Maneuver Without Regret, In-Space Assembly and Manufacturing Among Potential Use Cases 

In late 2024, the United States Space Force established the Space Power & Propulsion for Agility, Responsiveness & Resilience (SPAR) Institute with $35 million to develop nuclear-powered systems for spacecraft propulsion. The initiative demonstrates the latest effort by the Space Force, in partnership with the Air Force Reserarch Laboratory (AFRL), eight universities and 14 industry partners, to explore nuclear fission as an energy source in space. If successfully developed and deployed, nuclear-powered systems can unlock a broad range of capabilities: from ”maneuvering without regret” and in-space assembly and manufacturing (ISAM), to orbital clean-up and natural resource extraction. 

“Retired Lieutenant General John Shaw’s catchphrase ‘maneuver without regret,’ means we need to operate and maneuver satellites without compromising the satellite’s lifetime energy supply,” said Tom Cooley, PhD, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy and former Chief Scientist at AFRL. “The current energy consumption costs of maneuvering space assets adversely affect the Space Force’s long-term capabilities. Nuclear energy has long been considered a potential solution, and the SPAR Institute will explore its viability.” 

Traditionally, maneuvering in space has been generated through electric or chemical propulsion. But both approaches have their respective limitations. 

“While electric propulsion is extremely efficient, it can’t generate enough power to change an orbit quickly, so it tends to be used for lower impulse per unit time activities like station-keeping,” said Brad Tousley, PhD, partner at Elara Nova and former director for the Tactical Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “Meanwhile, chemical propulsion rockets have greater impulse per unit time, but fuel is volume and weight-constrained by the spacecraft. So chemical propulsion requires the Space Force to address on-orbit refueling and logistical challenges.” 

Alternatively, nuclear fission carries both high-impulse thrust and low-consumption rate qualities. Nuclear fission works by splitting an atom’s nucleus within a controlled reactor to generate energy in a way that could revolutionize dynamic space operations.   

“Nuclear fission’s latent energy is simply far more per unit volume compared to electric or chemical power sources,” Dr. Tousley said. “Regulatory and safety issues still exist that can inhibit nuclear development and deployment. But from a physics and energy density perspective, nuclear power can change how we approach building resilient architectures and systems in space.” 

Therefore, nuclear-powered spacecraft are an attractive endeavor for both national security and civil space applications. 

“The Space Force is interested in nuclear energy because maneuvering to change orbits requires a lot of energy,” Dr. Cooley said. “Maneuverability can also enable in-space logistics, like on-orbit refueling or conducting maintenance repairs on a spacecraft. Then for NASA, human habitation on the moon requires a reliable source of energy, especially during the two-week lunar ‘night.’” 

Nuclear-Powered Systems vs. Nuclear Weapons 

Nuclear-powered systems are not nuclear weapons. Whereas a nuclear weapon splits an uranium or plutonium atom in an uncontrolled manner to maximize energy consumption, a nuclear reactor can house this same atom-splitting process in a way that generates a low-carbon, long-term energy source.  

It’s the same technological process leveraged by nuclear power plants and even the United States Navy. 

“There’s no better analogy for using nuclear power in space than how it changed the U.S. Navy’s global operations,” Dr. Tousley said. “The Navy went to nuclear-powered aircraft carriers because the infrastructure to supply carriers with conventional fossil fuels was burdened by long-distance deployments. So today’s Navy depends on nuclear energy for their global power projection.” 

To this end, developing and deploying similar nuclear reactor technology for space is legally within the bounds of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.  

“The 1967 Outer Space Treaty is clear that we must not put nuclear weapons in space,” Dr. Cooley said. “But a nuclear reactor simply uses nuclear technology to generate electricity. Some of the most successful NASA programs used radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which similarly leveraged nuclear technology for deep space or interplanetary exploration.” 

Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Programs 

Historically, the United States has embarked on a series of research and development programs for nuclear energy in space. Nuclear-powered systems can be delineated in two ways, the first of which is nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP). In an NTP system, hydrogen fuel is used to split a uranium atom within a nuclear reactor to generate heat, which can create thrust. 

One of the earliest NTP efforts was the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) program, overseen by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). 

“NERVA aimed to develop an upper-stage rocket engine using nuclear thermal propulsion, because the heat generated by a nuclear reactor is much greater than the heat you get from a chemical reaction,” Donna Dickey, Elara Nova partner and aerospace engineer, formerly of AFRL and now supporting DARPA. “The NTP process generates twice the efficiency, while maintaining the thrust levels of a traditional chemical rocket – so it’s the best of both worlds. The NERVA program developed several nuclear reactors to be integrated into a rocket engine, and even started testing before the program ended in 1973.” 

While the nuclear-powered rocket engine NERVA developed was never launched into space, the program has been considered a successful proof of concept for nuclear thermal propulsion.  

Today, similarly-inspired DARPA programs have emerged, like the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) and LunA-10 programs.  

“DRACO is focused on demonstrating nuclear thermal propulsion technology on-orbit,” Dr. Tousley said. “Effectively managing the excess heat a nuclear reaction generates continues to be a technical challenge that DARPA and NASA are working through, but the program is an effective example of how we can develop nuclear technology in a way that adheres to the Outer Space Treaty. Meanwhile, LunA-10 was a capability study of the lunar economy and how shared systems could benefit everyone, including nuclear power and propulsion.” 

Nuclear Electric Propulsion 

The second way to leverage nuclear energy is known as nuclear electric propulsion (NEP), which uses nuclear fission to create electricity that generates the magnetic fields used to accelerate and expel gas propellants like xenon and krypton. The NEP process provides a lower amount of thrust compared to its NTP counterpart, but it can still efficiently propel a spacecraft for extended periods of time.  

That’s been the focus of the Joint Emergent Technology Supplying On-Orbit Nuclear High Power (JETSON) program, overseen by AFRL. JETSON emerged after the Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology (KRUSTY) experiment, led by NASA and the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, safely demonstrated NEP capability. 

“KRUSTY created a relatively small nuclear reactor and used that to generate electricity,” Dr. Cooley said. “Now, JETSON gets back to powering an ion thruster with that electric energy, but the hard part is getting the nuclear reactor into space safely.” 

Remaining Challenges and Terrestrial-Driven Solutions 

Launch presents one of many remaining challenges needed to be overcome before the government, with its industry and academic partners, can successfully adopt nuclear-powered systems for spacecraft propulsion. 

“The biggest concern is not launching the reactor structure, but rather the nuclear material itself,” Dr. Tousley said. “But launching the reactor structure on one rocket and the nuclear material on a smaller, more reliable rocket before assembling it in space is one example of how we can creatively reduce the risk of an accident or reentry. Although we would still need mission assurance during the system’s lifetime, and a means for appropriately disposing it at end of life.” 

But similar, land-based nuclear energy efforts may in turn facilitate solutions for getting a nuclear reactor to space. For example, the Strategic Capabilities Office’s Project Pele aims to develop a mobile nuclear reactor to power remote military bases.  

“It’s difficult to get fossil fuel sources to places like Eilson Air Force Base in Alaska, where winter limits opportunities to resupply,” Dr. Tousley said. So Project Pele’s investment in  nuclear research and development for terrestrial power purposes can advance similar technologies for space.” 

Land-based applications for nuclear power systems are also drawing the attention, and investment, of technology companies and their private equity partners.  

“Companies are developing small nuclear reactor concepts to meet the growing nationwide energy demands of data centers,” Dr. Tousley said. “So nuclear developments may not start with space, but the government is still going to benefit from private capital investments in developing advanced reactors and power systems for terrestrial purposes.” 

Enabling the Future of Nuclear in Space 

If successful, these programs could enable the development of other space-based capabilities, like in-space assembly and manufacturing (ISAM), orbital clean-up, recycling and even natural resource extraction in space.  

“Nuclear energy can solve two problems at once: building the future infrastructure in space, while cleaning up the old one,” Dr. Cooley said. “Nuclear power systems can maneuver space debris into remote orbits, or recylce and manufacture debris into new material. But all of these capabilities would require tremendous amounts of energy that nuclear-powered systems can uniquely provide, and the United States needs to take that risk and invest in these capabilities now if we are going to lead that change.” 

However, the government must also make the appropriate regulatory and policy changes if it’s to overcome the risk-averse mindset triggered by nuclear accidents like Three Mile Island. 

“Japan, France and the United States led the free world in nuclear power development for electric generation purposes before the 1979 partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island,” Dr. Tousley said. “That accident impacted U.S. public policy and set us back in nuclear development for decades, while Japan and France continued forward. Likewise, we need to be more risk-tolerant in order to make progress because the physics don’t lie – nuclear energy is incredibly efficient.  

The complex challenges facing the SPAR Institute and other nuclear energy programs require the type of intersecting technology, human capital, regulatory and policy-driven solutions Elara Nova partners are prepared to provide. 

“The SPAR Institute is funding graduate students to work in nuclear development, an area that is critical to the United States,” Dr. Tousley said. “These students will likely go on to work in industry or start their own companies in support of the U.S. government’s nuclear development efforts. That’s where Elara Nova can support them, by bridging the gap between policy and technical challenges to enable their company’s success.” 

Elara Nova is a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain. Learn more at https://elaranova.com/. 

Episode 23: SPAR Institute Begins Latest Effort to Develop Nuclear Propulsion for Space

Host: Scott King

SME: (DD): Donna Dickey, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy; aerospace engineer with decades of experience at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory

(BT): Brad Tousley, PhD, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy; former director of the Tactical Technology Office at DARPA

(TC): Tom Cooley, PhD, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy; former chief scientist at Air Force Research Laboratory

00:02 – 01:26

Late last year, the United States Space Force allocated $35 million to the Space Power & Propulsion for Agility, Responsiveness & Resilience – or SPAR – Institute to develop nuclear-powered systems for spacecraft propulsion. 

The institute demonstrates the latest effort by the Space Force, in partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory – or AFRL – to explore nuclear fission as an energy source in space. If successful, nuclear energy can enable the Space Force to “maneuver without regret,” among other capabilities. 

Traditionally, maneuvering in space has been generated through electric or chemical propulsion, both of which have their respective limitations. Nuclear fission, however, which splits an atom’s nucleus within a controlled reactor to generate energy, carries significant advantages compared to its electric or chemical propulsion counterparts.

Welcome to “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security.” I’m your host, Scott King. We have three guests today, for a roundtable-style discussion on the use of nuclear energy in space. 

Donna Dickey is a partner at Elara Nova the Space Consultancy, and an aerospace engineer with decades of experience working with agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – or DARPA – as well as the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Donna, welcome to the show.

01:27 – 01:28

DD: Thank you.

01:28 – 01:39

Also joining us is Doctor Brad Tousley, a fellow Elara Nova partner, and the former director for the Tactical Technology Office at DARPA. 

Dr. Tousley, thanks for taking the time to join us today.

