Air force embraces small satellites as budget outlook grows dim.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

Building, launching and supporting space-based systems is one of the most expensive tasks the U.S military and intelligence communities undertake.

With the federal budget expected to shrink in the coming years, Air Force officials said they are already looking at ways to maintain the capabilities they must deliver to the armed services.

"We're not going to be relieved of our requirements even as our budget goes down," said Gen. William L. Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo.

The command must deliver an array of services to the armed forces including GPS, communications, weather satellites and space-based sensors. The area of operations it must monitor--the beginnings of space some 100 miles above the Earth's surface up to where the highest satellites orbit about 24,000 miles is about 73 trillion cubic miles, Shelton said. "There is no question that there will be more demand for these capabilities, not less," he added. "Disaggregation" is the key, Shelton said. Smaller satellites launched more frequently and that are less expensive to build and launch is the trend.

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The roots of this way of doing business began long before the recent calls for decreases in government spending. Both the Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds the nation's spy satellites, had reputations for delivering spacecraft that were late and over budget. Afterwards, these large satellites would stay on orbit for a decade or longer as their technologies quickly became outdated.

To get a handle on requirements that shifted during a satellite's development, resulting in late delivery times and cost overruns, former Undersecretary for the Air Force Ronald Sega in the middle of the last decade instituted a "block buy" approach to ensure that satellite fleets would maintain a tighter schedule. Program managers would do this by inserting new technologies into each spacecraft only when they were deemed fully mature. They did have to wait for every requirement to be filled before the first spacecraft in a new series was sent aloft.

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About the same time, a concept called operationally responsive space began to gain more attention. An ORS division under the auspices of the office of the secretary of defense was set up in 2007 at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. The concept called for smaller satellites that could be quickly built and launched in order to...