Roles and Limits of Commercial Space in National Security

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Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

All right. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us for this panel. I’m Charles Galbreath, Director and Senior Resident Fellow at the Mitchell Institute Space Power Advantage Center of Excellence. And again, welcome to our panel on the roles and limits of commercial space in national security.

So if you haven’t heard, space is vital to our national security. It is an imperative that we must have a robust space architecture to meet the needs of the joint force and joint operations, and withstand increasing challenges to our space superiority. As our demands on space capability have grown, so too has the commercial space market. No longer the sole purview of nations, today, private corporations and startups offer opportunities for the Space Force to leverage private capital and independent research and development for space capabilities and services. The Space Force has embraced this, and has explicitly stated it is pursuing a hybrid design for its architecture and its Objective Force 2040.

Commercial solutions, while beneficial in many ways, are not without limitations. The important job for all of us is to determine the right application for the right missions at the right times. So to discuss this important topic, it’s my pleasure to introduce our four expert panelists. First, I’d like to introduce Dr. GP Sandhoo, the director of the Space Development Agency and the program acquisition executive for Missile Warning and Missile Tracking. Joining him is Colonel Aaron Stevenson, Deputy Director, Commercial Space Office, Space Systems Command. And then from the industry, we have Greg Caiceda-

Greg Caicedo:

Caicedo.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Caicedo. Sorry about that, Senior Vice President at Kratos Federal. And rounding out our panel, it’s my pleasure to introduce Tom McCormick, the vice president and general manager of National Security Space at Lockheed Martin. Gentlemen, thank you all for joining us today.

So before we go into too much detail, I’d really like to start with some basic definitions. So from a government perspective, how do you define commercial? Dr. Sandhoo, you want to kick us off here? And then Colonel Stevenson, if you mind.

Dr. Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo:

Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having us and the opportunity. So how you define commercial is actually, it’s critical to understand, because it can mean so many things to so many people. At one level, everything’s commercial, right? There’s commercial services, there’s commercial, just capability, you can just buy the service, or you can just buy the system, or you can turnkey solutions.

I’d like to define how we have tried to define commercial at Space Development Agency, and that is through the aperture of speed. So kind of three things that, and again, if you’re trying to do things at speed, and which has been kind of a theme for the last seven years for us, and now across the department, you have to have the maturity of what you’re trying to buy. You have to have the scalability of what you’re trying to buy, and you have to have hot production lines to be able to do what you buy.

So when we look at that from that perspective, now the mission area specific things may not be commercial, right? Missile warning sensor may or may not be commercial, but the buses, the production lines, the components, the commodity stuff that should be there, that’s commercial. Being able to manufacture those can be commercial, but the payload-specific things you may have to develop. I kind of look at from a, where do you lead? Where do you leverage? Where do you let go of things? So let go of the things you can buy as a service commercially, but lead is where you perform the mission-specific things you lead, and you leverage a commercial infrastructure and commercial capacity and capability that’s out there to build the systems. That’s how I would define commercial for us.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Thank you. Colonel Stevenson?

Col. Aaron T. Stevenson:

Yeah, thank you. And again, thank you for having us here. So Commercial Space Office, obviously we had to define commercial. What does that mean to us, and how does that kind of relate to what we’re talking about here today? We kind of define it as a spectrum, just as Dr. Sandhoo talked about. There’s commercial services on one end of the spectrum, and then there’s the other end of the spectrum, which is you may be making an IRAD investment in a company that has a very specific capability, that you need a component or something like that.

So there can be COTS, commercial off the shelf products, but one of the big things that we really focus on is the commercial market, because a lot of times there’s no commercial market for something, and the government is the anchor tenant. And so is that really a commercial market?

Well, maybe, in some cases, but sometimes it takes a government tenant or a government anchor to anchor a capability to propel a commercial market, and we’ve seen that in some cases. And so we also look at the commercial market, the health of that commercial market. Is that something where it truly is something commercial that we could just buy off the shelf as a service? Or do we need to really maybe think about this as the government anchoring this particular capability, at least initially, so that we get some more capability out to the broader enterprise?

