Untapped Commercial Resources for Space
March 4, 2025
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Before I start with this, happy Mardi Gras. I really appreciate you being here rather than somewhere collecting beads or getting drunk. So, thank you very much for joining us. I’m Charles Galbraith, Senior Resident Fellow at the Mitchell Institute’s Aerospace Center of Excellence. It’s my pleasure to welcome you to this panel looking at how to better tap into the commercial sector. As we’re witnessing right now an unprecedented time for transformation in the space domain. For two decades, space was primarily a government entity, but for the past several years, commercial has really picked up the game. And in fact, I would be remiss if I didn’t congratulate Firefly on their recent lunar landing as a commercial organization landing on the moon for only the second time and for the first time fully successful. Congratulations to them. But the potential for commercial capabilities and how they might apply to the military missions is an interesting aspect to explore. Both the United States Space Force and the United States Space Command, Department of Defense have all put out policies and strategies of how to better integrate those commercial capabilities into their architecture. So, to help us understand how better to implement some of those strategies and maybe some perspectives from industry on how best to integrate them in, please welcome. First, we have Matt Brown, the Technical Director of Air and Space Defense Systems at RTX. Next, we’re glad to welcome Phil Carrai, President for Space Training and Cyber Division at Kratos. And finally on stage, we have Louis Bergeron, Senior Vice President, Federal Strategy and Growth at Govini. Gentlemen, thank you all for joining us here. You know, we did a prep session a few weeks back as all good panels should. And the pace of growth for commercial is so great. I’m just going to throw the script out and ask a new first question. And that is, how would you define commercial space? I think many people might have a different perspective on what that actually means. So, for the sake of this panel, maybe we can come to some agreement. Louis, let’s start with you and work our way.
Louis Bergeron:
Well, thanks, Charles. To everyone here for being here. And thanks for having us on this panel. So, my — it’s a great question around what is commercial and how is commercial space defined. I’ll just give you a quick story, a sea story. So, I was in the Navy. So, I’m a little bit out of water here with the Space Force Air Force crew. On my first ship, though, it was in 2000 to 2003 on the USS Arleigh Burke, which is a DD-51. And we were out at sea. And we had all the communications in the world. We had all those government-provided satellite communications, right? So, the things you’re talking about were the domain exclusively of government for, you know, over three decades. And we got into some situations. I don’t want to explain why. But we were in some different areas. And we needed to communicate. And the one thing that we used to communicate was Iridium foam. So, if you remember, that was kind of the — one of the pathfinders in communications in space. And I got this Iridium foam. And I went out to the bridge wing of the ship. And I called. And we had that capability, thanks to commercial space. And so, even though I was a government entity on a ship at sea doing the business of the nation, I had access to commercial space technology and commercial space communications in my hand, thanks to the Iridium. So, plug for Iridium if they’re here, if they’re still around. So, you know, there was, I think, some areas where we can think about the definition of commercial spaces. Commercial is going to be in space regardless of government. It’s how do you leverage the technologies, the innovation, the energy, and financial capital, quite frankly, of commercial space to improve government outcomes and government readiness for all the missions that Space Force, Air Force, Navy, and Army may undertake. So, I think there’s a kind of a area where we can think about commercial space. And I’m really interested to hear from Matt and Phil as well around their definitions, because they’re a bit more in the industry. For us, we’re in the software space. So, we work on a defense acquisition software platform that allows you to basically define commercial space in the way that you want to see it. So, if I want to think about vendors who are working across the United States government or with DOD or folks that are out in the commercial sector, in kind of whatever way you want to think about commercial space, whether that’s ground systems, whether it’s tracking and communications, or whether it’s the actual platforms and vehicles that are out in space, you can do that sort of work in the software that we have and kind of define it the way that you want based on the needs that you have at the moment. So, probably better to hear from them as well around just in that sort of commercial space, how do they define it as well. Matt?
