WHY THE PENTAGON NEEDS COMMERCIAL LAUNCH

The Department of Defense spent decades building a launch enterprise premised on control. It owned the ranges, certified the vehicles, and wrote the requirements. The result was reliable access to space and eye-watering costs that Congress periodically investigated and ultimately accepted as the price of national security.

Commercial launch has changed the underlying economics so dramatically that the old model is now a competitive liability. When a Falcon 9 launch costs a fraction of what a comparable government-procured launch cost a decade ago, the gap between what the DoD pays and what the market offers becomes a political problem as much as a financial one.

The deeper issue is speed. Commercial launch providers iterate faster than the acquisition system can track. By the time a vehicle completes government certification, the commercial version has often been upgraded twice. The DoD's certification processes were designed for a slower industry and have not kept pace with the one that exists today.

Reform is underway but uneven. The Space Force has made genuine progress on launch procurement modernization. But the cultural shift required, from owning and controlling to certifying and purchasing, is harder than any regulatory change. The Pentagon needs to become a sophisticated commercial customer. That is a different skill than being a program manager, and the institution is still learning it.