Space has become a software business.
Just ask the Space Development Agency, which successfully launched 21 Tranche 1 transport satellites as part of a massive satellite communications network and then paused launches for nearly nine months to address technical issues.
Travis Steele, chief architect for the Air Force and Space Force at Red Hat, said those lessons highlight a broader transformation taking place in this space. The military could build the most sophisticated orbital hardware in the world, but if flight software, ground station integration and network orchestration are not effective, that platform is essentially grounded, Steele noted during Federal News Network’s Space & Satellite Exchange 2026.
While launching hardware has its challenges, software has become just as critical, agreed Jennifer Elzea, SDA’s director of strategic engagement. It enables satellites to maneuver, avoid collisions and carry out their missions, said Elzea, who also spoke with Federal News Network for the exchange.
“There are some things we learned that we could do on the ground for software much more quickly than trying to upload software fixes to space in low Earth orbit,” Elzea said.
“In particular, the satellites are moving very fast, and so you don’t get very long connections with them over any given ground station. And we’ve learned that there are some pieces of software, flight software, other enabling types of software, that we can address on the ground and before they are in space, and that will move us along much more quickly in the process.”
How to add speed, resilience to space comm domain
As Defense Department organizations shift that paradigm and move from a traditional exquisite satellite system architecture into this proliferated low-Earth orbit network, they can build in resiliency through both numbers and then the cadence of development, Steele explained.
“Their spiral development will allow them to do that. I think that’s really critical, and from our perspective, that directly mirrors what we’re seeing in other domains around software-defined warfare, and the emphasis on backward compatibility, like building with tactical data links such as Link 16,” he said.
“That really demonstrates a high focus on immediate warfighter utility rather than some future horizon over multiyear hardware modifications.”
And as the number of satellites grows and the complexity increases exponentially, defense organizations will face challenges such as interoperability, fleet management and processing vast amounts of data.
SDA in particular “is going to — and needs to — leverage multiple vendors to build out those transport and tracking layers,” Steele said. “But it’s incumbent upon us in industry to move away from proprietary operating environments, ensure that we embrace standardized open architectures and then also ensure that we can orchestrate data across different contractor platforms.”
Managing configurations across hundreds of satellites will require a fundamentally different operating model — one that relies on automation rather than human operators to deploy software updates, enforce policies and recover from failures across the constellation, he added.
Plus, as sensing capabilities expand, particularly for missions such as hypersonic missile tracking, satellites also will generate exponentially more data. Rather than transmitting massive amounts of raw data to ground stations, Steele said industry will need to enable artificial intelligence directly on orbital hardware, allowing satellites to send actionable intelligence instead of raw data to reduce the latency associated with traditional downlinks.
Adapting to SDA’s fast timelines
SDA was created to accelerate space acquisition by leveraging commercial practices and rapidly fielding new satellite capabilities. Steele said industry will also need to make some changes in how it develops software to keep pace with the agency’s accelerated acquisition model.
Companies will need to shift to a continuous software delivery model as well as move away from tightly integrated, highly proprietary platforms.
“We all must to move to this modular open shell where we extract software capabilities entirely. The reason why that’s important is not only that speed component, but also it allows you to build this automated DevSecOps ecosystem where you have pre-accredited baseline images and operating environments utilizing that automated software. You can do things like attestation, where software bills of materials come in,” Steele said.
The potential is exciting — both for comm and for software, he said.
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