Matt Brown:
Yeah, thanks, Louie. That makes, yeah, I get that completely, right? So, in reality, I think there is a lot of opportunity when you look at what Raytheon does, understanding the con ops, understand the end-to-end mission. I’m a system architect. So, I look at the problem as how can I bring things that already exist, that are high TRL, that are being used in commercial industry and tie it into an overall thread that solves my mission need, my customer’s need. So, while Raytheon may not be the first name you think of, and I know that’s true because some of you said that to me yesterday, what, you’re on the commercial panel? The fact of the matter is, we can bring all those capabilities together end to end to solve the mission need. And so, commercial space is really just one piece of the puzzle in my mind. How you bring exquisite capabilities to the customer, you have to tie all those things together. And so, you know, I’ll give one example. We have an arm of our company, RTX Ventures, that actually invests in companies and smaller companies to get them into Milestone B and beyond. And so, one of those companies that we invested in was Impulse Space, which builds a kick stage to get capabilities from LEO into GEO. When you talk about an end-to-end mission, we just delivered a payload for next gen GEO. That gives additional capability. When you look at that mission thread end to end, now we have an additional way to get, using commercial technology to get that capability into the right orbit to support the mission need that we have. So, I think that’s one example of how you can look at the end-to-end mission thread and say, how can I leverage all the different technologies out there? And again, I’m the technology guy. I’d rather not spend my R&D. I’d rather leverage commercial capabilities that are there to solve my mission need.
Phil Carrai:
Thanks. And maybe just to build on that, what Matt was saying. I think it’s sometimes easier to think about what commercial isn’t. Commercial isn’t mission unique software for a very specific military mission. It isn’t an exquisite sensor that’s built for a very specific military mission or an intelligence mission. But there’s a lot of other activities in that trade space. Components, subcomponents, other sensors, as Matt was talking about, components around launch. Most of the ground infrastructure, most of the cloud infrastructure. A lot of that base building block that we use today and call it noncommercial or government specific systems, really are built on commercial infrastructure, as Matt was saying. And so, I think often we think about, when we hear the word commercial, we think of, oh, it’s a commercial imager or commercial as a service organization. And I think we need to look and change that definition because that’s what we really want to do from a defense standpoint is how do we leverage investments into a broader based marketplace, broader based commercial marketplace, and then take whatever we have that we can have and then create specific, you know, mission unique, mission specific activities. And when we have to, not every case, but when we have to then create the very specific mission activities or the specific sensors. So, I think we’ve got to change the definition a little bit and talk about commercial as a much more broad based of how we provide access to space, how we provide imaging to space, how we provide warfighting in space. And I think that definition will change, is a little bit what Matt was talking about. It’s, and so when people say, well, you know, the government isn’t really, you know, how does the government buy commercial? Actually, we use a lot of commercial activities today in our very specific military intelligence missions. We just have to think about it a little differently.
Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):
Thank you all for that. So, if I try to put all that together, commercial would be any product, service, technology, or capability not specifically developed for a government mission and now being applied to applications for the government, right? Something along those lines. Everybody clear on that? So, if we have questions later, we’re going to go back to that. And so, you all pointed out some different types of commercial missions. When I deployed to Afghanistan in 2009, 90% of the SATCOM that we used was commercial. And so, that’s been a longstanding mission pillar for commercial integration. And there are others, as commercial capabilities have expanded. But are there specific missions that you think probably need to remain government, even though there might be some potential for commercial application there? So, Phil, why don’t we start with you and work our way back?
Phil Carrai:
Yeah, thanks, Charles. I think it’s clear on the left-hand side of the spectrum, if you will, SATCOM, especially, you know, mildly protected SATCOM, let’s say, has been in the commercial space domain for decades. And I think we’ve seen, you know, with recent buying, that’s kind of been an exploding sector buying commercial SATCOM. I think as you move, you know, to the other end of the spectrum, protect/defend missions, from a mission standpoint, again, I think components that are used and other aspects of protect and defend, you’re going to have commercial components that you use on those mission sets. But on that side, yeah, you’re really talking about a government-specific mission. I don’t think you’ll ever see any commercial protect and defend mission in our lifetimes. As you move sort of maybe to the left of that missile warning missile track, again, I think it’s a very specific mission. It’s going to be hard to pull, you know, other aspects of commercial other than the infrastructure side of it. However, even there, I think if you open the aperture up a little bit and talk about what other decisions could be informed left of launch, left of activities, from commercial activities, I think there’s trade space in those areas as well. So I think, you know, when we look at the sensing marketplace broad-based, there’s clearly commercial, there’s room for commercial in that marketplace. We just have to think about it differently than a very specific mission tied to a very specific set of requirements tied to a very specific target. I think if we think about that a little differently, we may open the aperture again up on what we might want to bring to the fight from a commercial standpoint. But I think at least our perspective, right, SATCOM, great activity for commercial. Protect and defend, no way. And in between, maybe there’s aspects that you can bring to the table and bring to the fight.
