THERESA HITCHENS
AMOS 2023 — Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman has, in essence, sent the Space Force’s draft Commercial Space Strategy back to the drawing board, seeking to flesh it out with more specifics on what exactly the service believes it needs from industry for each of its mission areas.
Saltzman on Wednesday told the annual Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference in Hawaii that after reading through the draft, “I said, ‘this is not enough.’ … It can’t just be a strategy with aspirational platitudes about how we’re going to work together. I just don’t think that’s where we are today. It has to have more tangible guidance, things that we can take action on.”
The document, he stressed, has to move from “aspirational to actionable” — echoing the growing industry concerns about the need to turn rhetoric on leveraging commercial innovation into real programs with real money.
“So, I started asking some questions amongst the staff, like, ‘What is the appropriate division between those services which commercial industry can provide and those services which have to be inherently governmental because of the nature of the effort, the nature of the consequences that come with it? And quite frankly, there’s not a lot of easy answers,” Saltzman added.
Another question he wants answered is how to define the types of commercial assistance the Space Force might need, in order to guide an acquisition approach.
“What’s the difference between commercial services, commercial data and commercial capabilities? What exactly is it that I want the commercial industry to do?” Saltzman said. Defining those terms will allow the service to then develop solid requirements and put out more specific requests for proposals to industry, he added.
Speaking to Breaking Defense and Space News after his keynote presentation, Saltzman explained that his goal is to figure out exactly what the Space Force needs for each individual mission set — including the topic of AMOS, space domain awareness.
“I’m trying to get to ‘here are some significant gaps that we think are best filled by commercial data, or commercial services or a new commercial capability,'” he said. “We just don’t have that level of fidelity yet because we haven’t asked all those questions. So, that’s why I kind of put it on pause.”
Saltzman told the AMOS audience that he hopes the rewritten document will be completed by the end of the year. Further, he said he will be looking for industry reaction once it is made available.
“We’ll make this a dynamic document. If it doesn’t clarify things for you, if it doesn’t make things actionable for you, then it’s not doing what I intended, and I need that feedback as well,” he said.
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