The agency does not disclose its annual funding, but Hammett said he expects budgets and workload to grow as the Pentagon pumps more money into space programs to compete with China. Like its Air Force counterpart, the Space RCO operates very differently than most military procurement shops, with far more autonomy and congressionally delegated authorities to allocate resources. The Space RCO’s workforce of about 200 people includes 80 government civilian and military officers. Working mostly behind the scenes, the Air Force RCO led the development of the X-37B uncrewed reusable spaceplane and the B-21 long-range strike bomber. Space RCO was modeled after the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office, established in 2003. The Space Rapid Capabilities Office operates with far more autonomy than most military procurement shops. Heinrich and other lawmakers at the time also complained that the Air Force’s procurement bureaucracy was not agile enough to respond to challenges posed by rival space powers threatening to target U.S. The ORS Office was established in 2007 to handle fast-response space systems and smaller satellites but the Air Force by 2013 stopped funding the office so it could fold its activities into its main space procurement shop in Los Angeles, the Space and Missile Systems Center.Ĭongress nevertheless kept adding money for ORS for several years and Heinrich ultimately pushed to create a separate organization for rapid space acquisitions that would be independent and physically separated from the Space and Missile Systems Center, which is now the Space Systems Command. Heinrich for years had been critical of the Air Force for not supporting the Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) Office at Kirtland Air Force Base. The office is one of three acquisition organizations within the Space Force, along with the Space Development Agency and the much larger Space Systems Command.Ĭongress established the Space RCO in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. That is hard to do “if people don’t know we exist or what we do,” he said. One of his goals for the space agency is to boost its visibility on Capitol Hill and work with a wider swath of the space industry. “We’re going to be a little bit more open about what we do,” he told SpaceNews in a recent interview.īefore taking over as head of the Space RCO seven months ago, Hammett ran the directed energy division of the Air Force Research Laboratory. Kelly Hammett, director of the Space RCO, said the decision to publicize the satellites on the USSF-67 mission is part of a broader effort to start shedding the office’s cloak of secrecy. Kelly Hammett, director and program executive officer for the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, based at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. The announcement was unusual as the Space RCO, based at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, operates under the radar and rarely advertises what it does. 15, the Space Force revealed that three of the payloads onboard were developed by one of its most secretive agencies, the Space Rapid Capabilities Office. When a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launched a national security mission to geostationary Earth orbit Jan. What exactly is the US military's top secret space weapon?
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