COLORADO SPRINGS: For years the Air Force space acquisition mafia fought the idea of Operationally Responsive Space. Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), for the most part, made fabulous, big and really expensive satellites at a wonderfully slow pace.

Operationally Responsive Space posited cheaper and more rapidly built smaller satellites. They weren’t nearly as capable but they could be launched much more quickly and at lower cost than could those big birds. Part of the idea was to quickly bolster the Air Force’s satellite communication’s capabilities and perhaps also put up larger groups of smaller sensors.

For years the Air Force refused to fund the ORS program, only to have a sometimes weary Congress keep funding it. Today, ORS won its spurs when Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, the head of SMC and former deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, declared before reporters that: “As we go forward, the objective will be to use those principles (of ORS) more broadly within space acquisition.”

She compared ORS to JIEDDO, the office formed to find answers to the problem of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and noted its special authorities. In the last few days here, several senior military space officers have mentioned the need for special authorities to ensure satellites can be built more rapidly and in greater numbers.

And she sent an unmistakable message to ORS employees, saying she thought it extremely important to keep people with such experience together.

Pawlikowski’s decision to support ORS so strongly carries even more weight because she is the likely new head of Air Force acquisition, waiting for her nomination to clear the Senate. SMC and the remnants of what used to be called Big Space will find it difficult to batter ORS when the top Air Force buyer says that it should be the way things are.

But the general, perhaps the most respected acquisition expert in what many regard as the toughest part of defense acquisition — space — did not reject the purchase of highly complex satellites that consume billions of dollars. They provide key capabilities the military needs. But several times today here at the National Space Symposium the wiry black belt in Tae Kwon Do noted she and her team had succeeded in building the same number of advanced systems during the last three years while SMC’s budget shrank from  $8 billion to $5.6 billion. Call it building Big Space with smaller dollars.

She said much of the success arose from efforts to encourage the defense industry to think more radically, to invest its own money in the search for greater efficiencies. “I personally believe that we at SMC have been very successful in getting industry to change their focus in thinking about satellites,” she told us.

If anyone in the US military can do this, and perhaps even help the rest of the Air Force do more with less, it may be Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski.