The National Security Space Association (NSSA) is urging a significant boost to the U.S. Space Force fiscal 2025 budget request of $29.4 billion–a $600 million decrease from last year’s request.
Last month, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said that the Department of the Air Force scrimped on fiscal 2025 plans to advance U.S. counterspace technology to deter China because of constraints in the Budget Control Act (Defense Daily, Apr. 30).
”Our greatest regret, if you will, in the constraints we had this year was we couldn’t move forward more quickly on counterspace capability, in particular,” he said. “Our pacing challenge is fielding a number of systems that threaten the joint force and are targeting assets like aircraft carriers. We need to have the capability to do something about those assets so they can’t provide an attack targeting surface to the Chinese military. That would be the highest thing on our list that we aren’t able to move forward as quickly as we’d like to.”
Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman told legislators that the fiscal 2025 Space Force budget invests in the service’s move to a proliferated low Earth orbit architecture and an improved operational test and training infrastructure, but he echoed Kendall in saying that the highest concern for the Space Force is a lag in counterspace to hold Chinese targets at risk.
“The reduced [Space Force] FY25 budget request is not merely insufficient— it is shortsighted,” NSSA said in its May 23rd analysis. “The Space Force requires substantial funding to continue developing and deploying advanced technologies, enhance its space domain awareness, and build resilient satellite architectures capable of withstanding adversary actions.”
“Investments in next-generation propulsion systems, artificial intelligence for autonomous operations, and secure communication networks are crucial to maintaining a competitive edge,” NSSA said. “The ramifications of underfunding the Space Force are profound.”
In addition, NSSA said that the Space Force’s fiscal 2025 request the “does not substantially align with the recently released Commercial Space Strategy.”
“Despite the policy’s emphasis on leveraging commercial space capabilities, the budget lacks significant investments in this area,” the association said. “This disconnect indicates a missed opportunity to harness the innovation and efficiency of the commercial sector to enhance national security.”
NSSA includes a number of defense, commercial space, and software companies. Its “four star” members–those contributing $50,000 or more annually–include Boeing [BA], Lockheed Martin [LMT], Northrop Grumman [NOC], Capella Space, BAE Systems, General Dynamics [GD] Mission Systems, Amazon‘s [AMZN] Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft [MSFT], Mitre, Leidos [LDOS], KBR [KBR], Parsons Corp. [PSN], ABL Space Systems, Reinventing Geospatial Inc. (RGi), Zoic Labs, and Science Applications International Corp. [SAIC].