A $20 million SpaceWERX challenge, run by the Space Force's innovation arm, is asking companies to design the depots and tanker vehicles that would let U.S. satellites refuel, maneuver, and stay alive in a more contested orbit.
The U.S. Space Force has a working name for the infrastructure it believes it needs to keep satellites alive in orbit without bringing them home: an "orbital warehouse." Its own definition, from a Space Systems Command spokesperson, is a depot that "receive[s], store[s], inspect[s], and cross-load[s] supplies, while offering protection of those supplies from the environment." That is the same functionality as a warehouse on the ground, except it has to operate in vacuum and survive a threat environment that did not exist a decade ago (Space.com).
The reason the Space Force is naming that infrastructure now is Beijing and Moscow. Both countries are flying closer to U.S. spacecraft than they used to, and both are fielding new orbital weapons the United States has watched arrive in the last several years. A depot network in space, the theory goes, would let American satellites refuel, reposition, and outlive the threats chasing them, what the service calls "in-space maneuver warfare" and "maneuver on demand" (SpaceNews).
To get there, SSC and its innovation arm SpaceWERX are opening an "In-Domain Orbital Logistics Challenge" this summer, a $20 million, multi-phase industry call (SBIR) for the building blocks of an orbital supply chain. The challenge names five specific layers: the warehouses themselves, the orbital transfer vehicles that would haul fuel and supplies between them, the depot-placement and routing logic that makes the network hard to intercept, the propellant-handling hardware (tanks, interfaces, purity controls, transfer accounting), and the broader reusability-and-repair culture that would let a tanker, a shuttle, and a depot share a total-cost-of-ownership model (SSC release).
The dollar figure is small. Twenty million dollars is closer to a market-shaping signal than a procurement line item, a hint, issued through a formal industry call, about which layer of an in-space economy the service expects to buy into. It is also explicit about what it does not yet know.
"The key question is whether these services ultimately become commercially provided capabilities or if the government is going to have to be the leader in some of these areas," Col. Scott Carstetter, who directs Servicing, Mobility, and Logistics inside SSC's Space Access portfolio, told reporters on a May 20, 2026 press call (SpaceNews). The challenge is, in effect, the Space Force's way of letting industry answer that question with proposals rather than declarations.
The hardware is not starting from a blank page. Two on-orbit demonstrations are already in the pipeline, and the new challenge is meant to grow the network around them.
The first is Astroscale U.S.'s hydrazine refueler, slated to fly on the USSF-23 mission in mid-2026. The vehicle is roughly 300 kilograms, was awarded under a September 2023 other-transaction agreement worth about $25.5 million to the government plus roughly $12 million from Astroscale, and is designed to refuel two Air Force Research Laboratory Tetra-5 client satellites. After that, it is expected to return to an Orbit Fab propellant depot, itself hosted on an Impulse Space platform and built under a 2022 Defense Innovation Unit contract worth $13.3 million, and top itself off (SpaceNews).
The second is Starfish Space's "Otter" autonomous docking and maneuvering demo, funded in May 2024 with $37.5 million from the government and roughly $30 million in private cost-share, and followed by a $54.5 million APFIT contract for a 2028 operational augmented-maneuver mission (SpaceNews). DARPA's Mission Robotic Vehicle, built with Northrop Grumman and carrying U.S. Naval Research Laboratory robotic arms, is also launching in summer 2026, and SSC has said it plans to be a customer once the vehicle is operational.
The framing the service has chosen is borrowed directly from terrestrial logistics. The release talks about extending the "joint logistics enterprise" into orbit and building a "theater-like logistics network in space," a phrase that maps almost one-to-one onto the fuel depots, runways, and ground-handling crews that the Air Force has used to project power since the 1940s (SSC release). Ron Lopez, the president of Astroscale U.S., made the analogy explicit in the same press call: "The advent of in-air refueling completely changed the equation for the duration and distance of aircraft missions" (SpaceNews).
What the analogy skips is that a terrestrial logistics enterprise sits on a century of hardware, contracts, doctrine, and contested training ranges. The orbital version is being assembled in a much smaller box. The Air Force Research Laboratory, U.S. Space Command, U.S. Transportation Command, the Defense Logistics Agency's energy arm, and the Defense Innovation Unit are all listed as participants in the new challenge, but the spokesperson who briefed the call, Jondavid DuVall, gave no operational timeline for when any of it would actually be flying as a network rather than as individual demonstrations (Space.com).
The challenge feeds into a longer document. The Space Force's "Objective Force 2040" planning framework, released in April, sketches out where the service wants to be in roughly fifteen years. "In-space maneuver warfare" and "maneuver on demand" are not new vocabulary. They are the same phrases the service has been using since at least 2023, but this is the first time the logistics chain that would deliver them has been opened up to industry proposals at this scale.
A more detailed call-out is expected this summer. Until then, the open question is the one Carstetter named on the record: whether the depots, tankers, and shuttles in orbit end up operated by the companies that built them, by a new space-logistics prime, or by the government itself. Twenty million dollars is not enough to settle that question. It is enough to start the bidding.