Matt Brown:
Yeah, I agree. I think when you — I see it as a big pie, and I don’t see it as any one of these mission areas is going to be completely commercial, and any one of them is going to be completely on the military side, right, on the DOD side. I actually think it’s a continuum to some degree, and we’re — you’ve got to be able to swing across back and forth. And so I agree, SATCOM, space domain awareness, there’s a larger portion of those that you can use commercial capabilities to cover. But in the end, there’s still CONOPs that tie back to the mission for the need for those systems that are beyond what the commercial capability is going to provide. You still have to find a way to tie that in. So we’ve had great conversations on space domain awareness with companies like Leo Labs about how does that tie into the mission, our understanding of the mission, paired with their technology, how can we use that for space domain awareness? So I think it’s really a combination of — in all of those, it’s really just a continuum. And it’s looking for the best product. It’s the best of breed. Again, I step back from the technology perspective and say what’s available, how can I leverage that to get to the mission need, and there’s always that mission need. So you always have to look at it from the mission perspective regardless of the specific capability and how much of it’s commercial or how much of it is exquisite, which is what I would call a lot of the things that we have from a military perspective.
Louis Bergeron:
Yeah, that’s great points. And I think everyone hit the nail on the head. It’s commercial domain awareness. It’s some of these different areas where commercial is kind of outpacing some of the capabilities that government is developing. I think it was the commercial space strategy that Space Force just put out recently where they talked about nuclear detection as an area where they’re not seeking commercial solutions. And I believe also electromagnetic warfare, which makes sense, as well as some of the offensive pieces. And kind of an analogy that I’ll just, you know, kind of stick with me here. But if you think about how we do transportation and logistics within the military, we do a lot on C-17, C-5, C-130s. But we also do a lot with the civilian reserve air fleets as a civil reserve air fleet. So, you know, Delta provides this. We have different lift partners that can get us. If you’re going on TDY, you take a United flight or a Delta flight. So there’s kind of areas where you can still move your mission essential folks around using commercial assets. But also, you know, but in that sort of vein of air travel, I’m also not for, you know, a commercial entity is not making an F-22 in terms of like operating that as a commercial endeavor. You’re not making an F-15 or F-35. It’s too expensive. It’s too exquisite, as you just kind of said. So, you know, there’s some things that will remain the domain of the government where it’s just too sensitive or too, you know, kind of mission essential for it to be left up to commercial. But there’s a lot in that spectrum that you can leverage, whether it’s a commercial flight or, you know, SATCOMs or something like that. And I think that’s a great area. And I will say to the point around, but even the F-22 is made by commercial entities. So there’s still this like definition of there is still commercial in all these things. All the equipment, the gears, the sensors, the life systems and the propulsion units on the F-22, just like anything else, is built by a commercial entity and very rarely just controlled by a government lab. So there is that spectrum, but I think there’s some of the areas who are around.
Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):
Yeah. Great discussion. Thank you all. So the million-dollar question is the requirements process within the government, the acquisition process, is not geared towards leveraging commercial as rapidly as we would like. Certainly the mindset of buying first and then building only what we must is a significant change in the acquisition mindset. So what can the government do to more rapidly take advantage of what’s available and bring it into the panoply of capabilities available to our war fighters? Matt, since you brought it up, what’s available? Let’s start with you, then Phil, and then Louis.
