DARPA chief says agency must harness commercial space boom

DENVER — About a year into the job, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency director Stephen Winchell is looking to reshape the agency’s space portfolio, arguing it must function less as a collection of high-risk experiments and more as a conduit to a fast-moving commercial market. 

Speaking May 3 at the GEOINT Symposium, Winchell said the shift reflects a fundamental change in where innovation is happening, with private companies now leading advances in launch, satellite manufacturing and on-orbit services.

Winchell, who became DARPA’s 24th director in May 2025 after leading artificial intelligence efforts at the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, said the agency should use its flexible contracting model and tolerance for technical risk to pull emerging commercial capabilities into defense prototypes that can transition more quickly to military operators.

The approach comes amid what he described as a “unique time and place” for U.S. space capabilities, driven by the scale and pace of private-sector investment. That environment creates what Winchell called an opportunity to “own mass orbit” and turn it into both a military and economic advantage, and he acknowledged that “the private sector is going to be in the driver’s seat.”

DARPA is focusing on foundational building blocks such as propulsion, maneuverability and the ability to assemble and sustain large structures in orbit, alongside analytical tools to plan and manage increasingly complex space operations, Winchell said. 

At the same time, the agency continues to fund basic science and more experimental concepts. One example is AtmoSense, a program that treats the atmosphere as a sensing layer by studying how disturbances from events such as volcanic eruptions or severe weather propagate upward and can be detected at high altitudes. Winchell said related techniques could be used to track phenomena such as hypersonic vehicles by observing disruptions in the ionosphere.

DARPA is also looking to expand space domain awareness through projects like Space-WATCH, which aims to create a near real-time picture of activity in low Earth orbit by aggregating data from sensors already onboard commercial and government satellites. The program is designed to flag unusual behavior and provide timely alerts to operators, using a marketplace model to incentivize data sharing from private spacecraft.

The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2027 budget request includes about $1.8 billion for DARPA’s advanced technology development. Winchell said he has proposed increased funding toward space efforts, though he declined to specify the amount.

Some programs are nearing operational demonstration. A robotic servicing spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman and equipped with DARPA-designed robotic arms is expected to launch this year to attempt repairs and upgrades of satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

Looking further ahead, Winchell said DARPA is considering a new “Grand Challenge” focused on cislunar navigation, a technical problem centered on how spacecraft determine their position and trajectory in the region between Earth and the moon, where GPS-like infrastructure is unavailable. The agency is also directing more of its portfolio toward lunar and deep-space technologies, including recent study contracts for missions that would search for water ice in low lunar orbit.

More speculative ideas are also under review. Winchell said DARPA is studying whether it could play a role in capturing and stabilizing an asteroid, potentially enabling private companies to extract resources. Such a project, he suggested, could help “jump start” a future market for in-space resource extraction, though it remains at an early conceptual stage.