So a commercial market is a big focus, as well as the commercial spectrum. So if something’s ready to purchase today, and there’s already a commercial market, that’s awesome. We can just go and buy it off the shelf. But there’s this whole gray area where there’s COTS, commercial off the shelf technology that we may want to use in our DOD systems, and those we want to buy and we want to be able to use.

But it goes kind of back to that industrial base, commercial market. Is there a commercial market there that’s going to prop that up and be able to be viable as well? We also are concerned about that, because if there’s no commercial market, that industrial base goes away, and that’s a critical component that’s also just as important to us.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Yeah. So thank you both. It sounds like there’s a range, from services and capabilities that you can purchase, all the way to components and technologies. And as the government, you need to understand when’s the right time to buy, and when’s the right time to lead and integrate. So thank you for that.

So from an industry perspective, how do you see the rapid growth of commercial sector and the current focus on integrating commercial space? Mr. Caicedo, could you kick us off please? I think it’ll turn on by itself.

Greg Caicedo:

I think I got it. Thanks. So from my perspective, the commercial market is, just to give you a little bit of my background, is I work for Kratos, which is kind of a hybrid. We have a whole product capability. We sell both into the commercial market, into the international market, as well as into the federal market.

So we’ve kind of got this interesting perspective in terms of how do we come at the market from a commercial standpoint, whether we’re selling to a federal customer or to an international geo owner-operator. And so having that perspective, we look at the change that’s happened, probably over the last five years, as a significant opportunity. So when we look at the change of pace, I mean, from an industry standpoint, we’re being much more flexible, much more dynamic in terms of responding to the threat. There’s a host of opportunities here to be able to support the government in ways that they hadn’t before, just because of the amount of investment that is currently going into capabilities and systems, as well as commercial services.

From a government perspective, I think the change is ongoing. We’re standing up organizations like the COMSO. Policy is changing. We’re seeing actual commercial emphasis from the senior leadership across the board. So all of those changes are really positive.

The challenge is, though, right now from an industry perspective, is can the government keep up with it? Can they change acquisition policy quick enough to handle the dynamic capabilities that exist? Our funding policies, we look at the POM cycle and it takes two to three years to fund for something that may not be relevant in two to three years from now. So how are we able to keep up with that from a government perspective? On the industry side, the challenge is the investment that’s being made from a lot of the corporate folks that need kind of liquidity events in two to three years. And that may be a system or a capability that may not exist if it’s not properly funded over the long term.

So there’s a lot of dynamic change and dynamic things that are happening that are creating both opportunity, but also creating a need for a partnership between the government and industry, to make sure that commercial capabilities continue to exist and are funded not only in the near term for the system, but also from a sustainability and maintenance standpoint.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Thank you. Mr. McCormick?

Tom McCormick:

Yeah. Hey, first, thanks Charles for having us here and the opportunity with the AFA. Thank you so much. And I’d like to thank Greg. Greg’s one of my commercial partners on programs like SBIRS, and happy that we’ve joined forces together in the past. This is very good.

I guess from a Lockheed Martin perspective, guys, we’re all in. And I’m hoping, I’m going to say some surprising things today because it’s fun to say surprising things, but I really do. We’re very bullish on the use of commercial technology. As a large mission prime integrator, we’re ruthless and unapologetic about seeking out and grabbing the best capabilities we can find, from all great companies out there. So we’re very excited about the huge investment that’s going on in the commercial industry, and taking that capability and integrating it rapidly into end-to-end mission solutions to deliver for all these outstanding challenges that we have is what we’re all about.

And so again, we’re very excited. We see the opportunity and commercial capabilities as an enabler, to help us transform for speed and scale. We think it’s a great partnership. We can help bring these upcoming companies in to the defense industrial base, given our engagement of the customer, and our infrastructure and know how to get them involved in defense activities.

So it’s really a great opportunity. We also spend a lot of time investing significant resources into finding early technologies that are very promising, and help guiding them toward mission applications we care about. A lot of resources and money there through our LM Ventures company. We also work to establish very strong partnerships with existing big tech companies out there that have invested vast amount of money that we really need to, as we’re talking about, leverage to the hilt, to the good of the government and our country’s national security needs.

Now I will say also that we need to be very deliberate. We’ve got lessons learned around the challenge of integrating commercial capabilities into these hybrid architectures, technical discipline, lessons around how to do system integration discipline that’s really important, and how we share data with the commercial entities and bring them along to make them successful.

But again, we’re looking for any and all great capabilities to help drive mission capability quicker, to address the threats, and more efficiently. And so we’re always canvassing, we’re investing where it makes sense, and then we’re partnering to really leverage the capability of this incredible investment in commercial that we’re all seeing happening.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Great. Well, since you brought up lessons learned, let’s pivot to that. So the adoption of commercial solutions isn’t really new to the Space Force. They’ve been doing it for several years now. And recent operations in Ukraine, and Venezuela, and Iran have all demonstrated the utility of space capabilities, including commercial. So can each of you highlight a lesson learned from either your experience dealing with commercial systems, or integrating them, or that you’ve seen? Colonel Stevenson, can you kick us off, please? And we’ll work our way.

Col. Aaron T. Stevenson:

Yeah, sure. So one of the big lessons we’ve learned is just understanding the operational use case and the business case right off the bat. So how is this commercial system going to be used? Because when you try to go dual use, you try to use it and integrate it into a DOD ecosystem, there’s all sorts of things that a company may have to worry about. Cyber controls being one of those, as an example, or you may have to worry about, now I’ve got to get clearances to be a part of this exercise or this war game, because they’re operating at a classified level, some level of classification.

And so we’ve seen challenges there. We’ve also seen crypto become important and critical for companies, right? We talked about data sharing. Sometimes to be able to share data, you’ve got to be able to have the right connections and the right components between those connections and encryption levels.

So a big thing is understanding the operational use case. And I think we’ve really been trying to do that in the Commercial Space Office with something we call CASR, the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve. And what that’s really focused on is getting companies cleared and getting them into war games and exercises. And we’ve used other best practices like DARPA BRIDGES, for example, with FCLs and DD 254s. But there’s DOD-specific things, like ATOs, ATTs. I mean, you could go down the list. There’s DOD-specific things, and we have to really understand that operational use case, is our lesson learned, so that we can actually employ it correctly and be able to understand all the things that this commercial company’s going to have to deal with when they integrate into the DOW ecosystem.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Okay. Mr. Caicedo?

Greg Caicedo:

Yeah, I’ll just add onto that. One of the things that the DOD has put in place is the commercial integration cell, and we’re a member of the commercial integration cell. That’s been, I think, a real benefit to a lot of small companies that don’t have FCLs or clearances. And so being able to collaborate, participate in exercises, have access to classified information that you wouldn’t normally, has been, I think, a real benefit to a lot of companies, especially some of the commercial companies that don’t normally play in that world.

The other lesson learned I’ll highlight is we have a global sensor network that does RF collection, and we support a number of both DOW and IC organizations with this capability. And by having something like that, it’s enabled us to collect information or data and provide that, not even at an unclassified level, but a not classified level, so that there’s no restrictions on us being able to share that with allies.

And so one of the things that I think that the government learned about having capabilities coming from the commercial side is being able to leverage those to support allied missions and other organizations. And during when the Ukraine-Russia war kicked off, we were there to support that ongoing activity. So I think getting an understanding of how commercial can actually help support and provide additional capabilities during conflict is an ongoing lesson learned.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Great. Go ahead.

Tom McCormick:

Yeah. I’d like to add, we’ve seen positive end challenges. I think on the positive side, we’ve learned that there’s capabilities at all levels to integrate, from parts, to subsystems, to big systems, services. Even at the parts level, we’ve taken automotive high roll parts and upscreened those. And we have some of those chips sitting in our next gen OPIR satellites in Sunnyvale, California right now. We’ll be launching soon.

On the challenges side, I think there’s claims about commercial capabilities that you have to vet and make sure are true. Some of these components are coming at us as black boxes. When we’re developing stuff, we’re used to having the atomic level detail understanding as we integrate these things in, but we’re just not going to have that luxury with a lot of the commercial capabilities.

So you really have to understand the behavior of these things as you’re integrating them into your system context, particularly in cases like off-nominal scenarios, and how they’re really going to operate, and are they really up to the task of the environmental challenges that we’re going to put them through? So these are really important things, lessons where it’s really about verifying the claims and making sure you understand the behaviors.