Matt Brown:
Yeah. I think one example, I’ll just give one example. So one of our commercial products, we did deliver a scalable telescope to Maxar for the World View Legion set of vehicles. And that’s six vehicles that allows 15 revisits, you know, to the same location every day, 30-centimeter quality imagery. That is a capability that the government can leverage as a service today, right? So instead of having to build out their own constellation of capabilities, you can leverage that, and that provides 90% of what you need as a service, right? So that’s a great example of where there’s a very close alignment between what is available commercially and what the government might want to leverage for a service. So those types of systems, they’re out there where you can get 90% of the way from a requirements definition. So instead of flowing down new requirements to build a system, you can say, well, what’s available today that I can leverage, and start looking at those. And SATCOM’s another example we’ve talked about today, space domain awareness. Sometimes the challenge for all of us in that is the market research, to understand what’s available. Things are changing so fast. I’ll be honest, a lot of that I get when I’m at these types of events right after I finish. I expect I’ll have a couple of folks I can talk to about some of those technologies that are available to help us better understand what is out there that we can leverage. But I think looking at it from that perspective, whether we’re building the system, and we can look at what components are available commercially that we can leverage, or if it’s products like we’re delivering for Maxar that the government can leverage, using those first to fill the gaps when it’s a 90% is a great way to limit the cost and to improve the schedule time for when that’s available.
Phil Carrai:
So we, about 35% of our business is commercial. I mean, it’s selling to commercial operators, commercial companies, commercial imagers. And we also have our own space domain awareness, RF space domain awareness offering, too, that we sell to commercial operators, allied governments, and obviously to the U.S. So it’s an, how do you talk through the set of requirements from a programmatic side has been something that we’ve been working with our government customers for quite some time. And I think at the core of it is if you look at it as part of the programmatic activity, right, at a PEO level, how do I take what capabilities might exist from a commercial infrastructure standpoint? And from an infrastructure standpoint, I think we already do. You can already see that in terms of, like, the commercial cloud and how that has been sort of moved over and become sort of an anchor for a lot of the activities that we do. But I think it has to start there. It has to start from a requirement side in the PEO office, not as sort of an adjunct to a commercial office per se. Because if it’s, if you don’t, if it isn’t threaded into a program or a set of program requirements, what happens is when it finally gets to the warfighter, warfighter doesn’t know what to do with it, right? But not how to train, how do you man, train, and equip something that’s sort of a one-off to their core, to their, whatever the core platform it is that they have. So I think we talk about a little bit, you know, how do commercial companies cross over the valley of death? And I heard General Gutlein said this last week, and we’ve been a big believer of it. You got to have the PEO own part of that responsibility and have that as part of the trade space as they’re building out whatever mission-specific thing that they’re doing. And if you do that, I think that’s the change needed. I think from an acquisition process, I think we have more than enough tools, speaking as a company selling to the government, I think there’s enough in the acquisition realm to pick whatever you need to do to buy however you need to buy it. But I think it gets back into the, what are the requirements and how do I fit commercial, not as sort of a one-off, but as part of the package that I’m delivering to a warfighter. I think that’s key to making commercial more broad-based and sustainable for us.
