Space RCO Director Dr. Kelly Hammett at Spacepower. Photo: Space Force Association

ORLANDO, Fla. — The U.S. Space Force’s Space Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) is preparing a request for proposals (RFP) around agile space capabilities, but it is held up due to the status of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding in the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), RCO Director Kelly Hammett said Dec. 11 during a media roundtable at the Spacepower conference.

The current NDAA does not renew SBIR and small business technology transfer (STTR) authorities for 2026.

This is also impacting contracts for threat warning radar satellite payloads, Hammett said, adding that Space RCO has selected three vendors for that effort but they have not been announced yet.

“Things are a little odd right now,” he said. “ I was told that if you had money in 2025 for a project you started in 2025, you should be able to do it. I think we’re going to be able to move forward with these.”

The SBIR/STTR funding reauthorization has been a “contentious” issue, he said.

“I actually see both sides of that coin,” Hammett said. “There are those who say, you need the SBIR program to seed money into non-traditionals and bring new entrants into the portfolio. Critics say — what are we getting out of that? Because the dollar thresholds are so low, you don’t typically get a product, you get a study. That’s also a thing we’ve been attacking, as we’ve talked about before, how can we get raised dollar thresholds.”

Space RCO hosted an industry day over the summer with satellite manufacturers and systems integrators and at the time, an RFP was expected by the end of the year. Hammett said the industry day was focused on new entrants and included K2 Space and Turion Space.

Hammett said Space RCO released a controlled but unclassified information specification to the companies, but the feedback was that the parameters were too demanding.

“We took the performance parameters from all the corner cases and put them in one spec. And everybody said, ‘None of us can beat that — it’s too demanding because you put all the requirements for every mission,’” he said. “So we’re also refining the requirements and separating [them] out into a couple of classes to do the missions, because it’s going to be too time consuming and too unaffordable to throw all those requirements into one development effort.”

Hammett said Space RCO’s portfolio is around a dozen programs, most of which are classified. The office was established seven years ago, modeled after the Air Force RCO, with a mission to deliver capabilities rapidly to enable space superiority.

Hammett addressed the recent directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on acquisition reform, saying that Space RCO already operates by most of the major tenets Hegseth laid out. “There’s not a lot of change in terms of how we operate currently that I foresee,” he said.

“They want us to have the ability to move money between programs, shift requirements, terminate failing programs, and shift funds into successful programs to deliver capability fast. We already do all those things,” Hammett said.

What is likely to shift for Space RCO is that every Portfolio Acquisition Executive will have a mission area, he said. Space RCO primarily deals with space superiority, but also in threat warning and the Satellite Communications Augmentation Resource is a telemetry, tracking, and command capability.

“I think there will be some changes to the programs we are assigned,” Hammett said. “We’ll probably get more added, get some taken away. That will happen as they rework all these portfolios.”