Another thing is system integration, which I think system integration as a craft is underappreciated, maybe misunderstood, but even when you’re integrating big homogeneous systems with things you understand very well, it’s a very hard job. Now, when you do that for heterogeneous architectures with components you don’t know as well, it’s even harder. So I think the craft of system integration and really doing that well is something we all need to get religion around as a community, because we’re not doing it as good as we need to.

There’s basic principles around driving an integration strategy upfront as you’re starting early engineering, and setting up good decisions around keeping things simple, open system architectures, standard interfaces, aggressive, hands-on integration in the lab as early as you can to vet interfaces and functional capabilities. These are really things that we need to focus on to make, not to shy away from commercial, but to make it truly successful as we leverage its full potential.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Dr. Sandhoo?

Dr. Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo:

Yeah, from at least as a government acquisition entity, what we are counting on is them to leverage the commercial entities, right? We’re not trying to prescribe things at a system or a component level. If Tom can go upscale the auto parts to deliver a system that meets the needs, that’s totally fine. So that’s what we have kind of backed away from that set of requirements. We have gone to capability-based systems. So as we do that, that gives them the flexibility to go build the system the most efficiently as possible and use all of it. So that’s kind of our approach to that.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Okay. Very good.

Dr. Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo:

To get that done.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

So thank you all for that. The commercial space sector is exploding in the United States, which is great news, but the Space Force must also continue to cultivate that growth to ensure it gets what it needs to meet war fighter demands. So what additional steps can the Space Force take as well as industry to ensure that the commercial sector is growing in the right areas to meet the needs of the Space Force? Mr. McCormick, would you mind kicking us off?

Tom McCormick:

Yeah, I’ll start. This is kind of near and dear to our heart. So we don’t just look to purchase and integrate commercial technologies. We really search out where opportunities exist to help new promising technologies come along. Our LM Ventures company was formed, it’s our strategic investment arm of Lockheed Martin. It was formed in 2007 with a hundred million dollar fund to go invest in commercial startups. It’s now grown to a billion dollar fund. We have a portfolio of 120 companies that we invest in in the US and globally, and that’s really borne a lot of fruit for us.

A good example for GP’s business is the Terran Orbital company that we invested in through LM Ventures. And now we are very reliant on them with their small stack capability, modular scalable architecture, commercial product line that’s helped us really integrate quickly, and really transform to be moving at a much higher rate to delivery of capability at scale for these proliferated architectures.

That’s a really good example. There’s another company called Hawkeye 360 that we’ve invested in for commercial ISR. We’ve recently demonstrated the integration of their capability in the Valiant Shield exercise that was run, where they’re providing tracking data across joint operations, and an integrated operational environment. A lot of other examples, nuclear technologies, quantum technologies, a lot of IA investment. These are all things that we’re doing to really kind of provoke that technology to be ready for our mission applications.

Greg Caicedo:

Just to add onto that and talk about hybrid architectures, I think one of the things that would help move the ball forward is being able to have an integrated architecture that doesn’t think of commercial as kind of a separate entity, where you’re actually taking commercial capabilities and integrating them into operations. Right now it feels like there’s a lot of, “Hey, we did this really cool prototype. We did this really neat demonstration, and eventually we’ll get to integrated operations.”

But I think right now, doing the exercises, participating, especially from a services standpoint, and being able to pull those in so that they’re actually part of the operational solution and become part of that integrated architecture is going to be a big key to moving commercial into an operational capacity, as opposed to just a kind of nice to have.

Col. Aaron T. Stevenson:

Yeah. So one of the big things we’ve worked with, and I mentioned CASR as one example, but is exactly that. How do we do that? You mentioned the CIC, we’re very tightly connected with the Commercial Integration Cell as well. They’re the classified version of the Joint Commercial Operation cell, but bottom line, it’s getting those things into OPLANs and things like that so that they’re actually able to be used during an actual contingency, or a conflict, or whatever the case is, and you’re 100% right.

