CAPITOL HILL:  The space community harbors many incredibly bright people, including a very few who are willing to say what they really think in public.

David Madden

A full house at the Capitol Hill Club was treated last week to a bravura performance of straight talk by Dave Madden, executive director of the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center.
The space budget, he noted, has dropped about 25 percent since 2012, “but we were still able to deliver on time and on schedule.” In fact, he thinks “there has been goodness in the budget’s drop” because it has — wait for it — “forced us to think.”

“We are having conversations in the building now about things we never would have addressed unless the budget dropped,” Madden said.

That would be music to the ears of some critics who argue we need smaller budgets to improve acquisition. Of course, those folks ignore a study of which Frank Kendall, head of Pentagon acquisition, is pretty fond of. It concluded that the biggest influence on a program’s costs being reasonable and the schedule not slipping too much was a healthy and predictable budget. When money got tight — for whatever reasons — program costs shot up.

But if the budget drops much more, then Madden thinks the space community may have trouble finding more good answers. He told the audience on Thursday morning that, they would “have to stop some things or come up with new ways to provide the capability.”

The other major trend Madden cited is the Air Force’s long overdue shift to focusing on the ground element at least as much as on getting satellites into orbit. Often the Air Force lofts satellites into space and has to wait several years before it can start doing much with the data because the ground stations don’t yet exist. Gen. John Hyten, head of Air Force Space Command, made clear his commitment to the ground in early December this year. The NRO made that commitment under Director Don Kerr in 2006 in a memo.

One of the most commonly cited examples of the gap between putting satellites into space and building the ground segment is AEHF, designed to provide secure communications during a nuclear war, and the Army WIN-T (Warfighter Information Network-Tactical) and other terminals it connects with.

Madden also told the audience the Air Force hopes to outsource operations of the Wideband Global Satcom  (WGS, formerly known as the Wideband Gapfiller) to commercial satellite operators. The Air Force uses a squadron to fly the satellites. A company might well, as John Deere does, fly the satellites with three or four people, Madden told us. Much of the commercial operations are monitored by software. Humans get involved only when needed and prompted

“I’m hoping 2016 is going to be the year we finally take the command and control for WGS and move it over to a commercial service,” Madden said.

Madden offered a real tour de horizon of space acquisition during his speech, much of it not newsworthy but rarely said by officials.