The Pentagon's research arm issued a market sounding request Friday asking industry how quickly it could replace satellites lost to attack, and the absence of a stated timeline is itself the story.
DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm, is asking the US satellite industry a direct question: if adversaries destroyed orbital assets, how quickly could the United States rebuild them and put replacements in orbit?
DARPA issued a Request for Information on Friday, 12 June 2026 for an initiative it calls "Rapid Reconstitution of Space Capabilities." A request for information is a procurement market-sounding document, the step before any contract, program of record, or funded capability. DARPA's RFI, reported by The Register, frames the problem in defensive terms. Space, the agency writes, is "an increasingly contested environment" with "a multitude of threats to U.S. space assets." Other nations, the document adds, are "seek[ing] to position themselves as leading space powers while undermining the stability and tranquility that allows space to benefit all nations."
The implicit benchmark is a 27-hour clock set in 2023. That year, the US Space Force executed a mission called Victus Nox, in which a call-up satellite was mated to a launch vehicle and placed in orbit in roughly 27 hours from the launch order. Victus Nox was a launch-only demonstration. The satellite had been built, tested, and stored in advance, and the clock started at a pre-loaded, ready-to-launch stack. It did not measure how long it takes to design, build, integrate, and hand over a satellite on orbit.
That gap is what DARPA's new RFI is now trying to close. The request asks industry for technical and timeline information on reconstitution approaches, including swappable or modular satellite architectures, on-orbit servicing, and rapid-replacement launch and logistics. DARPA did not publish a target timeline in the RFI. The absence of a stated clock is itself a story point: the agency is openly asking the market what is achievable, not announcing a goal industry must meet.
The threat backdrop DARPA cites is well documented. China conducted kinetic anti-satellite tests against its own defunct satellites in 2007 and 2022. Russia conducted a similar test in 2021, blasting a retired Soviet-era intelligence satellite into thousands of trackable debris pieces that forced astronauts on the International Space Station to shelter. The Register's reporting also flags US Space Force descriptions of Chinese on-orbit maneuvers as "dogfighting," an escalation the RFI implicitly answers to.
The Register's headline played this as "future star wars." The procurement story underneath is more concrete. DARPA explicitly does not know whether the United States itself fields space weapons. The Register asked the agency, and DARPA declined to answer. A genuine rapid-reconstitution capability does not require a parallel weapons program, but it does require satellite manufacturing lines, integration facilities, ground stations, and on-orbit servicing vehicles that can move faster than they currently do. The RFI is a request for information about whether that pipeline exists, can be built, or can be rented from commercial operators.
RFIs typically feed into a Broad Agency Announcement, a program of record, or a demonstration. This RFI does none of those things yet, and industry answers to RFIs are routinely optimistic, so any quoted timeline should be read as a vendor pitch rather than a contract. The follow-on question worth watching is whether DARPA publishes a target clock in the next solicitation, and whether the agency partners with the Space Force's existing rapid-launch work, the Space Development Agency's tranche-based constellation procurement, or commercial on-orbit servicing providers.