One of the other things we’ve been really trying to do, speaking of investments, is STRATFI/TACFI program, strategic breakthroughs. We’ve been really bullish on that, because that’s been a tremendous opportunity where you have commercial capabilities being delivered by private capital coming in. So they see that as a demand signal, and then that gives more capital for them to be able to raise through these series A and et cetera raise rounds.

So we’re using STRATFI/TACFI vehicles. We also work with In-Q-Tel and a lot of other different organizations. We work with the PAEs also, expressly in certain mission areas, to see if there’s opportunity for commercial services. Sometimes it can be additional requirements, so it doesn’t necessarily have to meet the exquisite requirements. It can meet some of those other outside use cases, because sometimes you have a stack of 3000 requests that come in, and you can only do 10% of those requests. Hey, if we could do 50% of those requests, that’s a lot better than 10%. So we’re always looking at opportunities where commercial can fill in the gaps, and a lot of times that’s where commercial comes in really well.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Okay, great.

Dr. Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo:

So I think what you asked about what is our government’s role in making sure that we can keep that going, which goes back to three things that we started, at least we started with: maturity, speed, scale. A constant demand signal. If you want a high production line, you have to have a demand signal. If you want to be able to iterate on design, you can do iteration, too, is you can iterate to go faster, you can iterate to get better.

So when the maturity comes into it, that means the more you build, the more you do, the better you get at it. That’s kind of the speed side of things. The iterate to get better is kind of the foundation of at least our pLEO SDA approach, which is to the tranche model of constantly, every two years, you do this on standard tranche model that allows you to freeze the requirements and deliver on that capability, and then you capture the next one.

So those are the kind of things that would, if you want to keep commercial growth going, you have to have the constant demand signal, you have to have iteration for the maturity and for the speed.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Very good. Very good. So clearly commercial players can provide a wide range of unique capabilities that the Space Force can leverage. However, at least on the surface, it would appear that maybe not all missions that the Space Force does, and certainly we learned about a new mission yesterday, might not be appropriate for commercial solutions. Years ago, I wouldn’t have thought missile warning was a good fit for commercial, but Dr. Sandhoo, that’s kind of your staple for you. So can each of you give me kind of a yes or no of, are there missions that aren’t appropriate for commercial solutions?

Dr. Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo:

I don’t think that we should have a preconceived notion of what’s appropriate for missile warning. So if you look at the missile warning system that we are doing from LEO, we have done it from GEO for a long, long time, here for a long, long time. Well, why did we have to go to LEO? Because the threat evolved, and we could not detect these things from where we were. So the innovation in the pLEO, PWSA, SD approach wasn’t new sensors. It was the ability to bring those sensors down to LEO. Well, when you do that, there’s a couple of additional problems that come into the picture, right? How do you do the network orchestration of the satellites? How do you connect all of them? How do you move the data, optical cross-links? Those are all technical solutions to those kind of things.

But the sensor itself was not necessarily a new thing. It was how we applied it. And that’s what we try to leverage the … Once we realized that, we’re going to need large number of satellites. You turn to commercial innovation for those kind of things. But there certainly is, from a missile warning, mission perspective, environmental monitoring and all this stuff, those sensors are not too far off missile warning. With the right processing, it could be the same aperture.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Interesting.

Dr. Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo:

I mean, there’s also, if you want to have the constellation, which are being done to do fire monitoring and those kind of things, those systems are pretty much very similar to that from a commercial perspective. So I think there’s an application to that, and vice versa, that it’s not that far off.

Now, when you get into the missile defense side, you’re right, there’s not a whole lot there. So to guide the weapon onto a target, that’s pretty much it. So that’s kind of where we have to lead, but we can certainly leverage stuff that’s being done in environmental monitoring or firefighting, and those kind of things from space from a sensor perspective. But the processing and what you do with the data will be different. That’ll be specific to a military mission.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Anybody else want to jump on what missions are good or not good for commercial?

Tom McCormick:

Yeah. I don’t know if it’s a black and white kind of thing there, Charles. I really do think there’s, like GP’s saying, there’s application of these technologies. I take the comms mission area. I mean, the government is very significantly invested in use of commercial for comms, but there’s also aspects of comms, like for nuclear command and control, comms to disadvantaged users, where the commercial technology may not be there right now to support those missions, in their really tough environments, with truly assured capabilities that the government can absolutely count.