Louis Bergeron:
Yeah, so as a Software-as-a-Service company, we are commercially developed and we have software that our users across the DOD and the federal government can log into and basically have the best of the commercial technology at their fingertips. And they’re using this for a variety of different ways, a variety of different objectives. One is to do the market research. So our platform provides data around kind of all government contracts, patents, private equity venture capital, who’s doing what in the market so the company’s the capital and the capabilities that they’re delivering. So at a fingertips, you know, anyone in Space Force or Air Force can have a commercial solution where you’re off to the races and you know exactly what’s going on within a market, whether it’s a specific company and all the kind of risk profiles and monitoring, or if it’s a broader market of space launch or enabling technology. So, you know, that’s available today for folks to buy. You know, and so we provide this as a software. What we see in, you know, going to the, to PEOs and folks across the government is kind of this need for them to kind of have a got solution, so a government solution where it’s their data, there’s, you know, they’re very enamored with how it works, but there’s a great commercial solution that we provide that could do 95% of the work, and if you just gave us the data and we have ATOs, we could do that rest of the 5% and probably do it faster. There is just a hesitancy in some areas to go for those commercial solutions just because of, you know, one, it’s the status quo, it’s sometimes a little bit challenging to get people’s mind around bringing in software and software solutions to an area, just like it’s a challenge sometimes to bring in commercial solutions or going and doing a service, like you mentioned around, you know, let me just get a little bit of time on a communications satellite instead of having to own the entire thing. So there’s those aspects of it. You know, when we look at Space Force, obviously Space Force is really doing a lot of trailblazing in terms of using commercial service, commercial solutions offerings, OTAs and things like this because you’re hopefully not bound by the same kind of restrictions or kind of, not really restrictions, but kind of thought restrictions of some of the other branches. And what we see kind of is that acquisition professionals have the far ability to basically go very, very far and really providing innovative solutions and being creative. There’s just a training problem. I think there’s a cultural problem in some instances where you need to have the cores, the contracting officers, the contracting officer representatives, as well as the leaders who kind of understand the severity of this moment. We like to say this is kind of, this is the Freedom’s Forge moment. And if you think about Freedom’s Forge, it was a book by Arthur Herman around what was happening in 1939, 1940, 1941 in the administration and in the country in terms of going out to commercial industry. So Bill Knudsen was from GM and Ford, and they went out to commercial industry and said, hey, we need to start ramping up production. In that kind of same way, there was a lot of things that probably weren’t the orthodox way that the government was doing contracting at that point. And today, we kind of face a similar situation where we have this impetus to be creative and be innovative and bold. And you know, and you actually have all the regulations, all the authorities within the FAR that allow you to do that. It’s really just, you know, seizing that initiative, getting your team on board in terms of the contracting officers, and then taking a stance and actually pushing forward.
Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):
That’s great. Thank you all for that. So meet them at least halfway. Be bold and be specific. So part of the last sort of tactical mile of integrating commercial is testing and integration. So we might have a technology or a software or even an end product that wasn’t designed for some of the stressing conditions that we might expect in the warfighting or deliver with the reliability and certainty that we need for military operations. So how do we look at integrating and testing commercial, whether it’s software or hardware, as part of a larger system? Louis, want to start with you?
Louis Bergeron:
Sure. So we’ve dealt with this a lot with the Navy. So the Navy’s doing a lot in additive manufacturing, for instance. So additive manufacturing, they’re trying to make submarine parts, parts for different ships and weapon systems. And what it really comes down to is the testing regimes and getting the testers. So those folks that are those huge, you know, subject matter experts who’ve been doing this work for a long time, and they know that this steel works or this particular fabric works best or this particular material. And that’s just, again, a bit of a cultural change of saying, hey, there’s commercial companies that are already doing this. They’re fielding these, you know, additive manufactured parts and pieces in the field today, and they have good testing data on the performance. But it’s taking that and taking that sort of initiative and really forcing the system to say, hey, if I’m going to do something different in software and hardware, especially in the manufacturing area, how do I take a certain amount of risk? And obviously, there’s risks that you can take in space flight that you may not be able to take in submarine construction. So there’s different levels and a spectrum of risk. But how do we take prudent, calculated risks to get the testing down from, like, well, we need to see how this works for 10 years in the field to something where let’s take a look, let’s run the models, let’s use software to basically crunch and condense that time that it would typically take to test and get stuff fielded quickly and, you know, basically shorten that requirements gap to get something to the warfighter faster. So I think there are tools and there are capabilities out there. Again, it’s really a — there’s a bit of a cultural dynamic as well as an initiative dynamic that has to be undertaken.
Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):
Great. Thank you. Matt?
