Leveraging Commercial Space Services

Book excerpt: The expanding global commercial space industry offers new opportunities--such as technological advances in small satellites, lower launch costs, and innovative satellite applications--that could help the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) meet its mission requirements more efficiently and give it access to a broader innovation pool. The Department of the Air Force (DAF), particularly the U.S. Space Force (USSF), is increasing its partnership activities with the commercial space industry to take advantage of these opportunities. As the DAF makes investment decisions to leverage commercial space capabilities, it needs a better understanding of opportunities, risks, and challenges it might encounter. To help the DAF evaluate these potential benefits and risks, RAND researchers examined two space-related markets that together represent the widest variation in market and firm maturity: the commercial space-based positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) market (an emerging market) and the commercial satellite communications (SATCOM) market (an established market). This variation between the two markets is useful for identifying distinct and cross-cutting themes that could be generalized to other commercial space markets not analyzed in this research. In this report, the researchers describe their analysis and provide findings and recommendations for the DAF.