I think architecturally we’re going to come up with solutions to bring more of the commercial in in those cases over time, and the technology will evolve, but it’s both. We’re completely relying on commercial as a country in a lot of ways for these comm missions. And in other places, government’s still developing capabilities that are not quite there from a commercial perspective.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Okay. Go ahead.

Col. Aaron T. Stevenson:

This’ll be really quick. I think it boils down to use cases, which was my original one. It really is a use case, and I think that’s where we’re all kind of staying up here. And so I wouldn’t say a specific mission area necessarily. I think it really boils down to, back to that example I just gave, of if I can get, like 10% of those requests might be exquisite requests that I need a government system to be able to meet, because that’s the only thing that’s going to meet that.

But if I can meet another 40% of requests on that list by commercial, and it’s maybe not something that is in critical government national security type of thing, or it’s not as, like F2TA, it’s not in the middle or something like that, then maybe I can use that capability, because it’s on the fringes of something where I’m willing to take risk to use that commercial capability. So it’s a risk assessment, it’s a use case. It really boils down to what are you using it for, I think.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Okay. Very good. So we have time for just a couple more questions. It is really flying, so appreciate the conversation. So for our industry partners, how do you leverage the strengths of individual companies? You talked about partnering with them, but what sort of factors do you prioritize when you’re making decisions about who to partner with and in what ways to partner?

Greg Caicedo:

So from my perspective, it starts with complementary mission value, right? So we have to make sure that the systems or the services or capabilities that we’re bringing to bear are going to include our products and services, and they have to be complimented by our partners that we select to be part of our team.

We perform both as a prime, as a sub, and so we have to play the both sides of that, make sure that sometimes our capabilities overlap with those other partners. Sometimes they’re perfectly complimentary. So you end up having those kind of detailed conversations with the other companies, in terms of how are you going to partner with them? And there’s a lot of both tangible and intangible things that we look at. We look at the technology, we look at whether it can scale, and the things that we know we can assess fairly objectively.

But the intangibles, some of the more subjective things that we look at, is are they going to take operational responsibility with us? Can we partner with other companies that have kind of the same values and culture as us in terms of how do we support the mission?

And then you want to work with people that aren’t jerks. You want, both internally and externally, you want to work with people that you enjoy working with, and that makes your relationship and your long-term partnership a little bit more enjoyable from a day-to-day standpoint.

Tom McCormick:

Yeah. I resonate with everything you said there, especially the no jerks part. Yeah, that’s really good.

Greg Caicedo:

More creative language I could use.

Tom McCormick:

No, that’s good. I like it. I’m from Philly. I’m straight talk. Hey, so I would add to that. We’re looking for discriminating capabilities, number one. Discriminating capabilities that are going to help us field the mission, the end-to-end mission capability we need to field.

I’d say on top of that, we are looking for companies that are all in like we are. We don’t want somebody that’s going to dip their big toe. We want companies that are really, they believe in the business strategy for their company, and they’re really going to come in and bring the resources to bear. And so that’s really important as well. Some examples, we do a lot with 5G, and we’ve partnered with some of the bigs in the industries, like Verizon, and Nokia, and Juniper toward bringing good 5G capability in. They’ve helped us embed technologies into our hybrid base stations that we’ve developed that help us connect military 5G with commercial 5G capabilities, Juniper and some of the AI … So Nvidia has been very helpful in that regard. We’ve got a new capability called NetSense that we’ve demonstrated this summer, using Verizon and using Nvidia’s AI capabilities to help us sense UAV traffic through the 5G network. It’s been really, really successful. So we really look for those kind of partnerships where they’re all in, and they’re bringing the full capability set to bear on our problems.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Okay. Similar question for the government. What sort of attributes that you use to distinguish great candidates when looking at commercial? I’m sure you would love to include in a source selection, “No jerks,” but that might be difficult to pass through the lawyers. So Colonel Stevenson, can you give us some thoughts on the attributes or key characteristics that you look for in a great commercial partner?

Col. Aaron T. Stevenson:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So one of the things that we really look at is, and it depends on where the company’s coming in, because we meet everything from new starts all the way to established companies. And so for the new starts, it’s really important, because we don’t have a lot to go on a lot of time.