01:39 – 01:40

BT: Thank you. Glad to be here.

01:41 – 01:50

And then we have Doctor Tom Cooley, an Elara Nova partner and the former chief scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Dr. Cooley, thank you for joining us.

01:51 – 01:52

TC: Absolutely, glad to be here.

01:53 – 02:04

As mentioned at the top, the United States Space Force directed $35 million to the SPAR Institute to develop nuclear-powered spacecraft propulsion.

But what is the SPAR Institute, and the purpose behind this funding?

02:05 – 04:27

TC: The Space Force with luminaries like Joel Mozer and others really recognizing and wanting to focus the basic research investment at universities, towards things that are going to be game-changing for the Space Force. 

And so amongst other things, this type of university consortium idea emerged.

And one of the topics that really stems from, General John Shaw’s catchphrase, “maneuver without regret,” meaning that we need to be able to operate and maneuver satellites without having to think about how much the lifetime of that satellite has now been spent, because we have just used fuel that would otherwise be used for station-keeping and whatnot.

That concept of maneuvering without having to think about the cost of this national asset [that] has just been diminished because you have maneuvered is one of the concepts that really has shaped much of the sort of long-term thinking and goals for the Space Force.

It’s very clear that maneuver is a critical capability for the Space Force. And that was not something that we had to think about in the past. And so when, Joel Mozer and others, looked at, ‘Well, what are some of these long-term big ideas and capabilities that are going to require major technology breakthroughs?’

The ‘maneuver without regret’ certainly informed that. And when they were talking about what could universities sink their teeth into and provide a viable option and viable capabilities for the future. I mean, we’re talking about the long-term, right? That we’re not thinking these are going to be operational capabilities in a year or two.

This is fundamental research that needs to be done. And so when they were standing up these university consortiums, this was one of the key ideas that emerged: nuclear power in space.

It’s long been identified, but we just haven’t been able to bring it into the portfolio. And so ‘How do we do that?’ It’s the kind of, really meaty question that we can put into academic worlds and have them sort through this. And so that’s, if you will, some of the origins.

And then with the award going to the University of Michigan to lead that effort, bringing together a lot of other really top universities that are able to contribute different components to this. That’s how it was formed.

04:28 – 05:25

BT: Scott, if I could jump in, one of the additional points I want to add to what Tom just said is that, SPAR is an example of, I’ll call it a university research initiative. The Department has used these techniques many times before to catalyze universities focusing on a particular challenge or a particular area the Department needs. 

And it does two things:

One is it focuses them on the problem. And so in this case, the Space Force can engage with the Institute to specify details of the problem in a way that can be very collaborative. 

The other piece of it equally as important, if not more so, is the human capital side of it. The graduate students and the students that come out of the Institute can help go into the Space Force or supporting the industry in general in this area for the long-term.

And that’s something that these university research initiatives tend to set up. When you have a five-year project, you’ll get a bunch of students all the way through a Master’s or Doctoral program focusing on different areas of the technology that is needed in this case for, in this case, space nuclear power and agility and that could be really beneficial as well.

05:26 – 05:39

And as it relates to “maneuvering without regret.” I have a two-part follow-up question:

1. What does “regret” look like in space?
2. Say we have this capability – what opportunities does that open up for the Space Force?

05:40 – 07:03

TC: So what space hasn’t really had is the in-space logistics. Clearly, there’s a lot of work that goes on with logistics on the ground. But in terms of in-space logistics and by logistics we mean refueling and just upgrades or maintenance repair, anything like that. We just haven’t done that because it’s really hard to do in space.

You have to get to the satellite. You have to be able to operate on that satellite. You have to refuel. Otherwise, I mean, there’s we need to think through that. And so what does regret look like? 

Well, it means that, ‘Gosh, you know, something broke. You used all your fuel. 

You now no longer have an otherwise perfectly good asset in space to do a critical national defense job.’ And so regret is losing that asset because of the inability to have that logistics chain that again, we sort of take for granted. 

So, that’s the main thing is that we really have to start thinking through, ‘How do we get that kind of space-specific logistics?’ And it all comes back to being able to get to and from your satellites, maneuver them.

Put them where you need them. If you lose an asset on one side of the GEO belt, and you’ve got a perfectly good one on the other side. ‘Well, how much fuel is it going to take and how long will that take?’ And that’s a trade. That’s a very direct trade.

07:04 – 08:05

BT: Scott, I also think that from a pure physics perspective, the latent energy in the nuclear reaction is simply far more per unit volume compared to chemical or standard electric and we know that on Earth. But the part of the problem on Earth is there’s a regulatory issue in terms of the safety. But if you think purely in terms of the physics and the energy density and what’s possible, you can get a whole lot more when you rely on nuclear power, but you have the regulatory, you have the policy, the concerns with debris and all that, and that’s inhibitive.

But if you can successfully get past that, it completely changes the architectures and systems in space that – we depend on for resilience. Well, one of the reasons for proliferation is we’re concerned about resilience. So we’re just going to send a whole lot more things up there because we’re concerned about the resilience.

Once you go back and you rethink of it in terms of nuclear power as a source in space, it completely changes all of those considerations. The ability of moving an asset around that we have, to be resilient against the threat, to be more survivable, to provide distributed ISR capability.

It all changes once you have nuclear [power] in space. All of it.

08:06 – 08:08

DD: And you wouldn’t have such big solar panels or any at all.

08:09 – 08:11

BT: Exactly, exactly. Absolutely.

08:12 – 08:31

I’d like to pause here and dive deeper into the two primary energy sources that we’ve traditionally used in space: electric propulsion and chemical propulsion. 

Let’s start with electric propulsion, which Donna, you just indicated is commonly generated through solar arrays.

Can you share more about the benefits or limitations of electric propulsion in space?

08:32 – 08:55

DD: Sure, to start with the limitations: electric propulsion has very low thrust, so maneuverability is limited. And it depends on energy from the solar arrays, which trickle power into the batteries. 

Low thrust is absolutely fine for many spacecraft, but for maneuvers like collision avoidance in congested space – you’d rather have much higher thrust and reaction times also.

08:56 – 09:47

BT: In terms of ISP, electric propulsion is just wonderful. The problem is that you can’t generate enough power with conventional means to power electric propulsion to get substantial impulse that you need to really change an orbit quickly. 

You can with nuclear power. But you can’t with electric. But electric is extremely efficient. So they tend to be used for station-keeping for long-duration missions, for things where I can afford to have a much lower impulse per unit time.

The power-added efficiency from a solar array. The advancement in the last 15 years has been very linear. It’s very incremental. There’s no factors of ten improvement in a solar panel. So if you think of a solar panel conductor, solar drive assembly and ride it through the bus to some propulsion system, it’s very linear.

There’s no factors of 10 or 100 improvement. There just isn’t. And so in order to get more power, you just got to get bigger, bigger, bigger arrays. So [if] you can shrink those arrays to almost nothing. It gets a whole lot better for a variety of reasons.

09:48 – 09:57

TC: And they don’t work in eclipse.

So, you’ve got to calculate that and oversize it with batteries and the like. That’s not something you need to do with a nuclear power [source].

09:58 – 09:59

And then what about chemical propulsion?

09:59 – 10:42

BT: Well, chemical is the standard like we’re thinking about today’s traditional chemical thrusters. And the capability there is the ISP is a little bit less. The impulse is a lot more, but there’s a limited amount of it. You are volume-constrained or weight-constrained. So there’s architectures being considered.

Well, I’ll just refuel on orbit. Well that comes back to logistics. Now I’ve got to launch it, right? Now, I go back to the launch weight from the surface of the Earth. I mean, one of the discussions of going to the moon is, from the water ice, can I extract hydrogen and oxygen to make chemical propulsion on the moon?

Because the gravity is a lot less and I can get things off the moon as opposed to launching it from Earth [I can] launch it from the moon. But once again, this is coming back to chemical, which can be consumed relatively rapidly compared to nuclear.

10:43 – 11:02 

DD: You really just want the heat that it creates. The heat that you can get from a reactor is much better than the heat you can get from a chemical reaction and combustion.

And that’s where you get twice the efficiency of a chemical rocket and yet you still get the thrust of a chemical rocket. So it’s kind of the best of both worlds.

11:03 – 11:22

Thank you. Now, the SPAR Institute is looking to develop a means for deploying nuclear energy in space – specifically through “nuclear fission.” 

But still, the term “nuclear energy” can be a pretty loaded one in today’s world – especially in national security circles.

So can we clarify what we mean by “nuclear energy” in the context of this conversation?

11:23 – 12:08

TC: Yeah, I think the main thing is to differentiate nuclear energy from a nuclear weapon. And a lot of times the public doesn’t necessarily understand that. And probably the main concern for this community is the policy.

And if we look at the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, it’s very clear to not put weapons of mass destruction and specifically nuclear weapons in space and so that’s not what we’re doing. We’re not putting a nuclear weapon. We’re using nuclear technology to simply generate electricity. So if you go back even in the 80s and some of the key most successful space programs that we’ve had, we had RTG, radio– help me out, Brad.

12:09 – 12:10

BT: Radioisotope thermal generation.

12:11 – 12:43

TC: It’s one of those terms that we, an acronym that we all know what it means, but you forget what it means. So those were the core of the Voyager, and anything that’s going to the outer planets and that is fundamentally nuclear technology, nuclear energy, for the source of energy. So that’s what we’re really talking about is using nuclear energy, but using it as a reactor. So that is a harder thing to do. It’s taking – I’ll put the stink bomb out there and say it’s taking the Three Mile Island reactor. Making it safe to launch [and] putting it in space.

12:44 – 13:49

BT: Another factor to think about, Scott, is nuclear weapons: the uranium or plutonium is assembled in a critical fashion.

It’s driven together to design and create an uncontrollable reaction. That’s for the maximum energy consumption. 

And in the case of a nuclear reactor, it is critical. But you got a moderator in place that is designed to control the reaction in a way that you can sustain it for a very long period of time.

And then, you leverage that in the case of hydrogen or whatever for chemical propulsion effects or combined effects, or you can use it just to generate electric power. 

I mean, I think that’s one of the reasons why some of the early studies about well, going to Mars specifically with chemical versus nuclear thermal.

It’s like you get 2x half the transport time with what’s available today. So that shortens everything up. I think the reactors can operate quite a long time. It’s going to be well past the lifetime of the spacecraft. So that’s one of the issues with nuclear power in space is the policy side of disposal.

What does disposal mean? Where do you send it? Where do you put it? Particularly, if the reactor is going to be long-lived compared to other spacecraft, or how do you shut it down? 

From a mission-assurance standpoint. I mean, all those things are part of the trade space.

13:50 – 13:56

Can you share a little bit more about what Three Mile Island was and how events like it influence the public’s perception of what nuclear energy means?

13:57 – 15:33

BT: Yeah, so I would put this way: Up until Three Mile Island, Japan, France and the United States, in the free world, were probably the three leading countries in examining and using nuclear power for peaceful electric power generation purposes. 

