The Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm wants industry to figure out how to rebuild a shot-up satellite constellation in hours, not years. DARPA released a request for information asking companies to pitch concepts for restoring critical orbital services after an attack.
The solicitation, posted by DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, asks for technical ideas spanning modular spacecraft, software-defined satellites, rapid manufacturing, on-orbit assembly and distributed sensor networks. The stated objective is blunt: reestablish service on timelines measured in hours to weeks after satellites are degraded by anti-satellite weapons, cyberattacks, orbital debris or other disruptions.
That is a sharp departure from how the U.S. has historically thought about space resilience — buy fewer, more exquisite satellites and assume they will survive because nobody dares shoot at them. That assumption is no longer holding.
The threat picture that prompted the RFI
Both China and Russia have spent the past decade fielding what defense officials call counterspace systems — direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles, co-orbital inspectors, ground-based jammers, lasers capable of dazzling optical sensors, and offensive cyber tools. The U.K. has begun naming the harassment publicly. Maj. Gen. Paul Tedman, head of UK Space Command, told the BBC that Russian satellites are stalking British military spacecraft and that Moscow’s ground-based jammers target UK military satellites on a weekly basis.
Tedman described Russian payloads designed to fly close to allied satellites and collect information from them. He also noted that the combined Russian and Chinese fleet of satellites has grown substantially over the past decade, while Britain operates only a handful of dedicated military spacecraft.
The U.S. is more exposed than its allies in one sense: American forces are wired into space for almost everything. Communications, intelligence collection, missile warning, and the positioning, navigation and timing signals that guide everything from infantry radios to precision munitions all flow through orbit. Take down the satellites and you do not just blind a sensor — you peel apart the joint force.
What “reconstitution” actually means
DARPA’s framing makes clear the agency is not just asking for spare satellites in a warehouse. The RFI envisions a full reconstitution architecture: spacecraft built in modular blocks that can be swapped or reconfigured, software-defined payloads that can take on missions outside their original specification, manufacturing lines that can spin up replacements quickly, and on-orbit assembly that lets operators stitch together capability from parts already in space.
The distributed sensor piece matters too. A constellation of cheap, networked satellites is harder to disable than one big bus carrying a one-of-a-kind sensor. Lose ten of a hundred and the mission degrades gracefully. Lose one of one and the mission ends.
Building on Victus Nox and CASR
DARPA’s effort plugs into a wider Space Force push that has been building since 2021. The clearest demonstration so far came with Victus Nox, the tactically responsive launch exercise flown by Firefly Aerospace and Millennium Space Systems in September 2023. Firefly’s Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base just 27 hours after the Space Force gave the launch order — a national security responsive-launch record, beating the previous mark of 21 days set on the TacRL-2 mission in June 2021.
The Victus Nox sequence is worth recalling because it shows what reconstitution looks like in practice. After entering a six-month hot-standby phase, Firefly and Millennium received an alert and had 60 hours to truck the satellite 165 miles from El Segundo to Vandenberg, fuel it, mate it to the payload adapter and ready it for launch. They finished in just under 58 hours. Then came the launch order, with 24 hours to update Alpha’s trajectory, encapsulate the payload and roll to the pad.
Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, then commander of Space Systems Command, praised the Victus Nox mission as demonstrating the nation’s ability to rapidly respond to adversary threats and deliver capabilities to warfighters.
The Space Force has also stood up the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, or CASR, which uses pre-arranged agreements with commercial satellite operators to provide surge capacity during a crisis. The model is borrowed from the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, which lets the Pentagon press civilian airliners into service during emergencies. CASR essentially admits that the commercial sector now operates more spacecraft than the military does and that wartime resilience requires using those assets.
The hard problem DARPA is really asking about
Responsive launch is the easy half. The harder question — and the one the new RFI tries to surface — is what you put on top of the rocket on short notice. A satellite bus that takes three years to build is not a reconstitution asset, no matter how fast you can launch it.
That is why the agency is asking about modular spacecraft and software-defined payloads. If a communications satellite can be reprogrammed in orbit to fill a missile-warning gap, the constellation becomes more than the sum of its parts. If a bus design can accept five different sensor packages with minimal integration work, manufacturers can keep partial inventory and finish assembly on demand.
On-orbit assembly raises the ambition further. Instead of launching a complete satellite, operators could launch a propulsion module, a power module and a sensor module separately, then dock them in orbit. The architecture would tolerate the loss of individual pieces and allow upgrades without replacing the whole spacecraft.
Where commercial industry fits
DARPA’s RFI is also an implicit recognition that the government cannot do this alone. The launch cadence required for genuine reconstitution — dozens of vehicles available on short notice — depends on commercial providers. The same applies to manufacturing. Companies producing small satellites at volume for commercial constellations have the production lines the Pentagon would need to draw on.
The Space Force has already been working to bring more launch providers into the national security fold. Blue Origin secured nearly $18 million for New Glenn integration studies under the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 program, joining SpaceX and United Launch Alliance as a potential heavy-lift provider for sensitive payloads. A broader stable of certified vehicles means more options when something goes wrong in orbit.
The deterrence logic
There is a strategic argument beneath the engineering one. If an adversary believes that destroying a U.S. satellite buys a meaningful military advantage that lasts for months, the temptation to attack rises. If the adversary instead believes the U.S. can replace the capability within days, the calculus shifts. Reconstitution is partly about resilience and partly about taking the prize off the table.
That deterrence logic only works if the capability is credible. The Pentagon will need to demonstrate, repeatedly and visibly, that it can do what the RFI describes. Victus Nox was the first credible demonstration. DARPA is now asking what comes next.
What follows the RFI — a formal program, a series of demonstrations, a quiet handoff to the Space Force — will say a lot about how seriously the Pentagon treats the risk that the next conflict starts, or ends, in orbit.
