Commercial Space Week 2026

In space warfighting, advantage isn’t just about presence, it’s about positioning at speed. As the U.S. Space Force’s Space Warfighting Framework makes clear, space superiority, the ability to operate at a time and place of our choosing, is a precondition for joint force success. But superiority in a dynamic, contested domain like space cannot be static. It must be maneuvered.

For years, the U.S. has rightly focused on proliferation, deploying hundreds or thousands of satellites to build resilience through numbers. But in high-end wargames, this approach alone is proving insufficient. Our satellites may survive the first strike, but they often can’t reposition, defend themselves, or respond quickly enough to threats in the second and third moves. Numbers help, but maneuver wins.

This talk presents the case for a new cornerstone of spacepower: high delta-v, high-thrust cryogenic orbital vehicles, like the system we’re building at Orbital Operations. These assets turn orbital trajectories into maneuver corridors, enabling rapid escort, interception, or strike across vast orbital regimes. Unlike slow, electric systems, they can respond within hours, denying adversaries the initiative and preserving our ability to control celestial lines of communication.

Rapid and sustained maneuver is not a luxury, it’s the key to localized, persistent space superiority. Without it, deterrence weakens, options shrink, and the fight moves on without us. The future of space warfighting demands that we stop thinking of satellites as fixed targets and start treating space as the fluid maneuver domain it has become.

Victory in orbit will go not to those who are merely present, but to those who can move first, fast, and far.