And the accident at Three Mile Island, which stories [have been] written about the series of errors, human and machine and otherwise, that unfolded. It basically caused a couple of reactors to go through a partial meltdown. 

And the impact of that on U.S. public policy. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Atomic Energy, it basically set us back in the development side of nuclear power for decades. Japan and France continued forward. We didn’t. It never changed the physics. But the bottom line was the accident caused a complete change in the public mindset of whether this technology is safe.

That’s the long story short. But, yeah, the Japanese have had their own problem, though. They had – it was actually a trip I took with DARPA in 2014, we went to see Fukushima, which was where they had the great undersea earthquake in the Fukushima prefecture.

And the Japanese had a similar problem with the tsunami hitting the plant. So they’ve had their own. The French have never had a major accident. The Russians of course had Chernobyl. But it doesn’t change the physics of it.

And I’m hoping this time around with a lot of the new capital, with the need for AI data centers, for the desire to go to space with longer range systems, I’m hoping that this time around, we’ll we’re going to get ourselves the next step beyond past limitations.

15:34 – 15:41

So where do we go from here?

And how do we evaluate the trade-offs between those advantages, against some of the challenges that still need to be overcome?

15:42 – 17:55

TC: Principally again, if you could have a maneuver without regret. So essentially implementing an electric generator or nuclear electric generator that you could then utilize a high efficiency, high ISP, electric propulsion. And now, if you have 100kW, kinds of scale of power available, then you can start to get some pretty decent thrust out of that.

When we talk about electric propulsion, we kind of mentioned it earlier, we’re talking about very, very low thrust. We’re talking about very low force because it’s that ion thruster that’s using a very small amount of that ion. You know, I mean something like xenon, and then accelerating that to very, very high speeds using the electrical energy and then being able to change the Delta V of your spacecraft. We usually think about it in terms of micronewtons or even millenewtons, right?

On that scale of force from one of these electric ion thrusters. If you go from, again, having hundreds to 1000W to now 100,000 or a megawatt, you can again reasonably put that into an ion thruster and now you’re getting into a Newton, type of force. Now that doesn’t hurt your head so much to think about.

Well, what will it take to actually change your orbit, change your altitude or change your inclination? All of this takes a lot of thrust, a lot of Delta V. So, that’s really the principal reason why the Space Force has become interested in it. 

However, there are a lot of other things that you could do with this kind of energy and if we sort of shift over to our NASA brethren, if you want to spend any time on the moon, you’re going to spend 14 days in daylight and 14 days in night, unless of course, you’re standing right on the pole. 

But that’s a very, very harsh, harsh environment. And you’re going to want something that’s going to heat it. You’re going to need energy. And so it’s a very logical thing to be looking at nuclear energy for human habitation on the moon, even in Mars, you need to have some sort of source of energy that is not dependent upon the sun, which requires then a bunch of batteries. So this is the basic, sort of things that are driving initially, the push for nuclear energy.

17:56 – 18:18

DD: And then you get the bigger engines.

Even in the ‘60s, the earliest reactors they had were 300MW. So you can imagine they can get 1500 seconds of thrust and at 55,000 pounds. So, that enables going to the moon much quicker, going to Mars much quicker. And not having people spend 18 months in a can.

18:19 – 19:18

TC: So there’s one thing that we haven’t yet talked about, but it’s that you’re generating all this heat.

You use the heat to turn it into electricity somehow have to get rid of that excess heat. That is one of the major drawbacks from going this route. The good news is organizations like DARPA, and others have been looking at materials that, again, can maintain much higher temperatures and be effective radiators for a higher temperature nuclear reactor. 

So that’s one of the reasons I think that’s forcing this discussion, is that we can start to see a path towards developing those technologies that will make your thermal management system not the same size as your solar cell of equal generation and that’s almost your beginning point for most of these satellites is how big do I have to build my thermal radiator, in order to have…and you know what, Donna, what you just said is a 300 megawatt. Like, wow. How big would that heat thermal radiator be? That’s big.

19:19 – 19:21

DD: The amazing thing is that the engine was not that big.

19:22 – 21:35

BT: That just goes to show the power that these nuclear systems for electric purposes can generate is enormous. The phrase that was given to me was “Yeah, Brad. What good does it do to remove whatever 2000m² of solar array on a satellite if I’ve got to turn around to replace it with 2000m² of radiators? You’re still launching a lot of mass with the radiators, as well.“

So I’m hoping that the SPAR Institute, one of the things they can work on, is new techniques for thermal management and heat rejection. How do you do that? It’s going to be a big problem. It just is.

So, they talked about the capabilities. When I think about the risks there’s really three things that pop to mind.

One is risk on-launch. And there’s just the whole nature of: do you launch the system integrated? Do you launch it distributed? You can imagine taking reactor components and launching on three different spacecraft, three different launches. There’s different ways of doing it, but there’s a risk on-launch. And there’ll be regulatory, there’ll be policy, there’ll be mission assurance of that. So that’s one thing that has to be addressed and will be addressed and it’s just a challenge we’re going to have to work through. 

The second is mission assurance during operation, just because I launch and get it into orbit, I’ve got to have the mission assurance, like any other system, to make sure that it’s going to operate in a nominal way during its entire mission lifetime. So that’s the second parameter. So if people thought that mission assurance was already stringent, it’s going to go to a whole new level when it comes to nuclear power systems in space. 

And then the third is disposal. At end of life, there’s a whole set of risks and trades about how you do that. And even in fact, if you look at the Committee on Peaceful Use of Outer Space back in ‘92, were thinking through some of the principles of nuclear power sources in space.

And they talk about what’s okay. It’s okay to do a nuclear reactor – RTGs – for interplanetary. That’s not a problem. It’s okay to put them in high orbits. And it’s okay to put it in low-Earth orbit. But you gotta be able to store it in high orbits afterwards. This is all because – in the example of interplanetary, it’s not coming back.

So disposal is billions of miles away from me. Well, what does that mean in LEO, HEO, MEO or GEO? So there’s a whole set of things that deal with disposal and how that is effectively done. So that’s the way I think of the risks: launch, mission assurance in operation and disposal.

And all three of those must be addressed.

21:36 – 21:41

DD: I would also add collision avoidance. Goes with the requirements on the spacecraft to be maneuverable.

21:42 – 22:15

This is not the first time that the United States has looked toward developing nuclear energy for space. 

And primarily, there are two ways nuclear energy is being developed, the first being “nuclear thermal propulsion,” or NTP – which uses a propellant to split an atom within a nuclear reactor to generate heat, which then can create the thrust to maneuver a spacecraft.

One program that looked at this approach was the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application – or NERVA – which ran from the mid-1950s to the 1970s.

What’s the story behind NERVA?

22:16 – 22:53

DD: So there was a precursor called the Rover program, kind of Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission. And then NASA came in and took over in 1959 from the Air Force. And it’s an upper stage engine, using nuclear thermal propulsion and with hydrogen as the propellant.

They developed several reactors. The amount of power they could produce increased, and then they integrated it into an engine and started testing in 1964, and then went all the way through to the end of the program. And they [held] multiple tests, multiple reactors in terms of like 20 reactors. And, they never did launch it. Unfortunately.

22:54 – 23:13

BT: My understanding from going back through the history was Congress started to defund it in 1967 because of the cost of the Vietnam War.

They were balancing that versus a whole bunch of other national security things. And then I guess Nixon actually canceled the entire program in ‘73. But like Donna said, they did a lot of work and made tremendous progress. But – no launch.

23:14 – 23:20

And can you elaborate on some of NERVA’s progress? How would you describe the program’s legacy, today?

23:21 – 23:47

DD: I think it gave you a bunch of engineers and the experience to know how to deal with it and what policy problems – I’m sure they looked at launch and what it was, and it gave people an idea of how you would run a program for the future – which I think leads to things like DRACO and other programs that are going because without having that as the precursor and knowing you could even fire it, which they did on the ground.

Let us know that it’s possible.

23:48 – 24:05

BT: I’m biased, but technically this goes to the Three Mile Island thing, Donna. I wonder if the TRISO approach –  where you launch the pieces and either humans or autonomous systems assemble it on-orbit.

Maybe more tractable from a mission assurance standpoint and a safety on-launch that may help get past some of this. I don’t know.

24:06 – 24:17

DD: And autonomous, additive manufacturing, everything has come so much farther that perhaps you can put the risky part on a smaller, very reliable launch vehicle, and you can take more risk with the other parts.

24:18 – 24:38

Now, we just mentioned DRACO, which actually leads into my next question. DRACO, or the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, is an ongoing program overseen by DARPA. 

Dr. Tousley, based on your previous experience with the agency – can you explain what the DRACO program’s goals and objectives are?

24:39 – 26:37

BT: So DARPA started the program. It’s important to remember that DRACO was done, started, and is being executed in collaboration with NASA. There are two programs going on these days that are in direct collaboration with NASA for a variety of reasons: technical, policy, Outer Space Treaty. One is DRACO and the other is LunA-10. 

They’re both being done because whether it’s nuclear reactors in orbit or whether it’s infrastructure on the moon, both of them have to be in strict compliance with the Outer Space Treaty and public and policy perception. 

In the case of DRACO, it’s focused on nuclear thermal propulsion. It’s focused on the demonstration of the capability in orbit. I will say that the program is in the process of being re-baselined.

I will say that the program has a lot of technical challenges. We mentioned thermal management. That is arguably the biggest challenge that program is dealing with, is effectively managing the thermal dissipation and how that’s structured in a spacecraft, so that’s one piece technically and we’ll see where it goes. 

I do want to point out if we’re going to refer back to NERVA, when I looked at a line in the numbers: in 1970 dollars, they spent $1.3 billion on NERVA over the life of it. So if you consider 1970 to today’s dollars, [that will] give you an idea of the magnitude of what they spent at that time.

We haven’t come close to that with DRACO and JETSON and all the rest of them. We haven’t even come close. So it’s a huge amount at that time, maybe that’s 8 to 10 times the amount compared to today in terms of real dollars. 

But the one thing that gives me promise is, separate from DRACO and JETSON. The fact that a lot of private and venture capital is flowing into this because they assess the potential of the value of nuclear power on the ground and in space. The fact it’s coming into it. Maybe this time it’s going to help the government together to get over the hump of the funding and the challenges.

It’s not easy. It’s just not easy. So we’re going to have to get the staying power. But DRACO right now, they’ve re-baselined. I know they’ve got technical challenges, and I know they have program challenges that DARPA and NASA together are working through.

26:38 – 26:43

Can you elaborate on that disparity in funding available? 

Is it just the risk-averse nature of the “nuclear topic?”

26:44 – 28:11

BT: So, think of three things: there’s how much money do I spend on a project versus where can I spend it elsewhere? There’s the regulatory and policy. And then there’s the conservative mindset.

