Space Force plans to award 20 contracts for commercial reserve by 2026

The Space Force expects to award as many as 20 contracts over the next two years for private companies to join its Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, which will create a mechanism for the military to better leverage commercial capabilities both in peacetime and during a conflict.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who provides civilian oversight for the Space Force, approved the Commercial Space Office’s plan for the program, known as CASR, last year. Since then, the office has developed an implementation strategy, which includes writing contractual language for companies that will participate in the reserve.

Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said this week the service plans to award five contracts in 2025 and another 15 in 2026. Those arrangements will detail the level of commercial capability the service needs in peacetime and provide a mechanism and pricing structure that will allow the service to access more capacity during a conflict.

“We’ve got a few things to work through about governance and contracting strategies, but we hope to have our first five contracts in ‘25 and then another 15 contracts or so in ‘26,” he said Wednesday at the National Security Innovation Forum in Washington.

The Space Force’s acquisition arm, Space Systems Command, announced last year it was planning to create a commercial space reserve. The team met with industry in February 2023 and formed a task force soon after to work through legal, policy, contracting and programmatic concerns.

The resulting strategy factors in those concerns as well as feedback from dozens of companies to ensure both the government and industry understand the requirements and risks associated with leaning more heavily on commercial systems during a crisis.

The U.S. will need programs like CASR that provide options for excess capacity as it prepares for the possibility of a future conflict with China or Russia, Guetlein said. He argued that the military’s posture in the past has been to strive for efficiency and perfect solutions when buying new systems, but that approach may not work against a peer adversary.

“What we know about this next fight is it’s not going to be efficient,” he said. “And we’re going to have to get comfortable with being inefficient. That means I need redundant capabilities, excess capacity, proliferation.”

Developing an acquisition and contracting strategy for CASR has also required the Space Force to work through some of the trickier questions about how much it should rely on commercial capabilities during wartime. Those concerns were illuminated in September 2023 when SpaceX founder Elon Musk revealed he had opted not to activate his company’s Starlink communication satellites in certain regions of Ukraine due to fears that Ukraine’s use of the service to launch an attack on Russia would escalate the war. The company provided Starlink terminals to Ukraine in the early days of the conflict and, at the time, was not performing those services through a contract with the U.S. military.

The service is still working through language to include in CASR contracts that addresses these types of “denial of service” scenarios, a Space Force official told reporters this week. The service is also working with the Office of the Secretary of Defense to study options for potentially compensating CASR companies whose space systems are targeted by an adversary.

“As part of CASR and then also part of this study, we are looking into potential wartime insurance,” the official said. “I do feel like that is going to be a policy decision.”

Companies selected for the reserve will participate in Defense Department war games, with the first CASR event slated for February 2025. Those exercises will help the Space Force get a sense of how much capacity is needed in different regions where the military operates.

The service has initial funding from Congress for CASR but is still determining how much funding it will need for the program moving forward, according to Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, head of Space Systems Command.

Speaking Wednesday at a Defense Writers Group event in Washington, Garrant said he is working with SSC program offices to ensure that CASR needs are factored into a program’s acquisition strategy.

“We don’t want these teams to have to be doing everything as an afterthought,” he said. “We want it to be part of the original conversation.”