Pentagon asks private companies to help secure space by enhancing satellite network

The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) of the Pentagon announced on May 12, 2025, that it has added over a dozen companies to its Hybrid Space Architecture (HSA) project. This is an initiative to tap commercial satellites and infrastructure for faster and secure transmission of battlefield data. The project is a collaboration between DIU, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the U.S. Space Force, and several other military organizations, per Space News. The DIU is based in Silicon Valley and collaborates with tech industries to aid with military needs, such as the HSA project.

Launched in 2022, the HSA included Earth-imaging satellite operators, broadband providers, and firms with a hand in cybersecurity, cloud computing, and quantum encryption. The new series of companies joining the project includes Capella Space, EdgeCortix, Eutelsat America Corp. OneWeb Technologies, Fairwinds Technologies and AST Space Mobile, Illumina Computing Group, Lockheed Martin Space, MapLarge, SES Space & Defense, Skycorp, SkyFi, Ursa Space, and Viasat. These companies are adding to a previous set of eight firms on board from 2022.

The set of eight companies comprised Aalyria Technologies, Anduril, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Kuiper, Astranis, ATLAS Space Operations, Google, Enveil, Palantir, Planet Labs, Microsoft, and SpiderOak. This initiative is connected to the Defense Department’s idea of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, per Defense News. This concept wants to connect the military forces and their sharing of information, be it in the air, space, sea, land, or cyber sectors. This required a more secure and faster means of communication that could exist in various orbits. 

Such a system could make use of cloud computing infrastructure that can collect, process, and distribute data from various sensors. The program has a set goal to be fully functional by 2026, and experts hope to start demonstrations later in the summer. “The HSA network has the potential to increase network resilience by employing multi-path routing of communications to optimize data transport and mitigate adverse effects caused by weather or other obstructions,” the DIU statement mentioned, as they focused on enhancing “real-time access to information.”

For the planned demonstrations, the program team is working to launch a live network to aid the demo exercises and include warfighting concepts and tactics. This defense contract has a public-private partnership where companies shall make and test the prototypes and technologies. These works were aided financially, instead of being entirely funded, by the government, as per Space News. The firms are required to build and demonstrate various ways to gather, transmit, and process data that can be securely transmitted across the globe and delivered to military units. 

Steve Butow, the lead of DIU's space portfolio, stated, "DIU's ability to rapidly integrate and deliver a hybrid space network architecture is testament to its process of allowing commercial innovators to solve complex problems at speed and scale by applying their solutions to DoD's problems." The success of these demonstrations will be a step forward in accessing tactical information without the burden of multiple radios and satellite terminals. It will help the department further realize its initiative of a resilient and hybrid space architecture to share data.