Selected companies to begin demonstrations with key mission partners in Summer 2025
May 12, 2025--Mountain View, CA– The U.S. military requires accelerated integration of commercial space technologies to stay ahead of rapidly evolving threats. In order to provide secure, resilient, and agile communications for military operations, the Defense Innovation Unit’s (DIU’s) Hybrid Space Architecture (HSA) project aims to integrate civil, commercial and military space assets into one integrated architecture to provide the warfighter with asymmetric awareness and improved decision making at the edge. The HSA network has the potential to increase network resilience by employing multi-path routing of communications to optimize data transport and mitigate adverse effects caused by weather or other obstructions. HSA seeks to integrate commercial persistent sensing, data fusion, high-performance edge compute, and resilient data transport capabilities to significantly enhance real-time access to information.
DIU partnered closely with the U.S. Combatant Commands to assess operational needs, prototype software architectures, and chart effective transition pathways. DIU's agile acquisition authorities enable commercial companies to integrate, test, validate and rapidly iterate improvements that will assure the technological relevance of HSA over time. Collectively, this project is building the technical and programmatic foundation to pilot an operational hybrid commercial and government space architecture by 2026.
"DIU's approach has enabled TacSRT to rapidly onboard multiple commercial vendors, tapping into their inherent agility and innovation. This accelerated integration pathway allows us to achieve essential automation and scalability far more swiftly than traditional acquisition processes." said SSC TacSRT Program Office
To prototype these capabilities, DIU recently awarded new contracts to Capella Space Corporation, EdgeCortix, Eutelsat America Corp. + OneWeb Technologies, Fairwinds Technologies - AST Space Mobile, Illumina Computing Group, Lockheed Martin Space, MapLarge, SES Government Solutions, Skycorp Incorporated, SkyFi, Ursa Space Systems, and Viasat. Existing HSA performers include Aalyria Technologies, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Kuiper, Anduril, Astranis Space, ATLAS Space Operations, Enveil, Google, Palantir, Planet Labs Federal, Microsoft, and SpiderOak.
"This is a winning collaboration between DIU, SSC and the commercial space industry to advance Hybrid Space Architecture (HSA) for the U.S. Space Force," said Lt. Col. Tim Trimailo, director of Space Systems Command’s Commercial Space Office. "Together with DIU we’re accelerating the integration of commercial capabilities through HSA demonstrations and pilot efforts to scale quickly into a resilient, multi-orbit architecture supporting the DoD’s vision for seamless, uninterrupted global communications. These efforts exemplify the power of whole of government and industry collaboration in delivering real-world capability at speed.”
Over the next year, these commercial vendors will prototype their capabilities through a series of operational demonstrations in the U.S. Indo-Pacific, European, Central and South Command areas of responsibility. In addition, the HSA project team will soon activate a live hybrid network for demonstrations, exercise support, and further integration of tactics and warfighting capabilities. Success with these demonstrations will be moving the Department closer to realizing an operational, resilient, and hybrid space architecture.
“DIU’s ability to rapidly integrate and deliver a hybrid space network architecture is testament to its process of allowing commercial innovators to solve complex problems at speed and scale by applying their solutions to DoD’s problems,” said Steve Butow, Director of DIU’s Space Portfolio.
Other partners participating in the HSA project include the Space Warfighting Analysis Center, Space Systems Command, Air Force Research Laboratory Rapid Architecture Prototyping Integration Development division, Strategic Capabilities Office, the Naval Research Laboratory, Special Operations Command, JIATF-South, USAR 310th Space Wing, Marine Corps Tactical Systems Support Activity, and other U.S. government agencies.
“Working closely with DIU is key to providing commercial options to the Space Force and overcoming the challenges to incorporate those capabilities into our architectures. We are committed to continuing that work,” said Dr. Michael Starks, Rapid Architecture Prototyping and Integration Demonstration Laboratory, U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
The HSA project clearly shows that the more strategic the problem, the more integrated the type of commercial technologies become to rapidly address the solution. To help address this and meet the goals of this project, DIU’s Cyber and AI teams are also coordinating on this effort.