I don’t mean public, but I mean just reticence to try something new and risky. I think all three of those things combined make nuclear projects more difficult to work through. It’s not just in space, it’s on the ground as well, because you will always find people that say, “Yeah, you can do that, but I can do it this way. It may need more coal, it may be more natural gas. It may need something else. But I could do that today, because it’s safer.” 

‘Yeah, nuclear is much better. But look what’s happened in the past. Look at Three Mile Island, look at Fukushima, look at Chernobyl. What if that happens?’ So I think that just makes…and I’ll be blunt because I met the former director of the national Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a part of the Defense Science Board.

It just makes the NRC really, really, really conservative. The effective risk posture is no mistakes. None. The French have dealt with this for years, and they don’t seem to have the same mindset of zero tolerance for any mistake. They have a risk management profile that allows them to deal with it. 

Three Mile Island; nobody died from it. Nobody. I went to Fukushima and saw how the Japanese, they are going to spend thousands of years cleaning the land up the way it originally was. The Russians with Chernobyl, they just dug a hole and buried everything, right?

So we don’t have to be like that, but our mindset surely got to be a little more tolerant of risk calculus to allow us to make progress. The physics don’t lie. It’s always going to be wonderfully efficient.

28:12 – 28:45

Now, I’d like to shift to the other process for leveraging nuclear energy – and that is nuclear electric propulsion – or NEP.

This process uses nuclear fission to positively charge gas propellants, which in turn generate electricity to power an engine.

One such effort looking at this is JETSON – or the Joint Emerging Technology Supplying on-Orbit Nuclear Power – program.

Dr. Cooley, I understand you have a direct connection with JETSON from your time as chief scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory. 

So can you share what the JETSON program aims to accomplish?

28:46 – 31:13

TC: Yeah, sure. So let me tell you what I know about the JETSON program. And we really have to go back to the Department of Energy in Los Alamos who had a small program that was, I’m gonna call it a “hallway experiment,” because it was not well-funded, but it was to develop a small reactor, and run that for a period of time.

And that was, if I recall correctly, it was called KRUSTY and so out of that program, some of the engineers up at Los Alamos National Laboratories formed a small company called Space Nukes. And so Space Nukes had, again, this heritage of working on a very low power and I don’t recall – several just kilowatts of power.

So in the grand scheme of nuclear reactors, again, we’re very much on the low end of this. But it started the idea of, “Well, can we take this relatively small device and use that for all the benefits that we’ve talked about in terms of space energy?” 

And so the JETSON program really emerged from that idea and, with Space Nukes and a number of other larger primes who are involved in that, including Lockheed Martin.

But essentially, if we want to understand what exactly was announced or what the program is, it is funding Intuitive Machines based in Houston. You have again, I’ve mentioned Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse. All of these companies are looking at, I’m gonna defer to Brad in terms of some of the risks associated with it, but to take a small reactor like what was done, in the hallway of Los Alamos.

And I believe they did that actually out at the Nevada Test Site that they’ve created this small reactor and can you get it into space? And so the purpose of that is, again, to go back to electric thrusters, so, powering an ion thruster using this electric energy. But the hard part of this really is the reactor getting that into space safely, so that you can use it for, again, myriad purposes. Specifically, though, for the Space Force funding, as a thruster.

So this is just a really important distinction. The DRACO program is a nuclear thermal propulsion, NTP, and the JETSON program is NEP, nuclear electric propulsion.

31:14 – 31:30

Now, I also want to call out a separate government looking to develop a mobile nuclear reactor that can be used for primarily land-based purposes: and that’s Project Pele by the Strategic Capabilities Office. 

Dr. Tousley, what relevance does Project Pele have to this conversation?

31:31 – 33:16

BT: Yeah, Scott. So Project Pele, is an attempt to develop a prototype reactor and put it on a military base to demonstrate the efficacy of essentially remote power sources for basing that are in distant places, right? And the Strategic Capabilities Office has been looking at this. The reason I think it’s important to note this for consideration is that in this case, investment and research development for terrestrial power sources can affect longer range advancement for small modular reactors that could be used in space.

And so I think that’s something to note that the nuclear power industry is watching as the Department advances, in this case a small modular reactor that could be used on a military base. Military bases have different regulatory authorities of what they can deploy on their own. In the particular case of Project Pele, the construct is there’s a base up in Alaska, Eilson Air Force Base.

It’s very remote. It’s difficult to get fossil fuel sources in there in the winter to resupply. So they’re greatly constrained about when the logistics that can show up and support that base exist. The theory is if we get a small modular reactor up there to power the infrastructure, to power some of the systems that are up there – that would be a lot wiser to do that.

So that’s why SCO helped to pay for this project going forward. Some of the same performers that Tom pointed out on JETSON are in the trade space of consideration for these small reactors. But the reason I bring it up is it’s in the Department. It’s under different authorities and policies. They’re doing it for terrestrial mobile power purposes, but if they make progress and they develop it – I think it’s going to continue to help the business case for continued investment to get through the challenges in space, as well.

33:17- 33:29

So, now that we’ve reflected on some of the historical and ongoing programs developing nuclear energy. What happens if we’re ultimately successful in finding a way to safely and efficiently deploy nuclear energy in space?

33:30 – 33:38

DD: Obviously going to the moon, going to Mars and making a more efficient use of space in our own cis-Earth space.

33:39 – 34:03

BT: Yeah, I completely agree, it means you can move around without regret. It means, “Hey, maybe I can put systems on the moon that I can’t today. I can operate through the night. Maybe I can start thinking about true manufacturing, logistics, and resupply in space in a way I can’t do today.” I could see a future where you dedicate all kinds of reusable launch to get nuclear capabilities up in orbit.

You assemble it up there, and then everything in space is powered with nuclear. I could imagine that 100 years from now.

34:04 – 34:07

DD: And that opens us up to the resources of what the solar system.

34:08 – 34:11

BT: Absolutely. [It] changes everything – changes mankind’s assumption on everything.

34:12 – 35:28

TC: It really does. One of the other things, too, that I get excited about and I think is really emerging is all the debris in space.

When you think about how many rocket bodies we’ve launched historically, all this material is up there that is essentially a danger to operating in space. You have to keep track of it. Not so much the big pieces as the little pieces, because there are so many more of them. But the idea of being able to reuse all this material that’s there, you have to re-manufacture that. You cannot do that without a tremendous amount of energy, both to actually go grab the thing and maneuver it where you need it, but then also to actually turn it into something useful, right?

This also goes for, again, using in space natural resources. If you want to go catch an asteroid. We need to be thinking about those types of opportunities. You can’t do that unless you have a lot of energy and you have some infrastructure. 

And to Brad’s point, that’s exactly the kinds of things that nuclear energy will start to flip the thinking to where we can utilize all these dead rocket bodies that we’ve put up there, other satellites, other things of that sort. Solve two problems at once: Building the future infrastructure, at the same time, cleaning up the old one.

35:29 – 36:35

BT: What I learned one time was, thinking through sailing ships, steamships, to nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. When the United States went to a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, it was because the distances and the deployments we had, put such a burden, infrastructure-wise, on conventional fossil fuel-based sources to get our ships around the world that with Rickover and others, we got over the hurdle – the whole regulatory side of it.

The nuclear Navy’s incredibly safe and now the entire U.S. Navy really depends on nuclear power for a global power projection. Well, if you think about the heavens, my gosh, there’s no more of a natural analogy of using nuclear power in space than how we changed the U.S. Navy’s operations globally with nuclear power. It makes perfect sense. I mean, like Tom said, for lack of a better term, imagine if you had a nuclear-powered recycle truck or trash truck in space.

It might make sense to use that to clean up all of LEO of all the dead satellites. It doesn’t make sense with conventional propulsion to do that, but with nuclear, it might make perfect sense. And then you clean everything up once at the end of life, you don’t have to de-orbit it at all. You move it some ways distant into outerspace.

You know, It just changes everything.

36:36 – 36:46

On this idea of “recycling” or even extracting natural resources in space – what value does a spent rocket body or an asteroid have in a “recycled” or second life, so to speak?

36:47 – 37:47

TC: You kind of have to think of it as a raw material resource. You’re not going to use it as is, but you’re going to need to break it down. Now, that depends on what you’re starting with, but let’s just assume we have to go back down to its raw material basis. The only way you’re going to do that is with a lot of energy and then again, have the infrastructure.

This is not going to happen in the next 5 to 10 years. This is a long-term goal. But if we in the United States want to be leading that change, leading that new emerging industry and capability, we need to be investing in it now and being willing to take the risk.

Going back to what Brad sort of laid the groundwork: we have to be not so timid, and so scared of the specter of a Three Mile Island, which thanks for pointing out – no one died from that. We need to be thinking more broadly about how do we advance these technologies and enable companies to emerge and support them with policies, support them with the technology that it’s going to take to ultimately bring about that future.

37:48 – 38:08

And then how about In-Space Assembly and Manufacturing (or ISAM)? 

Dr. Tousley, you suggested earlier that one solution to getting nuclear-powered systems into space might be launching materials separately before assembling the system together in space.

So what opportunity can ISAM serve in this nuclear energy in space question?

38:09 – 39:10

BT: My thought about the in-space assembly and manufacturing of nuclear reactors is very specific. The biggest concern with launching a reactor is the material itself. It’s not the reactor structure. So you could imagine, for example, if you launch the reactor structure with one rocket and then the material, whether it’s TRISO pellets or otherwise, you launch them in distributed launches elsewhere where they’re actually spatially separated on the launch vehicle, the risk of an accident, or the risk of re-entry of any of those is minuscule at that point.

The problem is when you put it all together in an existing infrastructure and then you attempt to launch it, there is some concern in the mission assurance community that something bad could happen on re-entry. But one of my points was if you separate them, you separate the material from the actual structure of the reactor itself. You can separate things in a way that the risk goes almost to zero.

That’s just an example of how creatively we can make sure that we’re adhering to the Outer Space Treaty, and we’re adhering to safe, effective mission assurance practices.

39:11 – 39:34

Now, I’d like to bring it back to the SPAR Institute – a multifaceted effort across eight universities and 14 industry partners, that are all tackling different aspects of the nuclear energy development problem.

So how does the SPAR Institute reflect the collaborative approach – between government, industry, and academia – that is necessary to address these complex problems in national security space?

39:35 – 40:16

BT: I mean, if I remember correctly, I think University of Michigan is the lead. They’ve been involved in quite a few really demanding R&D projects in the past.

I know they’ve got a strong group on propulsion, electric propulsion. It looks like it’s a five-year effort, $35 million. That’s why it’s smaller in comparison to other programs and efforts. But one of the reasons I made the comment about human capital is – that I would argue that the biggest benefit we’re going to get from that is going to be funding these graduate students to work in an area that is critical to us.