It’s their experience base, so how much experience does the leadership have with taking a capability like this and doing what they’re saying they’re going to do? So for new starts, that’s critical. Or even smaller companies, do they have a team that is going to be able to push this capability and be able to get it on orbit, as an example? And so we look at the leadership makeup.

We also look at all kinds of other things, obviously. There’s financials, the financial health of the company. There’s their ability. Have they worked with the DOW before? Because that in and of itself is kind of a learning curve. The DOW is unique. There’s a lot of jargon that we use, and a lot of things that they need to worry about when they come into the DOW ecosystem that they may not have ever dealt with as a commercial company. So if they’ve done those things before, sometimes that will lend itself to a little bit more success. It doesn’t mean that we won’t work with a company if they have never worked with the DOW. It just means we’re going to have to be more diligent in terms of working alongside them to help them understand and navigate the ecosystem that we have.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

It sounds a little bit like past performance too.

Col. Aaron T. Stevenson:

It is, yeah. I mean, we do look at that as well. It’s similar to a source selection, you would look at the performance of the company. So if the leadership and the team has a track record of delivering capability, or taking something lower TRL and making a constellation, scaling that capability, that’s huge, because they’ve done it before, maybe at another company. And so that’s where we also are looking for opportunity to help companies like that.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Dr. Sandhoo?

Dr. Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo:

Yeah. Seems like I’m kind of on the threes here. So three things from a war fighting capability perspective that we try to look at is, number one is where’s the threat going? Number two is what’s the emerging capability, that maybe it’s come through COMSO, maybe it’s come through DIU, maybe it’s coming through ARL, AFRL, NRL, Lincoln Lab, you name it. There’s entities that do that.

But the key thing is the maturity of that. Is it scalable? So the Venn diagram, when you look at the threat, when you look at the technology, and you look at the commercial scalability, maturity aspect of that is kind of where we try to focus, because we want to do this at scale. The maturity has to be done outside of our portfolio or SDA, but to scaling. So those are three things that they have to be reconciled to be able to say, “Okay, yes, now we can go do this.”

There may be some demos involved in the process. We may have to do fly one or two to make sure that the technical risk reduction has been done, which is approach we with Tranche 0. But once you do that, then you can go out and scale on it.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Okay. Very good. So we’re running out of time. I want to ask one final question of all of you. So in 30 seconds or less, what one step, I’m not going to give you three this time, Dr. Sandhoo, just one step to improve or increase the collaboration between the government and the commercial solutions. Prioritize.

Dr. Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo:

One step I would say is the ability to mature the payload and the technology before you try to come build a tranche out. Go mature that technology, demonstrate, and then we can scale it.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Higher TRO. Okay. Colonel Stevenson?

Col. Aaron T. Stevenson:

For us, yeah, it would be, because the Commercial Space Office, and we do deal with across the entire spectrum, including the new starts, like I said earlier, it would be communication. So I mentioned the use cases. So just communication across the entire ecosystem. The one step is if we can increase that communication and make it much more, so forums like this, reverse industry days, places where we can get our needs out, and then we can get and discover what you have that you can meet.

Greg Caicedo:

I’ll piggyback on that in engaging with industry ahead of requirements being locked down, doing a bigger market assessment, understanding what’s out there before you lock down requirements and push for a bespoke system.

Tom McCormick:

Yeah, I like those answers. Emphasis on the sharing data is important, but my one step would be collaboration. I think we’re all investing a lot toward helping commercial advance. Everyone’s got a lot of irons in the fire. Some of the big companies have a lot of irons in the fire. We’d like to see more structured, deliberate. We were talking about this earlier, Colonel Stevenson, some deliberate, structured engagement that help us share and synergize our resources together to best bring force multiplication to the investment that we’re doing into the commercial market.

Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):

Very good. Well, thank you gentlemen for this wonderful discussion. I appreciate your insight and your time, and thank you, audience, for hanging in with us a little over schedule here. Appreciate that. If you’d like to read more about this, I have a paper that came out recently looking at commercial space, the good, the bad, and the ugly. So please grab a copy at the Mitchell booth. And from all of us at the Mitchell Institute, have a great space power kind of day. Thank you.