The United States Space Force has announced the awarding of five additional contracts aimed at designing and demonstrating purpose-built satellites, marking a significant financial commitment to the commercial sector. The program, renamed PTS-G, has a large award ceiling of $4 billion. This will be a major departure from the way the military has traditionally acquired and integrated satellite communications (SATCOM) capabilities. This decision is the largest initiative to date in a broader push to change how we buy satellite technology. Historically, this process has been long and expensive, but we intend to fix that.
The first phase contracts, worth $37.3 million in total, will allow each of the chosen firms to further design their architectures through January of 2026. Onboarding commercial entrants is a key priority for the Space Force. Beyond cost savings, this strategy increases efficacy by streamlining operations and enhancing its capability to respond to emerging threats. The eventual contractor will then be given an additional award for the first satellite. This satellite, named GeoCarb, is scheduled to launch in 2028. Additional production awards would be handed out in the same calendar year.
Cordell DeLaPena Jr., the program executive officer, emphasized the importance of this new approach:
“Our PTS-G contract transforms how SSC acquires SATCOM capability for the warfighter.”
This hasn’t been easy, since this kind of approach is anathema to most traditional procurement processes. Before that, those processes generally took years and hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars for each geostationary satellite. Such historical practices have limited the military’s ability to be responsive and flexible in the face of rapidly changing conditions on the ground.
The PTS-G program aims to change this model by incorporating commercial baseline designs into military needs. DeLaPena Jr. noted that this incorporation significantly enhances the speed and efficiency at which the Space Force can bolster its capabilities:
“The incorporation of commercial baseline designs to meet military capability significantly enhances the Space Force’s speed and efficiency to add capability to meet emerging threats.”
Aria Alamalhodaei is a transportation and defense staff writer at TechCrunch. From her homebase in Austin, Texas, she covered this ground-breaking story. Ala’malhodaei’s academic background is in art history, which she studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Drawing from this experience, Michèle has developed a distinctive understanding of how technology and culture interact within the world of defense technology.