Matt Brown:
Yeah, I’ll use a specific example. Software is a great example of this. When we talk about some of the infrastructure capabilities that are available today, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, those are being deployed to classified environments as well, right? So there’s a level of integration there that’s already hardened that you can leverage on top of that. And then we’ve run into the issue. We want to use — I mean, good software coders want to use free and open source, they want to Google something and copy and paste it into their code, right? So you have to go through and use some of these agile development dev sec ops, these commercial concepts that commercial companies are using all the time to be continually testing, continually testing the software and making sure each delivery, every day when you’re loading that code in, you have a set of tests that you’re running, not just unit tests, but end-to-end tests that are looking at the whole mission capability. And you’re already building on these commercial capabilities that are out there, there’s commercial tools that are out there, and that allows you to have a lot more confidence and allows us to deliver more frequently to the customer because of that, right? So new warfighter capability being deployed every two weeks now instead of every six months, right? And all that ties back to that confidence that you can have because you’ve run through and are leveraging these commercial capabilities that are already available.
Phil Carrai:
Yeah, I think software and infrastructure is sort of a great way to look at the — how, you know, how commercial actually has levels of resiliency better than a lot of the government-specific applications that we’ve seen. And if you think about things like high-frequency trading, the kind of timing, the money, the cyber, the transaction volumes, you know, those organizations die in a day if they don’t have the kind of resiliency that, you know, we take months or years to sort of engineer into our system. So I think maybe the base question is that the assumption that commercial — again, it depends on what you mean by commercial — commercial writ large, you know, doesn’t have the same level of reliability that a military use case is. You know, I think that’s wrong. I think that’s a wrong way to look at it. I think the better way to look at it is what are the things that you’re bringing to bear from a commercial standpoint? I think software tech, software — some of the cyber components around software, I think, are an area where commercial actually is leading the way and has led the way for quite a while because of what’s happened with cyber and fraud and the like. And then I think the other aspect I think we talked about — it was already talked about before, looking at it from a risk management standpoint. You know, what’s the risk tolerance and are you willing for that level of tolerance to take the risk? I think we’ve, over the last — because we were doing so many large programs over, you know, the previous 20 years, our risk tolerance was really low. Part of it, you could argue, was nobody wanted to get dragged in front of Congress when a rocket blew up. And the reality is that rockets blow up, right, occasionally. You know, it’s the great story of, you know, how do you get to the end of that? Well, you’ve got to make a few mistakes along the way. You’ve got to be, you know, be calculated moving forward on it. But it’s about the risk management. I think our risk tolerance has dropped to the point across the board — had dropped to the point. I think there’s a lot of areas where that’s changing, but had dropped to the point certainly in the mid-teens, mid to early teens, where the oversight to a program was onerous to the point where you really weren’t getting, you know, the payback for reliability versus speed just wasn’t there. And I think, you know, that’s the other aspect of it, taking a look at each of the applications and really doing a hard evaluation from an acquisition and from a contract, from a program management standpoint, to talk about what am I willing to take from a risk standpoint and then moving out accordingly.
Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):
Yeah, excellent. So all three of you hit on some security aspects and the IT side. So I want to dive down into that rabbit hole of cyber and IT a little further. DevSecOpsSec is security. So the linkage between space and the importance of cybersecurity is unmatched in any other warfighting domain. We absolutely have to have cybersecurity. So what are the things that we can do to ensure that the commercial software or commercial technologies are cyber resilient against what may be a greater threat than a potential hacker seeking to pilfer money from a bank? So Phil, do you want to start off on that one?
Phil Carrai:
Yeah. And I think, you know, the question may be even broader than cyber, I think supply chain is another issue we’re all now coming to grips with, right?
Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):
Yeah, great. Absolutely.
Phil Carrai:
Finding components that we didn’t realize were built in places that we really don’t want them to be built in. I think it’s part of that discussion as well, especially as it relates to space. And it’s a hard problem getting, you know, being able to understand where did the component come from? How do I trace reliability to that component? How do I make sure that I’m creating an appropriate level of wrapping around what that looks like? I think it’s a challenge for everyone. And then, you know, when you sort of expand that list to the number of subcontractors that sort of have that same problem, maybe at a smaller level of scale to be able to handle the things that are now being asked for us. I think this is a challenge the industry is going to have to grapple with, the supply chain in particular. But I think as it relates to cyber, there are good practices that are out there. This is, cyber is sort of a, it’s an easy, the threat surface is broad because of how much software is deployed. But I think the counter to that is the attention to that threat surface is also very, everybody’s aware of it. And so how do you follow best practices? How do you follow DevSecOps? How do you do appropriate level of testing? How do you do appropriate level of compartmentalization? Because that still works. Compartmentalization, despite, you know, we all talk about the challenge of it, it works. All of those things, I think, are what we have to think about. And again, balancing in what’s the mission, what’s the risk of that mission, what level do we need to get to put the oversight that we need to. I think at a base foundational level, though, you know, it’s a throwaway line, but cyber needs to be built into everything that we think about, or at least to be thought of in every program that we execute.
