COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—A Space Force program that buys commercial satellite imagery and analytics has seen success across combatant commands—and with a plus-up from Congress, the service hopes to give commands more information and new tools.
Called Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and Tracking, or TacSRT, the program began as a pilot in 2023. It provides a “marketplace” where military customers seeking timely intelligence can ask a question and then industry competes to provide answers.
The tool has been used to support a wide range of missions, from tracking illegal fishing and monitoring humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to supporting the construction of the Joint-Logistics-Over-the-Shore pier in Gaza and the withdrawal of forces from air bases in Niger.
The results “speak for themselves,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said, noting how the TacSRT team in U.S. Southern Command, in collaboration with partner nations, “has supported detection and tracking of narcotic operations. It’s led in-theater humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. It’s even countered malign influence, helping Peru to identify and defeat interference and jamming of PeruSAT from China and Russia.”
Congress gave the Space Force an additional $40 million last month in the continuing resolution deal to buy more TacSRT services, which was a “congressional vote of confidence” in the service’s moves to harness commercial kit, Saltzman said Wednesday at the Space Symposium here.
To keep pace with demand, service is building out its “Tap Lab”—the TacSRT tools, application and process lab—to develop new tools and techniques that commands can use, said Col. Rob Davis, the program executive officer of space sensing.
“We continue, in that more developmental space, to do ad hoc support through that development, still experimental space, to answer questions that combatant commands have. So they’ll ask a question—border monitoring, human activity in this region, area interest—things like that, and we can provide that information back to them. They feed that information into their other processes to be able to make sense of it, and understand the battle space,” Davis told reporters Wednesday.
Commercial companies have been advocating for more TacSRT funding, but Space Force efforts to buy from commercial providers have been wrapped up in jurisdictional challenges over who has the authority to buy commercial information. The National Reconnaissance Office is in charge of buying ISR imagery from commercial providers, while the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency purchases analytic products.
Since “day one,” the Space Force has been trying to avoid duplicative efforts, Davis said, but the program is still maturing and building its processes to coordinate requests from commands.
“We have close, working relationships with our counterparts in NGA,” he said.
Vendors are eagerly awaiting for the Space Force and intelligence community to come to an agreement over who buys what, an agreement that is in the “final stages,” according to Breaking Defense.
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