Space Force creates office to accelerate innovative tech acquisition

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Amid the Pentagon’s acquisition overhaul, the Space Force has created a new office dedicated to bridging the gap between the service’s operational needs and emerging industry capabilities.

The so-called Technology Portfolio Executive will report directly to Erich Hernandez-Baquero, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration.

During a panel at AFA’s annual Air, Space and Cyber conference, Hernandez-Baquero said the office will work closely with the Space Force’s new portfolio acquisition executives (PAEs) to ensure new technologies transition into operations.

“It will be empowered just as the PAEs, it will be a peer to the PAEs and it will be 100% focused on that valley of death — working with industry to ensure that there’s a pathway into product lines that the companies are developing, and ensuring that the PAEs have what they need to inform these on-ramp opportunities,” Hernandez-Baquero said Tuesday.

Like the rest of the Defense Department, the Space Force is reorganizing its acquisition structure in an effort to speed-up and improve bureaucratic procurement processes. The service plans to establish nine PAEs that will have cradle-to-grave authority over all of the programs within a specific mission area.

Hernandez-Baquero noted that the new structure has given the Space Force more acquisition flexibility. However, he said there are still concerns that the PAEs alone will not have the bandwidth needed to identify and prototype novel capabilities.

Unlike PAEs, the Technology Portfolio Executive will not be responsible for a single mission area. Rather, the office will look at a broad array of research-and-development efforts and work with industry — including commercial companies — to get them on the path to prototyping, Hernandez-Baquero said.

“I want somebody that’s focused 100% on looking at the most promising tech and driving the prototyping initiatives that are going to help mature it to the level where a PAE can say, ‘It meets my criteria for this onboard path and I can go do that,’” he told reporters during a media roundtable on the sidelines of the AFA conference. 

The Space Force has already stood up the Technology Portfolio Executive office and is actively looking for someone to lead it, he added.