Matt Brown:
Yeah, when I think of security, one of the first things I think of is risk management framework, right? That’s a way to look at security. And what I find is when I go to my security person and say what’s the risk you’re willing to take? And they say none. It’s a challenge, right? Because that is the perspective. But at the same time, what I find is this is an area where a company like Raytheon or a company like Kratos, where we have that experience of building cyber secure systems for the government, can partner very closely with commercial companies and help them see what is required to really be cyber hardened for these capabilities. And, you know, be able to give them that concept of this is what RMF or whatever current framework we have to deal with, right? This is what it lays out in terms of how we manage risk. And then being able to have a conversation with the customer, right, I think is critical. When you talk about security, you know, if I’m already a standalone system that’s not talking to anyone else, does that change the requirements and the risk posture? It should, right? So how do we have those conversations? And I think it goes back to some of the acquisition and discussions that we had earlier where you want to go and say, hey, what are the minimum viable capabilities that we need for this mission to be delivered? And then we can iteratively build on it with some of these agile and DevSecOps capabilities to build new capabilities on top and keep delivering more secure, more capability, more mission to the warfighter, right? And I think that’s — it really comes back to, as you said, Phil, what’s the risk management that you’re willing to take on and how do we partner together with commercial, with the government to make sure we’ve got that right level of security available?
Louis Bergeron:
Great comments. And so I’ll talk about just two things around one, supply chain. So that’s an area that we work kind of closely with our government customers on because of that need to understand what does that second, third tier look like? How do I think about their connections with the adversarial countries? What do I think just in terms of their supply chain if I just take a look at the map and see where they have partnerships or relationships with companies that may be overseas? But also just to start to look and start to judge performance of some of those subcontractors. So kind of at a moment’s glance, the software is there, the data is there to basically go down to third or fourth tier of the supply chain and start to look at the breadth of that supply chain as well as start to go deep on some suppliers and then get into a monitoring stance. And I think that’s really where we think about risk is there’s that initial due diligence. And a lot of things that we see, especially in the cyber world, you know, we have a software, we have to go through the disaccreditation process and the ATO’s just like anybody else, and there’s that initial due diligence and then there’s really that monitoring the company over time. And the only way to do that kind of at scale is through software. And so what we’ve seen a lot of indications is taking that whether supply chain or cyber resilience or anything, it’s basically mapping your supply base or your cyber, your cyber security base and understanding then those companies change over time. They bring in new products, they bring in new suppliers. How do we start to monitor and assess those in real time and be able to provide that to the government? We provide it kind of directly to the government right now in a kind of a way for them to have an ability to manage risk and working with their partners at Raytheon or Kratos and be able to be proactive in terms of managing risk, whether that’s cyber security risk or whether it’s supply chain risk.
Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):
Excellent. Thank you all again. So it’s easy to think about space and you think about rockets and satellites and those become very attractive and the center of attention. I enjoyed the launch panel yesterday and all three companies had their launch videos. But there’s another side of space and that is the software mission planning, the ground elements as well. So how can, you know, maybe less sexy but definitely just as critical, how can the Space Force leverage some of the mission planning software tools and ground elements that are part of the commercial infrastructure already? And this is our last question. We’re running a little short on time. So, Louis, let’s start with you.
