Report Civil and Commercial Space Bringing the Private Sector to Space PublishedMarch 14, 2025 By Clayton Swope Download PDF A steady cadence of speeches, strategies, reports, and recommendations from senior defense officials and experts extol the virtues of commercial space and urge increased use of commercial space services and products for national security. Yet the rhetoric does not match reality, in spite of meaningful progress made at the Pentagon, as commercial space is not being integrated and used at the scale needed to maximize its contribution to operations. The Department of Defense (DOD) is making it easier to buy commercial space, creating contracts and developing new frameworks, but sorting out how to acquire commercial solutions is only part of the problem. The military needs a process to validate when commercial products and services meet operational requirements. There is also currently no formal service-level guidance on accepting commercial space services into operational use from the Space Force or any other service. Though policymakers recognize the need to modernize requirements processes, there has been much less attention paid to operationalization challenges, including the unique difficulties of operationalizing a commercial service. Unlike commercial products, which mostly fit into current processes, commercial space services are incompatible with Space Force system acceptance procedures for operational capabilities. As such, the military risks fielding commercial services that have neither undergone the vetting as other systems presented to combatant commanders nor the same rigorous process to ensure they fit into the joint force. Full integration and maximized use of commercial space services only happens when commercial services can be operationalized like any other warfighting capability—i.e., included in readiness and sustainment activities, budgeted in operations and maintenance accounts, allocated and presented to combatant commanders for operational use, and considered in future force planning. This white paper was made possible by the support of Amazon’s Project Kuiper.
