Industry Finding Ways to Work With CASR for Critical Satellite Infrastructure

Experts from commercial satcom, and remote sensing companies gathered at SATELLITE to talk about the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve (CASR) program, focusing on partnerships between the U.S. Space Force and industry to prepare for critical satellite infrastructure.

Greg Caicedo, vice president of Space Domain Awareness and Space Superiority at Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, said that the company’s role is to represent the terrestrial and ground capability. “We offer a service through our global sensor network that supports a number of different mission areas, from command and control to space domain awareness to space superiority to cyberspace,” he said. “The government is going to incentivize businesses like ours. That is the important balance that we need to get from a partnership standpoint with the government — to incentivize companies like ours to invest in the future as well as the present. That’s where industry comes into play.”

One of the characteristics described by the government as it relates to CASR is the notion that the government will buy out the excess capacity upon demand. “Excess capacity is not a commercial business model,” said Rebecca Cowen-Hirsch, senior vice president, Government Strategy and Policy, U.S. Government business unit of Viasat. “The Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve is a commercially available space resiliency effort provided by commercial capabilities integrated into architectures, and what that ultimately means for when that one bad day happens.”

Planet Federal manufactures and operates a large constellation of imaging satellites and provides geospatial intelligence to the U.S. government. “We're very much in the fight,” said Jared Newton, senior technology strategist for Planet Federal. “The scenario for the one bad day presents a real opportunity to operationalize the agile manufacturing capabilities, in particular in the smallsat sector, to be able to respond flexibly to some catastrophic event that's going to affect everyone, not just the government, but the commercial industry as well.”

The capabilities of CASR need to work seamlessly with the broader architecture than just augmenting “like it's a simple capability that you can just turn on whenever you need it,” said Caicedo. “It has to work with the rest of the enterprise at any given moment. If you think you can just wait until the bad day, when you're in the fog of war, you're not going to be able to manage through that.”

Newton talked about the CASR pilot program, which the U.S. Space Force System Command implemented late last year. The command’s strategy is to guide the integration of commercial space solutions to develop technical innovations that supplement or supplant existing government capabilities.

“I'll say that paid pilots are always better than unpaid pilots, absolutely,” he said. “You're doing it in an exercise environment, and that's great. It allows people to train how they fight, to some extent. But the gap between paying to do that pilot and then investing in having that capability as a commercial thing that you can bring online for a contract that doesn't exist yet, is a tough sell.”

“When you start looking at how to pilot an integrated architecture in a constrained environment,” Cowen-Hirsch said, “not only do you need to have the incentive structure so you have a partnership where there's skin in the game from both parties, but there's also benefit-reward on both ends, both from a military application and utility, and then from the commercial business.”

Caicedo said there is a way to be flexible and agile, not only in the capabilities that companies like his bring, but also in responding from a policy and regulation standpoint.

“I think those two aspects are going to have to be things that the government grapples with,” he said. “I think including that into the dialog with government is going to be important for the government to consider how we are using commercial capabilities, and how it is different from peace time to wartime.”

We are already under the threat of attack, Cowen-Hirsch said, which puts new emphasis on how to work with government. “It’s understanding what the relationship with government means, and what the risk proposition is both in terms of how these capabilities are consumed and used. This is a very complex but essential regulatory framework that needs to be considered.”

Newton said that he thinks industry and CASR are getting to the point where there probably needs to be some focused conversations in terms of who is really going to participate at scale in CASR. “It's not going to be 500 companies. It's going to be a couple of core companies providing capabilities across different pillars. The sooner that those companies are engaging with the government in a tangible way, the better it will be.” VS