Louis Bergeron:
Sure. So, you know, everyone loves a good launch. It’s awesome. It’s really just incredible and it kind of speaks to you, to some of the spirit of the innovation and everything we’ve seen before. When you get kind of down to it, there is that launch element. And what we think about in terms of breaking that kind of down is a taxonomy. And thinking about space launch is one element. But then there’s all those enabling functions that go on, whether it’s communications, whether it’s tracking and telemetry, or whether it’s testing ranges and things like that. Down to even just the scheduling the launches at Vandenberg or at Cape Canaveral or Wallops or wherever it is, you’ve got to be able to use data and software to basically enable the launch scheduling, enable some of the areas around, okay, we just did a launch. What needs to be replaced? How do we go out and get it? What’s our demands look like? And then can we actually forecast out what demand looks like in two years, three years, five years? And then start to say, do we have the infrastructure in place? Do we have the vendors in place? If not, okay, let’s go out and find vendors who provide whatever it is that I need to facilitate launches, whether that’s mission software or something on the launch pad or the radars and communications. So, you know, I think from our perspective, if you can bring software in early, you can start to scale your operations kind of across different, you know, across kind of the whole range of enabling technologies that you need to really have Space Force being able to be mission ready and supporting the warfighter.
Matt Brown:
Yeah, I think when I think about the mission capability that’s needed, when I look at those applications that are required, really going back to what I said earlier, you have commercial infrastructure like AWS and Azure that you take and you need to add these very exquisite applications on top to optimize some of the missions. We’re talking about very large constellations. You know, we’re just talking about collecting electro-optical imagery, right? I have to choose which vehicle, and if I have a large swath of area I have to capture, I have to figure out how to combine all that data that’s captured to provide what my customer’s asking for. That optimization to get the most out of what you have in a commercial system is very valuable. And so what we’ve focused on is really those unique apps, those exquisite apps that run on top of that infrastructure. And it’s kind of the reverse of what you’re seeing, Charles. What we’re seeing is we have commercial companies going, “Hey, I know you’re doing this for the government. Can you do it for us?” And so we’re actually piloting this year, transitioning those software elements, those unique apps that we’ve built into commercial products that we can then provide to help give some of those exquisite capabilities to get the most out of what’s available with your constellation, what you have in space, by planning very well on the ground, by optimizing where it’s easiest and you have the most processing power that you can on the ground to get the very best result with your product. So that’s one of the ways that we’re working with the commercial industry to provide the best capability, leveraging what we’re already doing for the DoD customers.
Phil Carrai:
Yeah. So I guess I’m last. So first I take exception. I think the ground’s sexy. Come on. I mean, have a network go down and tell people that, “Yes, no, I think the ground’s sexy.” And honestly, I mean, we’re a ground systems provider. And I think we’re in the third inning maybe of a digital transformation on the ground. And I think it needs to happen. If you look at the constellations that are going up, the number of spacecraft, the missions of the spacecraft, the reality, right, if you can’t get it from space to a plane or the ground, you got nothing, right? You got an object in space. So the idea of thinking about that whole system as a network or a web, right? We’ve talked about kill chains and kill webs, right? It’s all based on sort of this interoperable network from ground to air to space that needs to work. And as Matt was saying, to be able to orchestrate, manage, configure, when we had a handful of spacecraft and a handful of stovepipe systems, different set of problems that we’re dealing with today, you know, we’re now talking about hundreds of objects, potentially thousands of objects, all operating at a variety of different orbits and a variety of different altitudes when we get to the plane level, all needing to have mission assurance, mission management, ground links, ground sensors, all of that. I think we’re, again, I think we have to transform how we think about what the ground looks like, which I think what we’re doing as an industry and transform our thinking about, you know, this isn’t just a one-off to get whatever an image that you need to have down on the ground. It really is about a very complex interoperable network or web that we’re building to be able to handle what we think is the next generation of threats.
Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.):
Ground is sexy. You heard it here first, folks. And I agree with you. It is sexy and it’s incredibly important. Well, thank you, Phil, Matt, Louis very much for your time and your insight. Ladies and gentlemen, this comes to the end of this panel. For the Mitchell Institute, if you haven’t seen our booth, because we’re way at the end of the corridor before you enter the exhibit hall, please stop by and say hi and take a look at some of our publications. And from all of us at the Mitchell Institute, have a great Spacepower Day. Thank you.