'Responsive space' office must quickly prove itself, proponents say.

OMAHA, NEB. -- U.S. Strategic Command's operationally responsive space office opened its doors at Kirtland, N.M. Air Force Base in May. Although the paint has barely dried, its proponents said that it's already time for the office to make good on what the concept promises: the delivery of space-based services to field commanders in days or weeks, rather than months or years.

Josh Hartman, a former Capitol Hill staffer who helped write the legislation authorizing the new office, said the organization needs to search for some "low-hanging fruit" to prove its value to the rest of the defense community.

"The next year and a half will be critical in deciding the success of ORS," said Hartman, who now serves a senior advisor to the undersecretary of defense, acquisition, technology and logistics.

As of October, the office had a staff of three officers to prove, what Hartman called, the "naysayers and doubters" wrong.

The operationally responsive space concept calls for a three-tiered approach to quickly answer the demands of combatant commanders. The office can leverage existing capabilities--for example re-tasking a remote sensing satellite to provide reconnaissance photos.

If a vital satellite is damaged, the second tier calls for small launchers to send replacements into orbit within weeks or months. A third solution would be building a satellite to fill a capability gap within one year.

This is a radical change in the way the military has deployed its space assets, the concept's advocates admit. Its chief architect is the Defense Department's former executive agent for space, Air Force Undersecretary Ronald Sega.

His pointman, Joseph Rouge, associate director of the national security space office, said the new organization will have to have the "world's greatest Rolodex." When a request comes in, it should be able to call the best experts available and come up solutions within 30 days.

The officer appointed to this task is Air Force Col. Kevin McLaughlin. As the office's first director, he will inevitably be fighting turf battles and entrenched organizational bureaucracies, Hartman said.

"The foundation has been laid, but might be another five years before it reaches acceptance," he added.

The community will have to understand what the office can offer and the process for requesting services, Rouge said.

McLaughlin said the program is not a threat to big satellites. "It's a complimentary capability to what is already the best set of space capabilities the world has already seen."

It can, however, deliver what the larger systems can't in terms of timeliness, he said.

It's not all about building small satellites, although that may happen, he said. It's a new conceptual framework of how to deploy and use space capabilities with both technological and operational innovations, he said.

"A significant part of our budget and focus will be on that," he added. Commanders in the field will send their requests through one of Stratcom's divisions--known as the joint functional component commands--which will forward them to the office. McLaughlin said his small staff, and some part-time personnel, are already working on the first requests.

However, tier one and two solutions--sending small satellites to orbit within days or weeks, or acquiring an entirely new spacecraft within one year--are still not technologically feasible, he noted.

That will require the support of the space community. Both Hart and McLaughlin suggested that entrenched "big space" interests such as major defense contractors may resist this new concept of doing business.

There are "some that can't handle change," Hartman said, "And others [who] defensively attempt to hold on to mission areas and business practices that they've dominated for decades."

Some have a "chip on their shoulders," McLaughlin added. The office is not out to "replicate satellites that are really marvels of modern engineering ... that's not what we're trying to do."

The office does have allies. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory have projects in the works that aim to rapidly launch and deploy satellites. DARPA has conducted test flights of small launchers. AFRL is developing "plug-and-play" spacecraft that can be assembled within days.

McLaughlin told National Defense that he has already had some preliminary talks with DARPA.

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"They will be a key part of the team as well as the other national labs," he said. Since the office's budget is small, he hopes to use other organizations' funding to do cutting edge research.

"The real goal is to see how broadly the S&T community across our whole government [will] participate in ORS," he said. He cited the Missile Defense Agency and NASA as organizations that have similar technological problems they need to solve. Lowering the cost of space launch is among them.

Air Force Deputy Undersecretary for Space Programs Gary Payton said, "ORS will be the impetus for much investment and will drive development of many new capabilities."

However, Rouge warned that the office should not evolve into a big budget acquisition program. It needs to stick to research and development, and test and evaluation instead. Otherwise, it would lose the flexibility needed to be truly responsive to users' needs, he said. The office should seek out the best and fastest laboratories to come up with solutions, even if they are civilian agencies such as NASA or international partners.

"If ORS becomes a procurement program ... we have no chance of success," he said. In the coming years, the office will begin to put seed money into some programs, McLaughlin predicted.

But in the short-term, the office simply needs to prove its usefulness to rest of the military, he added.