WASHINGTON — Congress is preparing to direct the Pentagon to establish permanent funding for a U.S. Space Force initiative that delivers commercial satellite imagery and analytics to military commanders worldwide, even as the program faces uncertainty in the Trump administration’s defense budget proposal.
The House Armed Services Committee is expected to include language in the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act directing the Pentagon to establish the Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking (TacSRT) program as a “program of record” with annual budget funding, according to draft language from the committee’s Strategic Forces subcommittee.
The move comes after the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 defense budget proposal omitted funding for TacSRT, despite the Space Force touting the program as critical for filling military demands for faster access to space-based intelligence in rapidly evolving situations.
TacSRT operates as an online marketplace where commercial vendors bid for contracts to deliver analytical products derived from surveillance satellites to U.S. and allied military commands. The program has existed for the past two years as a pilot funded by congressional add-on appropriations rather than regular Pentagon budget allocations.
Speed over classification
The program is designed for rapid response, with goals to deliver intelligence within 24 to 72 hours of requests from combatant commands. In some cases, such as during the U.S. withdrawal from Niger, the time from satellite collection to data delivery was compressed to just 90 minutes, according to the Space Force.
Products are intentionally kept unclassified, enabling easy dissemination across U.S. military branches and with allies while bypassing traditional classification and intelligence-sharing barriers that can slow information flow.
Bureaucratic friction
The growth of TacSRT created friction between the Space Force and the intelligence community, which traditionally handles geospatial intelligence delivery to military units. After a successful pilot phase in 2023, TacSRT received additional congressional funding, prompting the Space Force and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to sign a collaboration agreement in May to delineate responsibilities and minimize duplication.
TacSRT is explicitly not used for targeting or situations where U.S. troops face direct risk, with those scenarios still relying on national intelligence assets rather than commercial sources.
The Strategic Forces subcommittee provision, which will be considered during the committee’s NDAA markup scheduled for July 15, would direct the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to establish formal requirements for the tactical surveillance program and instruct the Air Force secretary to designate it as a program of record.
The Department of the Air Force declined to comment on the status of TacSRT and the program’s funding.
A faster process
The Space Force has started efforts to improve TacSRT services, including modernizing data request processes to make them faster and more automated. The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit has been funding prototype software platforms under its broader Hybrid Space Architecture initiative, which aims to leverage commercial space satellites for national security applications.
“Users of geospatial data demand speed more than anything else,” said Luke Fischer, co-founder and CEO of geospatial intelligence firm SkyFi, which has been awarded a contract from the Defense Innovation Unit to prototype software supporting TacSRT. “Typically it has taken days and weeks. Now it’s getting to hours. But it’s going to be minutes if more processes were automated,” Fischer said, drawing on his background as a former U.S. military special operations service member.
SkyFi, which operates as an Earth observation marketplace analyzing data from multiple satellite operator partners, has developed what Fischer calls a “retail exchange for space information” that it’s pitching as a data management platform for TacSRT.