So, in other words, they may only work on this effort for 2 or 3 years, but then they could end up working in the industry, supporting the U.S. government in this for the next 30. That’s the value. It’s the collaboration. It’s getting these people engaged.

40:17 – 40:44 

DD: You know, one thing we’re not addressing is what other countries are doing.

Competition is really the key. Having things like the SPAR Institute just creates new businesses, new technologies, and it just keeps the American engine going.

If other countries are doing that, their engines are going too, and we want to do some things that lift all boats. But I think we should really focus a lot on doing it for ourselves and knowing that it will lift other countries, too.

40:45 – 41:15

BT: At least with DARPA, I think DRACO and LunA-10 are examples of the U.S. government and NASA working together in a way that reinforces the value of the Outer Space Treaty and yet enhances our technological advancement in a productive way.

It’s not clear that other countries truly merge their civil and their government space programs together in a way that supports the Outer Space Treaty as opposed to ruptures it. But I know that we spent a lot of time as a nation focusing on doing things collaboratively, in that way.

41:16 – 41:25

And what about commercial and industry partners? What opportunities exist for them to be part of this effort in finding a solution, through programs like the SPAR Institute – or otherwise?

41:26 – 42:31

BT: There are a number of companies that are getting into 21st century small reactor concepts. Believe it or not, I don’t think it starts with space. Most of the money is flowing in. It’s coming from private capital. It’s coming from a lot of the big technology companies specifically for one reason, and that is that it’s pretty clear that the nationwide demands on data center needs for processing, computation and memory are driving huge growth in data centers.

And because of that, it’s pretty clear that that growth is going to drive stresses on the United States power grid. And I think a lot of these data companies know it and many of them are investing their own money in new starts that are focused on advanced nuclear reactors and power systems. They realize it’s going to be 10-15 years to get through all the regulation side of it, but they believe that there’s a pony there, and so many of them are investing in that.

I think the U.S. government’s going to benefit from that in terms of people, technology advancements. They’ll be questioning business practices, the policies, all that. The U.S. government is going to benefit from that. I’m bullish on that.

42:32 – 42:45

I want to go a step further on this role of private capital. We discussed earlier some of the funding shortfalls that resulted from events like Three Mile Island.  

But can you share more on the value private capital can provide in overcoming those funding shortfalls?

42:46 – 44:11

BT: So, I’ll put it this way in the past Three Mile Island the infrastructure necessary for nuclear power is enormously capital-intensive.

And it was a question of well, are we going to go down the nuclear path with all the challenges? Are we going to default back to traditional fossil fuel-based approaches. After Three Mile Island, the assumption was we’re going to go back. Don’t want to deal with this again. We have all this electricity that we could gain from hydroelectric.

I’m not even going to include solar because it’s contribution is so minuscule. But solar, oil, natural gas, coal those things can generate most of the baseload production we need. What’s happened in the last ten years is the rate of growth of demands on the power grid from the data centers has grown so fast, and the criticality that the United States and the economy is so important that the U.S. government didn’t need to convince a bunch of companies this is going to be important.

A bunch of these companies all by themselves, realize the cost per kilowatt hour is going to go up. It’s going to put more of a demand. This is a supply and demand challenge. They realize the demand is growing and so they’ve identified a portion of their capital is dedicated to venture capital investment in these new companies. Compared to – I’ll just put it bluntly – compared to DRACO, JETSON and Pele, it’s going to dwarf that and I think the U.S. government will benefit from that.

The thing, I will say, they won’t invest in the we that we have to think about in the Department and from an Elara Nova standpoint. The challenge the JETSON and DRACO both have is this thermal management issue. They’re not going to address that. Nobody else is going to focus on thermal management in space.

They’re not.

44:12 – 45:32

TC: I’ll just chime in and say that I agree with Brad’s assessment that the terrestrial demand for nuclear energy is going to drive the train. And, I’m really excited, though, to know that there are a number of space-focused companies that are thinking hard about how to bridge that gap, and think through all the safety and assembling something in space.

If it’s up to me, I would suggest that we should have a program that’s not DRACO. That’s not JETSON. That’s going to think through and enable other companies to enter this and learn the lessons about how do we do this safely? How will we assemble something in space? Can we focus the ISAM community, for example, on this very problem?

Those are the types of things that I think very much fit into the role of government. And that I’d like to see the government, take the leadership role and then give something like, a vision for investment communities, for companies to rally around and know that there’s going to be a longer-term funding stream as well as an end user at the end of the day.

Those are some really important components to be able to actually take all of the great seed corn that we have going into a program like SPAR and put it into a brand new industry.

45:32 – 45:40

And to really drive home the opportunity of using nuclear energy in space – what would this capability mean for the Space Force and its Allies?

45:41 – 45:59

DD: So they can maneuver without regret.

Spacecraft are going between 7 and 17,000 miles an hour. So it’s not easy to change your orbit. And it takes either a lot of fuel or a lot of time. Maneuvering without regret means having satellites and systems that can eliminate regret with new capabilities.

46:00 – 46:13

BT: It’ll allow us to maneuver without regret and in particular with our partners and allies. We can collaborate with them on the capability, enable them to do it as well. And I think it’ll change the entire free-loving world’s ability to protect our space assets and be resilient.

46:14 – 46:29

TC: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. We want to be able to drive the train in terms of policy, how it’s used. Again, utilizing the resources that today is space debris. Those are the types of things we want to be on the front-end instead of watching others do that.

46:30 – 46:49

Each of you are partners at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy. How does the complex nuclear energy discussion we had today – from its opportunities and risks, to the technical, policy and funding challenges that still need to be overcome – represent how Elara Nova is well-suited to be a key partner in these challenges?

46:50 – 47:39

BT: I think there’s 3 or 4 things, critically, we could do. Number one, we can support companies that are trying to grow into this area. From the standpoint of those that are outside of the U.S. government, they want to get in – that’s one thing. 

I think we can help bridge the gap on discussing and talking to folks about some of the policy challenges, because at Elara Nova we do have a lot of folks that are former military, former Space Force that understand that. 

I think we could help ring out some of the wheat from the chaff on the technical stories. So if there’s companies that have technical capability, but they want to get an assessment from folks that understand technically the challenges and understand how the Space Force operates, we can help them refine their messages in a way that’s really productive for them.

And then the last thing I think is just from a transition standpoint as they achieve success. We can help them understand what are the challenges to the transition, the great work that they’ve done into operations and into production for the Space Force.

47:40 – 48:17

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security. As a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in space security.

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. This episode was edited and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.

Study Recognizes the Value of Commercial Space Systems in Military Requirements 

In November of 2022, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering commissioned the Defense Science Board (DSB) to study commercial space systems and how they can be leveraged in support of Department of Defense (DOD) objectives. As the Federal Advisory Committee to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the DSB engaged government and space industry stakeholders to assess the opportunities and challenges to integrating commercial space systems into military requirements. The study’s resulting document, “Final Report on Commercial Space System Access and Integrity,” was published nearly two years later with five recommendations toward what the DSB called its bottom line objective: “Integrated Deterrence Requires Integrated Operations.” 

“The bottom line of ‘Integrated Deterrence Requires Integrated Operations,’ means we must budget and plan in advance to provide maximum capability to the warfighter,” said Dr. Brad Tousley, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy and a member of the Defense Science Board. “Economic power is a critical element to our military power. If commercial space capabilities exist that can support DOD objectives, they should be integrated into warfighter training now.” 

Dual-Use Technologies in Space 

The Defense Science Board’s findings come as an emerging commercial space market is increasingly developing “dual-use technologies,” or commercial space capabilities that can also be applied toward DOD objectives.  

“Commercial space systems bring the collection and distribution of information to the fight,” said Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova. “For example, the military needs satellite communications to transmit orders from commanders to troops in the field, ships at sea and airplanes in the air, which is the same technology that puts the World Series in every home. Further, commercial satellite images that support economic monitoring of crude oil movement through ports around the world can also find Russian convoys in Ukraine.” 

Commercial space systems have demonstrated their military value since the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. However, the Ukrainian military’s reliance on commercial space systems was not planned in advance, but rather came as a result of the inherent responsiveness of commercial space technologies.  

Understanding Commercial Space 

Now, the DOD is looking to understand how the commercial space industry – and the institutional investors financially backing it – can similarly be factored into their own warfighting plans today.  

“Prior to the pandemic, commercial investment in space technologies peaked at about $15 billion a year, which was essentially the same as the Space Force’s budget in Fiscal Year 2021,” Dickey said. “Leveraging that commercial investment becomes a huge opportunity for the Department to double its financial resources toward space capabilities for military operations.” 

The Defense Science Board defined “commercial space,” across four elements: innovation, development, products and services. But the report prioritized the two elements that can provide immediate value to a modern or future conflict: commercial products and commercial services.  

“From a near-term standpoint, the Defense Science Board’s goal was to offer a set of recommendations for applying commercial solutions to immediate DOD needs,” Dr. Tousley said. “There are a variety of commercial space products or services the DOD can buy now, as demonstrated by the use of commercial space systems in Ukraine.” 

Planning for Commercial Integration 

To this end, the Defense Science Board offered five recommendations toward facilitating the growth of commercial space markets in ways that also align to fulfilling DOD objectives.  

The first recommendation calls on the government to “implement an end-to-end framework to better integrate existing and planned commercial capabilities into national security architectures.”  

This recommendation stems from opportunities to utilize commercial space technologies that have already matured, much like the commercial satellite communication (SATCOM) networks that exist today.  

“United States Space Command has a Commercial Integration Cell that sits at Vandenberg Space Force Base primarily supporting satellite communications,” Dickey said. “By sitting with Space Command, those satellite communication providers are aware of ongoing operations and threats to their commercial systems, so they can translate those potential issues into enhancements, upgrades or defensive cyber operations to guarantee resiliency against the threat before a crisis emerges.” 

While the Commercial Integration Cell at Vandenberg is an example of integrating a mature commercial space capability at the operational level, not all commercial space markets have reached the same level of maturity that makes this collaboration possible. However, the DOD can apply the same financial strategies it uses to buy services from the SATCOM market to support the growth of other emerging capabilities, too. 

Budgeting and PPBE Flexibility 

One of the significant advantages of a mature commercial space services market is the ability to respond to the ebbs and flows of supply and demand. Long-term budgeting for these variations, however, is difficult to predict. In the SATCOM market, the government has solved this by making use of a Defense Working Capital Fund as a funding tool. 

“The working capital fund basically creates a checkbook that the government can use each year in the commercial market to support a certain requirement,” Dickey said. “DOD users can transfer money into that checkbook and have the purchases made on their behalf. With a multi-year funding process and the working capital fund, the DOD can get better market pricing that will drive the cost down for a service, while providing transparency to companies and their investors about the government’s buying habits.” 

The Defense Science Board further addressed challenges in the DOD’s budgeting process directly in its second recommendation: “integrate evaluation of and provision for commercial space services into institutional processes.” 

