The space domain is evolving at unprecedented speed, and the Space Force knows it must adapt just as quickly to preserve decision advantage in an increasingly contested arena.
Read our top four takeaways from our conversation with Colonel Tim Trimailo, director of the Space Force’s Commercial Space Office (COMSO), or listen to the full episode.
Takeaway 1: Military-commercial collaboration is crucial for keeping up with the rapidly evolving threat landscape.
The Space Force established the COMSO to strengthen the relationship between military space operations and the commercial sector, which is proving increasingly critical for staying ahead of adversaries, Trimailo said.
With competitors moving aggressively in space and industry pushing technology forward at a pace the government can’t match, the Space Force will need to draw directly on commercial advances and speed up how it brings new capabilities to the field, said Trimailo.
“Speed is the name of the game today and really across all domains, so space is not the only one that relies on speed. It’s really the delivery of capability to the warfighter as quickly as possible. The reason that in the Space Force and commercial space, we’re getting after speed, is really twofold.”
“Our adversaries are moving faster than ever, and they are rapidly developing and fielding capabilities to deter and even defeat us in the next conflict,” Trimailo continued.
On the flip side, the commercial sector is also moving at a rapid pace, particularly in the past few years with more private capital flowing into commercial companies to field new technologies, he said. The government can’t match the industry’s speed of innovation, which makes collaboration with the private sector paramount for expanding capabilities, Trimailo said.
“We need to leverage commercial space technologies and these great companies that are building these technologies if we want to counter that threat that’s moving that fast,” he said.
Takeaway 2: Requirements, security and operational integration pose barriers for defense contractors – but reform is on the horizon.
There are three basic obstacles that can hold back commercial firms from contributing to defense missions – requirements, security and operational integration, said Trimailo.
“Our requirements traditionally have been too prescriptive. They’ve put our contractors in an industrial base in a box to go build a bespoke prescribed system, and it fundamentally changes the commercial capability that they set out to build in the first place,” Trimailo said. “It also slows us down to deliver that to the war fighter, and it costs us a lot more money than just buying something outright.”
On the security side, many programs are still overclassified, which means the government can’t even brief some companies on the threats or requirements because they lack clearances or facility approvals, said Trimailo.
Industry keeps running into the same loop: “you can’t get a clearance without a contract, and you can’t get a contract without a clearance.”
The third challenge – operational integration – involves actually incorporating the commercial systems acquired into how the military plans and fights, and recent exercises have shown how much work remains to do that well, Trimailo said.
There is progress. New acquisition guidance is reshaping how requirements are written, with an emphasis on minimum viable products and lowering barriers to participation. Classification levels are being revisited, with some programs already made partly unclassified. And Space Command is actively working with commercial partners to test how their capabilities would be used in real operations, he said.
“We’re working across all of those barriers. It just takes a while.”
Takeaway 3: Commercial data could help solve classification bottlenecks and bolster coordination with allies.
Long-standing security rules have made it difficult to share information with partners, especially when the information involves bespoke capabilities and associated outcomes, said Trimailo. Much of what allies need is locked behind classification barriers that slow coordination and limit joint operations, he said.
Commercial space offers a way around those constraints, according to Trimailo.
“If we’re going to go after allied by design as a service and start from the ground up with some of our mission sets, thinking alongside of our allied partners and getting them capabilities to fight with us, commercial space is the perfect avenue to do that because it’s largely unclassified, we can sell it through foreign military sales. We can partner on buying some of these capabilities and not have some of the traditional security issues that we’ve had in the past,” said Trimailo. “So, I think commercial space from the outset is a perfect avenue to get after allied partnerships.”
For example, Joint Commercial Operations cell (JCO) is already providing unclassified commercial data with to allied partners, Trimailo said.
“We can certainly scale that up in the future for different mission sets, but we’re starting to see more and more of it across the enterprise.”
Takeaway 4: AI-driven autonomy will reshape how future space networks operate.
The commercial sector is already far ahead in autonomy, and the next few decades will continue to bring more automation, AI and machine learning – not only individual satellites that can heal themselves… but self-healing networks, said Trimailo.
“You look at how we do operations today and in particular how commercial companies do operations today where there is no more human in the loop … they’ve got ops floors that are running 24/7. We’ve got commercial operators who are running satellite ops from their phone at home if they need to,” he said.
The growth of large constellations is creating a need for space networks that can link, separate and reconnect as needed, with operators able to move between them using multiple types of communications links. “The ability for operators, whether they’re Space Force or on the commercial side, to be able to hop between different networks… is going to be in play,” Trimailo said. Edge computing will become more important as more processing happens on orbit, Trimailo said, adding that he believes data centers in space are imminent.
Remote sensing will expand beyond traditional Earth-focused imaging to cover more regions and more sensing types. “We’re not only looking down at Earth; we’re looking across all domains,” Trimailo said. Future systems will use radar and other advanced sensing methods to “really interrogate and understand what’s happening in space and on Earth,” he said.
For more, Listen to the full episode.
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