TAMPA, Fla. — After helping place proliferated low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations at the center of U.S. military space planning, the SmallSat Alliance is now tackling how these networks can be used together as a unified system.
The topic will be front and center as the alliance of small satellite companies kicks off its Miami Space Summit tomorrow, bringing together government, industry and investors Feb. 5-6 after roughly a decade of advocacy.
It’s a notable shift from the SmallSat Alliance’s original mission in 2016, when it was formed by combining two recently created organizations: the Next Generation Launch Coalition and the SmallSat Coalition.
Small satellites were just beginning to outgrow their roots as academic experiments back then, the group’s chairman Chuck Beames said in an interview, but there was no meaningful budget or government organization ready to truly take advantage of the technology.
It therefore fell to a handful of small satellite builders, suppliers, launch providers, ground station and data analytics companies to band together and change that through persistent advocacy in Washington.
“For 10 years, our lobbying firms led us all over Capitol Hill to educate Senators, House members and their staffers,” Beames told SpaceNews.
“A typical day on the Hill would involve 12-14 visits with either committee or personal staff.”
The campaign extended beyond Congress to the Pentagon and key Air Force (now Space Force) and National Reconnaissance Office facilities as the alliance pressed the case for proliferated LEO.
Fast forward to today and the Space Development Agency (SDA), established in 2019, oversees billions of dollars in planned spending focused on small satellite constellations supporting national security missions.
The Department of the Air Force’s Commercial Space Office in Los Angeles has also shifted its focus toward buying services from commercial companies operating constellations of small satellites, rather than owning spacecraft outright.
The SmallSat Alliance itself has grown to more than 50 member companies as proliferated LEO has moved into the mainstream of military space planning.
The next challenge
With that shift largely complete, Beames said the alliance is now focused on ways proliferated constellations can better support the warfighter.
“We have moved away from emphasizing the government buying more small satellites instead of the large GEO ones, because that battle has been won,” he said.
“Now it is about what and how these networked, mesh constellations can help the country keep our asymmetric advantage of space and stay on top to win the country’s wars.”
The effort spans a wide range of planned government-owned constellations, including MILNET, Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, Golden Dome missile defense-related networks, weather satellites and classified systems supporting intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and communications missions
Beames likened the moment to the early days of the personal computing revolution, when standalone machines became transformative only after they were connected through networks, later supercharged by advances in software and processing power.
“The smallsat revolution into LEO of the last 10 years is analogous to the desktop in the home,” he added.
“To ensure space dominance, the [U.S. government] needs to promote that vision for affordability, speed and resilience.”
In 2024, retired Marine Corps officer and Microsoft senior vice president Angel Smith was appointed executive director of the SmallSat Alliance to help steer its agenda toward software, networking and artificial intelligence.
“Lately, China has been moving much faster than we are and many Americans rightly fear we will lose this second space race because sometimes investors, operators, and the government get out of synch and don’t communicate well,” Beames continued.
“We will win this race because of the fantastic companies, investors, and government leaders gathering here in Miami to supercharge each other to win.”
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