The DOD currently develops its budget through an institutional process known as Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Evaluation (PPBE). But the long-established PPBE process lacks the flexibility needed to keep pace with the rapid developments of commercial space technologies. 

As such, the Defense Science Board advocates for more flexible funding measures within the PPBE process. In addition to the working capital fund model found in their first recommendation, the DSB also supports the flexible reallocation of operations and management (O&M) funds that were similarly recommended by a Congressionally mandated Commission on PPBE Reform earlier this year.  

“Program executive officers need flexibility to move funds between program elements year-to-year, because sometimes one program might under-spend on a service or product, while another might have a greater need,” Dr. Tousley said. “So if the government can adopt a multi-year acquisition reform and leverage working capital fund-like models, the commercial market will have clarity on market demand. Then as long as Congress can review a multi-year appropriation in the appropriations process, their equities are served.”  

Guaranteeing Resilience of Commercial Space Systems 

A greater reliance on commercial space systems, however, presents its own set of risks for the DOD’s military requirements. These risks influenced the Defense Science Board’s third recommendation: “incentivize trust and build resilience in commercial providers.” 

“The government can include resilience of a commercial space capability as a quality-of-service requirement, while acknowledging that quality assurance is going to cost more,” Dr. Tousley said. “But as long as the additional price is factored in as part of the economic model, then the vendors know what they have to do to ensure resiliency, and the government can rely on the enhanced capability as a function of the increased pricing.”  

Commercially available space technologies also present the risk of adversaries leveraging them against the United States and its Allies. The Defense Science Board acknowledges this likelihood in its fourth recommendation: “develop suite of capabilities to monitor, assess and respond to adversary use of commercial space capabilities.” 

“Commercial partners and the government have to acknowledge that adversaries will want to use the same commercial capabilities that we would want to use,” Dr. Tousley said. “So commercial vendors must ensure the U.S. government’s interest is best protected in a way that does not damage the commercial industry’s international growth.” 

Government as Regulator, Investor and Customer 

Navigating the complexities of the commercial space market may be a challenging endeavor, but the state of each market can inform how the DOD develops its policy. This dynamic created the Defense Science Board’s fifth recommendation: “account for maturity of the commercial market when making decisions on how it regulates, invests and buys commercial space services.”  

The Defense Science Board proposes the DOD do this by avoiding over-regulation, while investing for “market creation, not market monopolization.” As an example, Dr. Tousley points to how the DOD actively relies on the GEO commercial satellite communications market today, while understanding the more nascent proliferated Low-Earth Orbit (pLEO) and cislunar markets will require a more calculated investment to facilitate their growth. 

“Over-regulation can restrict a robust domestic market, while inhibiting commercial competition internationally,” Dr. Tousley said. “Competition in the commercial space market serves the DOD’s best interest in the long term with more competitive pricing, so the government must account for market maturity when it evaluates how it’s going to regulate, invest and buy these commercial space services.” 

This final recommendation highlights the key challenge for the DOD as it looks to engage the more nascent industries within the commercial space market.  

As an “anchor tenant,” the DOD can provide critical, early-stage funding for emerging space companies to grow their capability into a total addressable market. But the government’s influence can also inadvertently prevent other competitors from entering the market by creating “vendor lock” with a single provider, thereby also reducing the resiliency for a given military requirement. 

“There are ways to navigate the government’s role as an anchor tenant while avoiding vendor lock,” Dickey said. “The government can put down the first investment in an emerging space technology as its first and majority customer, but the government also needs to mitigate the risk of vendor lock by creating on-ramps for other providers into the market and off-ramps for those who fall short of mutually agreed expectations.” 

Achieving Integrated Deterrence 

With each of these recommendations realized, the DOD can apply the lessons learned in Ukraine to achieve “integrated deterrence.”  

“‘Integrated deterrence’ means the United States must integrate commercial capabilities into its military operations upfront,” Dr. Tousley said. “What happened in Ukraine demonstrates the agility and responsiveness of the commercial space market, but we must remember that wasn’t planned in advance. The government needs to plan for integrated operations now by developing contracts with the commercial space sector, because the DOD can’t just hope that a commercial space company is going to be there in an emergency.”  

Now, partners at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy, are positioned to provide their expertise to stakeholders similarly exploring solutions at the cross-section of military requirements and commercial space capabilities. 

“Elara Nova lives at the intersection of the government, industry and the investment market,” Dickey said. “Elara Nova partners have direct experience in each of these sectors of the space economy, so we offer a unique opportunity to support the implementation of the Defense Science Board’s recommendations.”  

Elara Nova is a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain. Learn more at https://elaranova.com/. 

Episode 19: Defense Science Board Offers Commercial Pathway to Integrated Deterrence 

Host: Scott King (SK) 

SME: Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy (MD)

Dr. Brad Tousley, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy and Defense Science Board member (BT)

00:02 – 01:43 

SK: In November of 2022, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering commissioned the Defense Science Board – or DSB – a Federal Advisory Committee serving the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to study the commercial space market and how their systems can be leveraged to support Department of Defense – or DOD – objectives.

The study came in direct response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier that year, when commercial space systems provided critical capabilities in support of Ukraine’s defense. The use of these commercial space systems in Ukraine, however, was not planned in advance – but rather occurred organically at the onset of the invasion.

Now, the DOD wants to apply the lessons learned and capitalize on similar opportunities to integrate commercial space capabilities into their own military requirements.

The study concluded in May of 2024, when the Defense Science Board published its “Final Report on Commercial Space System Access and Integrity,” which provided five recommendations toward what the DSB determined to be its bottom line objective: “Integrated Deterrence Requires Integrated Operations.”

Welcome to “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security.” I’m your host, Scott King, and today we’ll be exploring the Defense Science Board’s Final Report and how its recommendations offer a pathway toward integrating commercial space capabilities into military requirements. 

Returning to The Elara Edge today is our first guest: Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy and the former Chief Architect of the United States Space Force. 

Mike, welcome to the show!

01:43 – 01:44  

MD: Well thanks, Scott. Glad to be back. 

01:45 – 02:01 

SK: We’re happy to have you.  

And our second guest today is Dr. Brad Tousley, who in addition to being a partner at Elara Nova, is a member of the Defense Science Board and directly contributed to the Final Report we’ll be discussing today.  

Dr. Tousley, thanks for taking the time to join us today.  

02:02 – 02:03 

BT: Thanks, Scott. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

02:04 – 02:29 

SK: Now, the Defense Science Board’s Final Report comes at a time when the budding relationships between the military and the emerging commercial space market is drawing more and more attention. 

I’d like to begin by understanding how we reached this point. Why are commercial companies – and the institutional investors financially supporting them – entering the space domain? And why has this development captured the DOD’s attention? 

Mike, let’s start with you. 

02:30 – 04:03 

MD: Yeah and it’s very interesting. This is what we call dual-use technology. Those technologies that the commercial world is maybe focusing for commercial purposes can be transitioned into military use and vice versa. 

Just a couple of examples, in the communications business, the military needs communications worldwide so that they can transmit orders from commanders to troops in the field, ships at sea, airplanes in the air. But it’s also the same technology that brings you the World Series, for instance.  

And in the imagery market, the imagery can be used to find Russian convoys on highways in Ukraine. And it can also be used to monitor crude oil movement through ports around the world, which has obviously important impacts on the market.  

PNT – positioning, navigation and timing. You use that to put bombs in very precise places to limit collateral damage. You also need that for precision farming, so farmers can increase yields in their crops by knowing where exactly to put fertilizer.  

So, all of these technologies have a whole bunch of markets they can address. So when you’re an investor, you look at total addressable market and, by doing both military and commercial things with your technology, you get access to much bigger markets and coupled with the reduced barrier in access to launch, has made it cheaper to get to orbit so now something that’s more doable from an investor’s capital.  

But those are the kinds of things that have driven the ability for commercial to come in and play in this world and not just sovereign governments. 

04:04 – 05:11 

BT: I would just add two minor points to that. 

Number one, there’s a physical attribute within space that’s a little bit unique here, and that is that in other, I’ll say, warfighting domains, you can separate capabilities, military and commercial capabilities. But in the space domain, because of orbital dynamics, everything is intermingled. So what that means is – if I already have commercial capabilities in space and they’re growing because of the market pull, like Mike talked about, those systems are going to be physically GEO-located with military needs. So I think that’s one reason why you’re seeing this growth.  

The other is the cost of launch, particularly in the last 15-20 years, has come down so much that as interest rates stay low, the private capital that’s always seeking the maximum return in a capitalist society – that return is going to be seen as promising. 

And I think space has seen that. And when the fact that when launch comes down by a factor of ten and interest rates drop, all of a sudden you see these opportunities, venture capitalists are going to take that money, they’re going to flow it wherever they think there is a return. And space has been really arguably the hottest area of growth the last five years and all of the market projections indicate it’s not going to slow down for 10 to 15, 20 years.  

05:12 – 05:52 

MD: In the government’s Fiscal Year of 21, which was kind of the peak of where commercial investment was before the pandemic and a bunch of other things, the commercial market was investing in those dual-use technologies about $15 billion a year. 

The Space Force’s budget in Fiscal Year 21 was $15 billion a year. So you literally had two Space Force’s worth of budget that you could apply to the problems that that the military had if you did that in the right way. And so that’s a huge opportunity for the Department of Defense to leverage that kind of investment. 

And we’ll talk about all the different ways that they can leverage it. So I think we’re still in a long period here of a lot of outside money coming into the space business. 

05:53 – 06:22 

SK: These market developments have sparked a series of commercial space strategies across various DOD organizations. 

But effectively integrating commercial space capabilities into military strategy also presents complex challenges, the first of which is the somewhat broad understanding of what actually defines quote – unquote “commercial space.” 

Dr. Tousley, can you explain how the Defense Science Board defined “commercial space?”  

And how does this understanding influence the government’s relationship with the commercial space market? 

06:23 – 07:12 

BT: Within the Terms of Reference and within that study, we really defined “commercial” in four buckets. We defined things as commercial innovation, which is more on the research end – which think of AFWERX and SPACEWERX and DIU and the things they are funding. 

Then the second bucket we kind of identified is commercial development. So think of commercial systems that are being built and the government is trying to buy them in bulk for government use.  

Then the third thing is essentially buying a commercial product, which means systems the commercial world is already building, and we just want to buy copies of it. 

And then the last is services. The commercial world always builds things and offers them to customers for services, in this case the Department of Defense, the Space Force, the intelligence community.  

They want to be acquiring these services, so we think of them in terms of those in bulk: innovation, development, products and services.   

07:13 – 08:26 

MD: The language here is really important because companies will come in and say, ‘Well, I’m a commercial company.’ So they think that that opens up a new world for them. But again, the language is important. What makes you a commercial company? If the government wants to think that when you say you’re a commercial company, you have something with a big market and you want the DOD to be one extra buyer in that market, and so you can just kind of buy at the margins. 

