A new request for information from the Defense Department's research arm, DARPA, signals a shift from defending a fixed orbital architecture to rebuilding it on hour to week timelines after attack.
The U.S. military no longer expects its satellites to survive a major conflict intact. It is now designing around the assumption that orbital assets will be lost, in some cases within hours of a fight starting, and that critical space services must be rebuilt on timescales measured in days, not years. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's long-horizon research arm known as DARPA, made that posture explicit on June 12 when it published a request for information titled "Rapid Reconstitution of Space Capabilities" on SAM.gov, the federal contracting portal. Industry has until July 8 to respond with technical concepts and operational strategies.
The notice is the clearest public signal yet of a doctrinal shift already underway across the U.S. Space Force and the broader defense establishment. For decades, the U.S. approach to military space was to put exquisite, expensive assets in orbit and protect them. That model is now treated as obsolete against a peer adversary with a growing counterspace arsenal.
The RFI reflects that change. DARPA is asking industry how to "rapidly reconstitute" space capabilities, meaning how to restore them after they are damaged, destroyed, jammed, or knocked out of useful orbit, across a wide menu of loss modes: direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons, electronic warfare, cyberattacks on ground or space systems, and the cumulative debris fallout from any of the above. The recovery window DARPA is targeting is "hours to weeks," a span that collapses what was once a multi-year satellite replacement cycle into something closer to a military logistics problem.
The list of areas DARPA wants ideas on reads like a survey of where the U.S. believes its current architecture is brittle. It covers satellite buses (the structural chassis that hosts a payload), the payloads themselves, launch vehicles, integration and test, modular spacecraft, plug-and-play components, rapid manufacturing and assembly, software-defined satellites that can change mission in orbit, multifunction spacecraft that replace several single-purpose vehicles, alternative positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) systems, distributed sensor networks, very low Earth orbit constellations, and on-orbit assembly and deployment. The notice also flags supply chain and production-bottleneck reduction, a tacit acknowledgment that even a perfect design will stall if the United States cannot build and integrate spare satellites faster than adversaries can destroy them.
The single constraint DARPA calls out by name is launch capacity. Without enough rockets, and the range and processing infrastructure to fly them often, "responsive" design concepts are still bound by the slowest part of the chain. The Space Force's Tactically Responsive Space program, or TacRS, is the existing effort DARPA is leaning on. The benchmark the field is now measured against is Victus Nox, a 2023 mission in which a satellite was launched roughly 27 hours after launch orders were issued, a figure reported by SpaceNews and consistent with public accounts of the mission.
That responsive-launch pillar is real but narrow. It addresses one loss mode: a kinetic strike or a direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon, where the U.S. needs to put a replacement bird on orbit fast. The RFI and the broader Pentagon push do less to answer the harder reconstitution problems. Cyber attacks on ground stations and mission software can disable a constellation that is still physically flying. Jamming can deny the services those satellites provide without destroying them. Supply chain compromise, including in commercial parts, can hollow out a fleet before it ever reaches orbit. None of these are solved by faster rockets.
The Pentagon is also leaning on commercial augmentation to fill the gap. The Space Force's Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, or CASR, is modeled on the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, a program that gives the military priority access to commercial aircraft in a crisis. In the space version, the government would pre-arrange surge capacity with commercial operators. The details of wartime authority, who decides which commercial traffic gets preempted, and how pricing and prioritization work in a shooting war, remain unresolved in public reporting. Those are not contracting details. They are policy questions about how a private satellite operator behaves when its network is also a national asset.
The threat framing in the DARPA notice is the same one the Pentagon has used for several years: China and Russia are developing counterspace capabilities spanning direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons, electronic warfare, and cyber systems targeting space infrastructure. That framing is, on the record, an official U.S. characterization, not an independent assessment of adversary capability. It is also the political backdrop that lets a research request for information read as urgent.
The honest read of the June 12 RFI is that it is a low-cost action. Requests for information are not programs, and they are not contracts. They can be a real first step toward a funded effort, or they can be a way to look busy on a problem whose hardest pieces, cyber defense of space systems, ground-segment resilience, supply chain integrity, and the legal architecture for wartime use of commercial space, are still in early discussion. DARPA's choice of follow-on solicitations, and whether the Space Force and the wider Pentagon put money behind the answers industry offers, will determine which one this turns out to be.
What to watch next: the response set to the July 8 deadline, any DARPA solicitation that follows, and whether the Space Force's TacRS program moves from a handful of demonstration missions to a standing operational capability. A 27-hour launch is a useful proof of concept. A working reconstitution doctrine, with contracts, authorities, and a supply chain that can sustain it, is what the next several years will actually test.