SWAC’s Dr. David Voss, or listen to the full episode.

Takeaway 1: We’ve entered a new era of space – one that demands new tools and new thinking.

The Space Warfighting Analysis Center was created to help the Space Force determine where to invest across diverse mission areas, said Dr. Voss on the podcast.

Much of the historical analysis assumed that the goal was identifying the most optimal single architecture for the joint force, Voss said. But modern missions require assessing when to use military versus commercial services, how to incorporate international partners and how to compare entirely different phenomenologies.

“We had to really create a set of tools and frameworks to be able to leverage those capabilities,” Voss said. “Our organization was really established to do that type of cross-capability analysis in a particular mission area and then, as we’re really growing, to be able to provide that analysis across mission areas as well within a variety of capabilities that go together.”

Takeaway 2: SmallSats are advancing, but operational maturity still lags.

SmallSats have progressed from technology demonstrations to meaningful operational contributions, Voss said. He pointed to improved gap times, higher resolution and new phenomenologies such as SAR, RF services and direct‑to‑device communications. “There’s a lot of really excellent examples of how the SmallSat community is delivering meaningful capability,” he said.

But maturity in manufacturing remains a challenge, Voss noted. Many missions still operate more like a sequence of disconnected demos than sustained operational systems. “We launch a lot of capability, a lot of tech demos,” he said. “How do we migrate that into the ability to now provide operational capability?” Persistent connection gaps still require satellites to operate autonomously, a limitation that could change if future architectures provide more consistent links, Voss said.

Takeaway 3: Resilience means graceful degradation – not perfection – and must span both space and ground segments.

Resilience is often discussed in broad terms, but Voss emphasized that the real question is whether a system can deliver useful capability while being disrupted. “Are you still able to deliver a capability that the user needs as you’re being affected by either natural or non‑natural causes?” he said. Homogeneous architectures tend to fail all at once, leaving users with an abrupt transition from working to not working.

Hybrid architectures, by contrast, allow for graceful degradation across reversible interference, irreversible interference, kinetic threats, nuclear threats and natural disruptions, Voss said. He described SWAC’s modeling as operating inside a “cube of possibility space,” where systems are assessed on how they degrade across multiple orthogonal threat vectors. He also argued that the community should practice for disruption rather than assume systems will always function normally. “We really should be practicing for disruption in addition to designing for it,” he said.

Takeaway 4: Effective architectures require the right standards, adaptable ground systems, and the capacity to learn rapidly.

Open standards are becoming increasingly important for coalition operations, but they must be tied to real technical interfaces rather than imposed universally, Voss said, emphasizing that standards must reflect actual phenomenology and architectural needs.

The danger, he noted, is becoming critically dependent on a single standard that does not match mission behavior.

“You don’t typically want one to, once again, rule them all,” Voss said. “And so, knowing the right standard for the right portions of the information mobility process is really important.”

Government wants to participate in standards development but is not always positioned to write highly technical standards, Voss noted. He said the community must build an ecosystem with the equivalent of highways, boulevards and rural roads, matching standards to both physical and networking layers rather than forcing uniformity.

Speed also shapes future architectures, Voss said. Physical hardware deployment slows missions, while software‑defined networks enable rapid learning and faster feedback into operations. Multiple cloud and constellation underlays connected at exchange points allow flexible overlays that can evolve quickly. “The goal is not to fail fast,” he said. “The goal is to learn fast.”

For more, listen to the full episode.