That’s typically not been the case with some of these space companies, because the commercial markets in space have still not truly matured except in communications, probably, you can say that that’s a mature market.  

But all the other markets, it’s still not mature. So really what these companies typically want is for the government to kind of be an anchor customer, to be their first customer, to be the biggest buyer of that product or that service. 

And then allow that to be a demand signal to the rest of the world that a commercial market is possible through these products and services. So, it really starts the conversation, perhaps in a bad place because you can be one of those where you’re just one of many buyers or you could use the Federal Acquisition Regulations to buy in a commercial way and I think a lot of times that conversation will kind of spiral and slow down the progress between the commercial companies and the government.  

08:27 – 09:33 

BT: With the emergence of this robust commercial market. We think it’s important for the government as a wise customer to understand how they can affect the market in a good way or a bad way. 

You have these companies, they want to grow into all these addressable markets. And yet the government what you really want long-term is you want a good, robust ecosystem of competitors. 

So the prices stay in a margin range that’s acceptable. You can understand it. And so as some companies succeed and some fail, you aren’t totally reliant on one company. So the concern is that depending upon how the market unfolds, the government needs to be careful not to get themselves locked into a vendor lock.  

Now, if I’m a commercial vendor, I want vendor lock. I want you to buy everything I have and don’t buy anything from my competitor. That’s capitalism. That’s my market drive.  

But on the government side, when you’re supporting the warfighter and delivering operational capability. You want the capability, you want the best, but you also don’t want to be dependent on one vendor because you don’t know what will happen down the line. 

You want prices to stay in control, and you want competition. I mean, that’s good. So there’s that balancing act that the U.S. government has to be concerned about and that’s kind of what we call out in terms of being careful of vendor lock. 

09:34 – 10:40 

MD: There are ways to navigate through that. It can get complicated and it’s tough, but an anchor tenant really means that, ‘I’m going to go in and I will put down the first investment in this technology. I’ll be the first customer. You know, I’ll be 51% or more of what you’re doing with the anticipation that other markets, the other markets are going to mature, other customers will come and you’re part of that customer pie will reduce over time.‘ 

You know, the government’s been bitten by this a little bit. And even in space with the first commercial imagery contracts, there were a couple of providers for that. As the government’s fiscal situation changed over time, the government couldn’t be anchor tenants for two. That sort of reduced to one and then now you get into this conversation, well have I created vendor lock because I was an anchor tenant? 

So there’s a real concern, I think some of that gives the government pause on wanting to do that again. But I think they can find ways to back out of that. 

You can have on-ramps for other vendors. You can switch to a different type of a model where, ‘Okay, the government’s going to have to start just defining requirements,’ kind of like we used to do back in the day. But those things are all sort of painful for all parties, but it’s a necessary part of maturing what it is we’re trying to do here.

10:41 – 12:49 

BT: One of the other things that we discovered in the course of this study was there is not unanimity of understanding across the Department, and I mean all the services of what the law and what the policy allows the United States government to buy or to leverage. 

And what I mean by that is we actually went to some of the general counsels of the services and said, ‘What do you understand as inherently governmental functions in space? And you did not find agreement across the board. And specifically what we discovered was it was very explicit in the law, in that pretty much the only thing required for the U.S. Air Force, I’ll say with the Air Force is nuclear command and control is a military and a government function. Period. 

That will never, ever be commercial. But there are a host of other things that said, ‘No, that could be commercial, no it can’t.’ And what we discovered was that the difference in interpretation comes down to what’s the law say versus what is your policy. And unfortunately right now there’s not complete concurrence across the Department that’s causing part of the concern. 

For example, is missile tracking, is that only military or could there be elements of that that could be commercial? Well, in fact, there are elements of that could be commercial. The law doesn’t specify missile tracking as being only military, and but the policy does. And so if there’s commercial entities out there, for example, that are developing infrared sensors for crop monitoring – is that commercial? Well, no, that’s only military.  

So the reason I bring it up is that it’s important in understanding the emerging market dynamics for the government to be able to understand and operate that way. And unfortunately, we’re not there yet. But one of the things that we recommend is that there being careful look at the integration of capabilities. 

And the other term we came up with was, integrated deterrence, which means that capabilities of the entire United States between military and commercial requires integrated operations early on. 

We’ve identified that integrated operations are not happening in the planning phase upfront. So what happened in Ukraine. It wasn’t planned in advance. Our recommendation is these sorts of capabilities are emerging quickly now. Let’s think about integrated operations, upfront integrated contracts, all that. Get that laid out now and not try and have to respond later. 

12:50 – 13:05 

SK: And within those four definitions to “commercial space,” the Defense Science Board placed a specific emphasis on what it described as the more near-term elements: commercial products and commercial services.  

Dr. Tousley, can you explain why this emphasis was necessary? 

13:06 – 14:12 

BT: Frankly, when we started digging in on it – in those four buckets we identified from a near-term standpoint. There’s tremendous opportunities, particularly in commercial satellite communications and communications as a service. 

There’s particular opportunities there right now. There’s still questions about how that service model operates and how much the Department should leverage. There was concerns about essentially multi-year funding and color of money and working capital funds in terms of how those models could be implemented.  

The second was there was a variety of products that you can buy right now. And in fact, whether you consider it a product or a service the, you know, what was going on in Ukraine was very clearly something – it’s happening quickly – so from an near-term standpoint, helping the Department arrive at a set of recommendations to implement that right now, you could think, ‘Well, why didn’t you go into more refined evaluation of Space Development Agency with commercial development or DIU and SpaceWERX and innovation’ like that’s already going on quickly. 

We’re not necessarily going to stop or change any of that or we don’t have major recommendations at the moment. But on the services and the product side, there’s stuff already happening and we thought the Department needs to address that quickly.

14:13 – 14:40 

SK: Now, to this end, the Defense Science Board – led by retired General Ellen Pawlikowski and Mandy Vaughn – published five recommendations toward integrating commercial space capabilities into military requirements. 

The first recommendation calls on the government to “implement an end-to-end framework to better integrate existing and planned commercial capabilities into national security architectures.”  

Dr. Tousley, can you elaborate on how the DOD can do this? 

14:41 – 16:05 

BT: The most direct one is to work within a working capital fund within a commercial services market – do the integrated operations upfront and tie those into the warfighting Combatant Commander’s plans – those are not done today. 

When a commercial company wants to set up a service-based contract, that’s typically a multi-year process. Yet within the, you know, Plan, Program, Budget, Evaluation process. We do that every year. There’s colors of money, there’s appropriations within Congress, all that’s very carefully prescribed by law. The problem is when the law sets it up this way. 

But the commercial world operates in a multi-year service contract. How in the heck do you make that work out? General Pawlikowski was very explicit that that has been worked in the past. She had to work that in her time as the head of acquisition for the Air Force and the phrase she uses is ‘working capital fund.‘

There are working capital funds that have been set up across various parts of the Department of Defense that are used for just this purpose: to establish, essentially, funds that allow services to be executed in a multi-year process where the equities of the government’s appropriation process are respected.  

And her recommendation is that – the Board’s recommendation is that – it more broadly gets adopted by the Department and really robustly attack the working capital fund as a model to operate that. But it’s color money, color money, it’s appropriations. It’s the way our government operates, the commercial world just doesn’t operate that way. How do you get the benefit of both? 

16:06 – 16:27 

MD: So General Pawlakowski is certainly right. I mean, in space, the commercial, the communications market over which 80% of the Department of Defense communications travels is all done under a defense working capital fund that in the last few years, that’s been on the order of $8 billion for a bunch of different communications services, so that model is there and it’s a good way to proceed.  

16:28 – 16:54 

BT: And I think part of the reason that we we picked up on the near-term challenge and opportunity in SATCOM because as Mike said, the commercial SATCOM leveraged by the Department of Defense is such a dominant point, that getting that more integrated upfront is, to us from a model standpoint, that’s the number one recommendation we came up with. 

Can be done, should be done. There’s an example of how it works financially. It will leverage the most out of the commercial market and it will provide the biggest benefit to the Department of Defense. 

16:55 – 17:14 

SK: The second recommendation is to “integrate evaluation of and provision for commercial space services into institutional processes.” 

This recommendation ties back to the PPBE process that Dr. Tousley – you referenced earlier – so in what ways might commercial space services be factored into the DOD’s budgeting process? 

17:15 – 18:26 

BT: Part of what’s happening is from a Combatant Command perspective. That is not necessarily done upfront. It’s done after the fact. And so from an annual standpoint, if they’re going to budget within the support of working capital fund, that it needs to be prescribed by law in a way that the Department recognizes it as part of the Space Force budget. It’s identified appropriately. It’s also clearly understood by the commercial market as an addressable market. 

Part of how you get the best out of the commercial marketplace is to make sure that the addressable market, which is how they evaluate what they’re going to spend money on, make sure it’s clear to them what the addressable market is. In many cases, there have been not necessary communications, but in other, I’ll say, remote sensing, sometimes the commercial markets, like I don’t actually know what the Department’s going to spend. 

Or they’ll say one thing and then six months later, when the actual budget actions go through, it’s one-tenth of what they said. And so that lack of transparency makes it difficult for public or private investors to figure out just how big is the market going to be and how much capital can I deploy. 

Given that this is an emerging market and the United States has a tremendous amount of private and public capital that can be brought to bear. It’s the government’s interest to leverage that to the maximum effect. 

18:27 – 18:57 

SK: Now, the PPBE process was the topic of our previous episode on The Elara Edge, when Elara Nova partner Shawn Barnes discussed the findings of a Congressionally-mandated Commission on PPBE Reform. 

The Commission on PPBE Reform advocated for the creation of a new budgeting process it called the “Defense Resourcing System.” But whether or not the Commission’s findings are implemented, how do the recommendations similarly coming from the Defense Science Board remain relevant to whatever budgeting process the DOD adopts? 

18:58 – 20:22 

BT: So I’ll be going on a limb here because we didn’t actually look at that. But here’s one way to think about it: If they’re able to adopt a multi-year acquisition reform and they’re able to tie into working capital fund-like models, I think it’ll be great because I think coming back to the point, the commercial market just needs clarity of what the market is. 

So that’s their interest here and you always want to think of this in terms of constituencies within our system of government. So, the industry partners would like the clarity. So if it’s able to be laid out as a multi-year approach, it’ll more carefully align with services. From a Congress perspective, as long as the appropriations process, they get to review it and look at it as a multi-year appropriation. 

And they get to assess and evaluate it. I think their equities are served. The Department’s equity is going to be served. If we can set up a working capital fund model, because that means they’ll understand year-over-year what’s the burden on their budget.  

And you know, from a Combatant Commander’s perspective, or the supporting command’s perspective, if they know what’s going to happen over a multi-year process, it allows them to support the operations plans better. 

I’m sure they don’t want to go through the process wondering every year, ‘Well, Congress appropriated this, but not that. How does that support my need? I don’t have it.’ So I think it’s great all around.  

