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In Brief: How Government and Commercial Entities Can Advance Space Initiatives Together

April 1, 2025
In Brief: How Government and Commercial Entities Can Advance Space Initiatives Together
In Brief: How Government and Commercial Entities Can Advance Space Initiatives Together

In Brief: How Government and Commercial Entities Can Advance Space Initiatives Together

Katherine Melbourne, Clayton Swope, and Andrew Penn
April 1, 2025
A lot happens every day. Alliances shift, leaders change, and conflicts erupt. With In Brief, we’ll help you make sense of it all. Each week, experts will dig deep on a single issue happening in the world to help you better understand it.***There is growing recognition that the U.S. government needs to work more effectively with the private sector to meet the military’s expanding and evolving needs in space. We asked three experts about policies the Trump administration could adopt to encourage this crucial evolution.Read more below.=  Katherine Melbourne National Security Policy Analyst at The Aerospace Corporation Center for Space Policy and StrategyThe private sector offers advantages for developing technologies that support U.S. security and economic growth in space. In many cases, integrating commercial capabilities into mission-critical space architectures will require altering the government’s traditional approach to acquisitions. Success requires mutual trust among commercial space companies, sources of investment capital, and government agencies while proving out the scalability of innovative contracting approaches. In national security, the U.S. Space Force can help create this trust by clearly signaling where they will rely on private sector services and systems to provide or enhance warfighting capabilities. Clayton Swope Deputy Director, Aerospace Security Project and Senior Fellow, Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International StudiesBuy more commercial space products and services. The space economy is still dependent on the government as an anchor customer. But somewhat counterintuitively, the government — especially the military with its massive buying power — can help break that dependence. By buying commercial products and services, the government helps power the innovation flywheel whereby companies invest in improvements and ideas that not only benefit the government but also create products that appeal to commercial customers. One example of where the military is doing this is the Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance,

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A lot happens every day. Alliances shift, leaders change, and conflicts erupt. With In Brief, we’ll help you make sense of it all. Each week, experts will dig deep on a single issue happening in the world to help you better understand it.***There is growing recognition that the U.S. government needs to work more effectively with the private sector to meet the military’s expanding and evolving needs in space. We asked three experts about policies the Trump administration could adopt to encourage this crucial evolution.Read more below.=  Katherine Melbourne National Security Policy Analyst at The Aerospace Corporation Center for Space Policy

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