Space Force shifts into high gear on cislunar warfare, with RFIs coming soon

WASHINGTON — After years of sporadic experimentation, the Pentagon has embraced cislunar space as a high priority warfighting domain, pushing the Space Force to rapidly acquire commercially available technology and spacecraft, according to the service official leading the charge.

“At the beginning of the year … there was no talk of cislunar, and basically I was told: ‘Don’t talk about cislunar and stop getting into it.’ At the end of the year here, and we’re not even at the end, I’ve got the secretary of war and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs full on stating in public, ‘This is a warfighting domain’,” Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, Space Force portfolio acquisition executive for advanced programs, said Monday.

The Space Force plans to issue two requests for information (RFIs) in the near future seeking commercially available technology for cislunar missions and artificial intelligence software to help spacecraft operate autonomously between Earth and the Moon, Purdy said. The service wants capabilities it can field by the end of fiscal 2029.

The shift comes as senior defense officials increasingly frame cislunar space as a future battleground. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told an audience in Dayton, Ohio on Oct. 20 that “[whoever] controls subsea and cislunar is going to destroy and control the next fight.”

Purdy, who reports to Air Force Secretary Troy Meink, told the annual Space Industry Days conference in Los Angeles that the reason for the new urgency is simple: “China is moving out in this area. We have traditionally not.”

One recent Chinese project that has raised eyebrows is the launch of 30 Cubesats into a highly elliptical orbit near one of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points and circular lunar orbit, as reported in September by the People’s Daily [Chinese language version]. While China has characterized the project at recent UN-related meetings as a science experiment, several experts told Breaking Defense it is clearly intended to support cislunar surveillance.

Purdy said research organizations such as the Air Force Research Laboratory, SpaceWERX and DARPA have been experimenting with cislunar technologies, albeit in a vacuum. Until recently, the Space Force considered cislunar space only as a potential future arena for military operations.

“They’ve been working, they’ve been passionate about this mission area, but they’ve kind of gotten no love from the broader community as we focus, perhaps rightly so, on the more terrestrial support warfighting activity,” he said.

That has changed, with senior Defense Department leaders now backing a full court press to advance US military interests in cislunar space and on the Moon. Purdy said the Office of the Secretary of Defense is launching a series of interagency policy working groups on cislunar issues. The Space Force is also working closely with NASA to coordinate infrastructure plans rather than build separate systems.

“So, yes, we’re actually attempting to build a unified architecture across the government — which should be good news to everybody — and then looking to see where [NASA is] investing and figuring out what are the deltas that we can invest in,” Purdy added.

His shop’s Cislunar Coordination Office (CCO), established in May, has been tasked with giving industry a clearer signal of the military’s needs.

“This has been a particularly onerous and bad area where we’ve really given no kind of indicator to industry, and as a result, industry hasn’t really done a whole lot into this area except what industry has been interested in,” he said.

Purdy explained that his office is not tasked to oversee all cislunar operations. Instead, it helps provide funds and support to the wider Space Force effort, while the service’s requirements and acquisition teams remain responsible for defining mission needs and procuring capabilities.

The first RFI, expected “soon,” will seek commercial technology ready for use in foundational cislunar missions, including space domain awareness and positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), Purdy said.

He cautioned that the Space Force does not want to spend buckets of research and development dollars for new capabilities; rather, the service wants working kit that can be fielded by the fourth quarter 2029.

“We want rapid deliverable capability. … I’m not going to pay you R&D funds for this stuff,” Purdy said. “We’re looking for existing commercial or near-commercial means, non-development solutions, hardware with actual relative relevant evidence behind it, software that doesn’t need a huge amount of work … and then ground systems — not as an afterthought, but as part of an integrated network.”

The second RFI, expected alongside or shortly after the first, will seek artificial intelligence software that lets spacecraft operate autonomously in the vast region between Earth and the Moon, he said. The RFI will ask industry about its capabilities in advanced AI and autonomous operations, Purdy added.

“Cislunar is a really painful space,” he explained, making autonomous operations more challenging than they are for satellites closer to the Earth. Spacecraft need to detect and manage hardware failures, process sensor data and adjust their missions as conditions change.

Meanwhile, Purdy said the CCO is refining its “nascent cislunar roadmap” that includes “mission area strategies” for things like lunar time, space domain awareness and communications.

The office also has created a list of “the emergency” unfunded requirements (UFRs) for cislunar operations, he said.

“There’s a lot of little ticky-tack things that are suffering in this area, to the tune of where a couple $100K could solve a lot of problems, which, in space terms, is like really budget dust,” he said. “But this is how bad the funding situation is, and so we now have a nice prioritized UFR list that we’re going to be able to get after. That’s real action and money and help to operators on the ground trying to glue together a couple of antennas and pull some data.”

Purdy did not disclose the total funding needed or detail the specific requirements on the list.