The U.S. government should expand its spending on commercial remote sensing and related data analytics to help this sector of the space industrial base grow, says a new report by the U.S. Space Force, Air Force Research Laboratory, and Defense Innovation Unit.
“Gradually expanding budgets for commercial remote sensing efforts and keeping these budgets consistent year-over-year will help foster the growth of the U.S. and allied remote sensing sector,” says the report, State of the Space Industrial Base 2023, the fifth year for the annual study.
The report’s recommendation echo long-standing concerns with the private space sector that the U.S. intelligence community and Defense Department have paid plenty of lip-service to the need to leverage the commercial remote sensing industry yet but lag on spending.
“Accordingly, we believe that the time for a study to examine how to overcome barriers to the use of commercial remote sensing/space-based data and analytics services has passed,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last September in response a Request for Information the office released on how to overcome barriers to using commercial satellite imagery and related analytics. “The USIC and DoD must act urgently to procure, integrate and utilize the value these products and services provide on a much broader scale to ensure the viability of domestic commercial remote sensing capabilities for the long-term.”
To provide the commercial remote sensing sector with boost in the short-term, the DoD organizations recommend designating the space sector as critical infrastructure, which would “formalize” the federal government’s role in leading and coordinating “national efforts to protect this sector.”
Longer-term, their report recommends giving the Commerce Department sole and final licensing authority for licensing authority for companies doing space missions. Other agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Communications Commission, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, would retain their respective authorities but work as part of Commerce’s interagency process for licensing applications, it says.
The report also recommends reforming Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Research grants, saying there has been overinvestment in “a small number of companies” that have not transitioned “scalable capability to warfighters.”
The industrial base report is broad and covers a wide swath of the space sector including commercial launch, space domain awareness, global partnerships, hybrid space communications, and more. It says a “central message from inputs” into the workshops that fed the report is the need to continue to leverage commercial space capabilities for science, commerce, and national security.
Some of the other observations and findings of the report include:
- Establishment of U.S. Department of Space or a National Space Agency to centralize regulatory authorities and advocate for space interests is an idea worthy of consideration if the conditions for its success are in place. Meantime, the bureaucracy should be “streamlined under the Vice President, or an appointed Director of Space” to preserve the industrial base and help grow the workforce;
- Keeping with the theme of streamlining the bureaucracy, the report says “bureaucratic inefficiencies” are stifling innovation and competitiveness in the space sector. It notes that space regulatory and licensing processes are intentionally slow and the bureaucracy under-resourced.
- Design space systems and architectures with allies in mind, allowing them to benefit economically and in terms of security. “The challenges posed by adversaries today are much smaller when allies stand shoulder-to-shoulder with integrated space capabilities,” the report says.