I just I think the PPBE annual process was set up long ago when technology did not innovate as quickly, but now the technology, particularly in space, is innovating so quickly. 

How do we respond to that? So I think it’s great.  

20:23 – 21:00 

MD: And I’ll say another aspect of the multi-year. So we talk about working capital funds. So the working capital fund basically creates a checkbook that the government can use each year, but it’s using at, in the spot market basically. So a requirement comes up. And now, we go ask the commercial servicing providers to give bids and then we select one. 

But that bid is for today and you don’t get the best pricing. If you can say, ‘Look, I’m going to do this, but I’m going to, I want to do it for two or three years.’ You’re going to get much better pricing. The cost will go down for that service to the government and it provides the benefit of giving transparency and clarity to the investors and the companies. 

21:01 – 21:40 

BT: Scott one other thing I think was in, in our recommendation, in terms of working more effectively within PPBE, was the ability to allow program executive officers to move funds in between program elements year-to-year, because sometimes one program might under-spend on a service or product, the other might have a need. 

And so that was one of the things we recommended that within a broader portfolio, the Department go to Congress and say, ‘We’d like to have more latitude of shifting funds from one to the other, because in many cases, the funds were underneath the program executive officer in total, but not within specific elements, because some programs are doing better than others.’ So we recommended – provide that flexibility. 

21:41 – 21:59  

SK: This leads us to the Defense Science Board’s third recommendation: “incentivize trust and build resilience among commercial providers.” 

How does trust factor into this budding relationship between the military and its commercial space partners? And are there any examples of how the DOD can effectively do this? 

22:00 – 23:05 

BT: We identified a few things. 

Number one it’s kind of a top level framework on the resilience and trust. The government has concerns about whether or not they can trust the performance and the security and the reliability of a commercial system. On the other hand, the commercial world knows that they depend on the government to help provide some clarity about the threat situation. 

So there’s a need to work together on both sides. And we thought that one way of thinking about it is from a market perspective, include resilience as a quality of service requirement. The government and the contractors acknowledge it’s going to cost more for that. But as long as that’s priced in and considered a part of the economic model, then the vendors know what they have to do. 

The government knows, ‘Okay, I’m going to get this enhanced capability as a function of increased pricing.’ I think that’s good and that’ll establish that market for premium pricing, which doesn’t exist today. There’s – it’s a gap in understanding. 

And then I think, you know, without getting into further specifics, just to improve sharing of indications and warning, because the government has an awareness from a rapid timeline of what’s happening more than the commercial world does. Having said that, as proven in Ukraine, many aspects of the commercial world, once they know the situation, they can respond very quickly.

23:06 – 24:36 

MD: The Department specifically, U.S. Space Command has a commercial integration cell that sits at Vandenberg that’s been very focused, for obvious reasons on SATCOM over the years it’s been in existence. 

And in that case, there are representatives from some of these commercial communication providers that sit with the U.S. Space Command and are aware of ongoing operations, are aware of threats. They have clearances and so they are able then to go back and translate those potential issues into enhancements or upgrades or defensive cyber operations or whatever on the commercial side to be able to continue to provide the service.  

That has got to grow and they recognize that has got to grow. There’s now, I think some remote sensing providers in that, as well. 

In addition to that, which is probably the deepest level of integration, there’s also the Space ISAC. There’s a set of these ISAC information sharing organizations across a bunch of different infrastructure elements within the U.S.  

Space is one of those – the Space ISAC is the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center – and they share things that they’re seeing amongst themselves, at an unclassified level to help everybody sort of up their game in defense and understanding what’s, what’s coming at them so they can provide a more robust product. So there’s a lot of data-sharing that has to go on. 

It is happening and, U.S. Space Command is going to expand as the markets expand for more access to these different mission sets with remote sensing, PNT, whatever else we get, is going to expand to commercial integration cell, too, in response.  

24:37 – 25:04 

SK: Now, the fourth recommendation requests that the government: “develop a suite of capabilities to monitor, assess and respond to adversaries and adversaries’ use of commercial space capabilities.” 

This recommendation explicitly acknowledges that just as the DoD wants to leverage the commercial space capabilities available today, there is a risk that our adversaries can do the same.  

Why is this acknowledgement important and how can the DOD mitigate that risk? 

25:05 – 25:57 

BT: Yeah. So this is one where most of our discussions and recommendations are not in the open document. There’s some classified stuff, but, I’ll put it this way. The commercial world and the U.S. government acknowledge that adversaries will also want to use some of the same commercial capabilities that we would want to use.  

That’s pretty obviously known because if part of the commercial market for a commercial capability happens to reside over a foreign territory of concern to the U.S. government, then you have to know that multiple parties are going to try and use that capability, so that was an acknowledgement – everybody knows it. And yet the commercial vendors, particularly those in the United States, are very concerned about making sure the U.S. government is happy – happy in general. 

So I think other than that, we’ve acknowledged that and there were a variety of discussions happening behind the scenes about how to best protect the U.S. government’s interest in this area and not damage commercial industry. I’ll just leave it at that. 

25:58 – 26:21 

SK: The fifth and final recommendation of the Defense Science Board’s report states the government must: “account for maturity of the commercial market when making decisions on how it regulates, invests and buys commercial space services.”  

In what ways can the maturity of a given space capability influence how the government approaches its relationship with those relevant commercial partners?

26:22 – 29:02 

BT: This is all in the vein of how can the U.S government leverage this capability while not damaging it and at the same time support the robust growth in the commercial sector?  

I think the first thing is the DOD has got to account for maturity. And I’ll give you an example of the commercial market: the GEO commercial SATCOM market. It’s pretty mature. I think the government knows that. The government relies on it. pLEO market a little less mature. Cislunar market, very immature.  

So my point in making those three comparisons is that when the government is making decisions on how it’s going to, you know, regulate, invest and buy these services, the government as a wise consumer of the commercial market needs to account for the maturity of those systems. 

It’s just important for the government to constantly do that maturity assessment of these different markets to figure out if it’s going to regulate, invest or buy because the government is a dominant player. As Mike said, if the government’s 51% of your customer, that’s very important to the commercial sector. So that also means the government can be a damaging influence if it’s not careful. So I think that’s the first thing – account for maturity. 

The second is I think just to avoid over-regulation, the commercial sector is always going to complain about regulation and anything that can inhibit their approach to work to obtain as much of the addressable market as they can because that’s their capitalist tendency. But avoid the over-regulation because a lot of commercial entities in the United States are concerned about over-regulation inhibiting their competition internationally. 

You know, because if the government’s concerned about over-regulation, because there’s a perception of, ‘I got to do this, I go do that to protect my own equities,’ but then you damage the very commercial company you need to depend on. 

Then at the end of the day, you’re left with an international company and nothing domestically. And I’ve talked about this with the vendor lock. Invest for market creation – now that’s a very sensitive statement. Not market monopolization. You don’t want market monopolization, not because of any particular vendor, I don’t think and I don’t think anybody the DSB believes that a dominant vendor is – without competition. 

I don’t think anybody would think that’s in the best interest of the Department of Defense in the long-term. Maybe in the very short-term – it’s fine. But long-term, I don’t think anybody would think this ever works out well where you have a monopoly. It isn’t. So I think the government as a wise consumer and customer needs to think about ‘How do you invest for market creation and not market monopolization?’ 

And then the last thing is, this gets back to the law-policy, ‘what’s inherently governmental?’ Be careful and try and minimize unique requirements when you’re buying commercial services. In order to maximize the commercial service, you’ve got to keep the requirements within what’s feasible, as close as possible to that commercial product, or the commercial service, because that allows you to keep the costs down. 

29:03 – 29:18 

SK: The Final Report concluded with a specific emphasis on what it viewed as its bottom line: “Integrated Deterrence Requires Integrated Operations.” 

Dr. Tousley, how do each of these five recommendations align to that bottom line objective?  

29:19 – 30:39 

BT: The bottom line about ‘Integrated Deterrence Requires Integrated Operations’ means I’m gonna put myself in the Combatant Commander’s shoes. In order to do an effective job of planning in advance, because you always want to have your plans all set to deal with potential contingencies. 

If I’m going to have my plans well-crafted and articulated in advance, the commercial sector, if I plan on using them, needs to be a part of that plan upfront. It can’t simply be something I’m going to respond to.  

For example, in Ukraine, that only happened as a happenstance. That was not planned in advance. The whole point of integrated operations and integrated deterrence means all kinds of capabilities like that. We ought to be doing plans, the budgeting and the work in advance, to provide the maximum capability to the warfighter.  

The way I view it is, economic power is a critical element of our national and our military power. And if the commercial sector has capabilities that can support the United States Department of Defense and the intelligence community, we’re going to want to do all this planning and the work upfront to have the capabilities integrated.  

You should be doing warfighter training right now. I don’t believe that we do a lot of training with the warfighter on the leverage of commercial communications in all of our war games today. But we should. So that’s kind of the foot stomp. Let’s get to work. Let’s we’ve got a lot of capabilities that could be integrated today. Let’s get to work and do it. Let’s do all the work upfront. And let’s not just wait for the next conflict to figure it out on the fly. 

30:40 – 31:01 

MD: Yeah, kind of the bottom line is that several of the military leaders have expressed is you want the adversary to look up into space and say, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of stuff I have to deal with and it’s frankly too hard. I’m gonna have to pursue my objectives in other ways and not take the fight to space.’ That’s the integrated part of this. We could have the same conversation about partnering with Allies as well.  

31:02 – 31:25 

SK: Going back to the purpose driving the Defense Science Board’s study, to facilitate the DOD’s understanding of the emerging commercial space market and how it can serve national security objectives – how does this also pertain to the expertise found at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy? 

And how can Elara Nova partners support these efforts at the cross-section of commercial space capabilities and military requirements? 

31:26 – 32:09 

MD: Elara Nova lives at the intersection of the three things we’ve been talking about here today: the government, the industry and the investment markets. And also with international partnerships is another part of integrated deterrence. The people that we have on the Elara Nova team and all of our partners, Doctor Tousley and many others. 

They spent time in government and or they’ve spent time in industry and or they’ve spent time in the investment markets and that expertise, all of that expertise doesn’t exist in any one place, either in the government or the industry. And so we offer an opportunity for those different players in this space, to have that conversation to mature the discussion to come up with specific recommendations and I think that’s where we can help out. I hope Brad sees it the same way.  

32:10 – 32:25 

BT: Absolutely. Yeah. No, I think that Elara Nova, we’re a bunch of like-minded people that really want to see us, know U.S. capability pushing forward for integrated deterrence. We want to support the marketplace. And obviously, in order to do that, we are laser-focused on helping our customers achieve maximum success in doing that.

32:26 – 33:02 

SK: This has been an episode of The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security. As a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in space security. 

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. This episode was edited and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at The Elara Edge.