The Evolution of Commercial Space and Its Integration with US Military Space

This chapter explores the evolving relationship between commercial space and the US military. Focusing primarily on the US Air Force, but including examples from the Army, Navy, and other DOD organizations, it provides an overview of how military reliance on commercial companies has expanded chronologically and dimensionally across at least five areas of space-related activity—launch systems, communications, space-based remote sensing, space domain awareness, and robotic on-orbit servicing—over six decades. Within each of those areas of activity, it will explain the evolution of the US military-commercial relationship in terms of several interrelated factors or considerations: (1) national security requirements in reaction to changing threat perceptions; (2) congressional legislation and national administrative policies that promoted growth in the commercial space sector and encouraged military utilization of commercial capabilities; (3) technological innovation by the commercial space sector, and push from industry for its adoption by government users; and (4) a transformative shift in the military’s orientation from contracting with industry for hardware—and its lifetime operational maintenance—toward the outright purchase of commercially competitive services. Although the US military space community has depended always on commercial enterprise, the chapter will show that dependency has shifted—slowly in the beginning but more rapidly in recent years—from demand-and-supply toward supply-and-demand. The result, at least in the case of the United States, has become an increasingly integrated military-commercial space enterprise.