{"id":49697,"date":"2025-02-12T21:58:28","date_gmt":"2025-02-12T13:58:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/us-space-force-looks-to-accelerate-shift-to-fixed-price-contracts\/"},"modified":"2025-02-12T21:58:28","modified_gmt":"2025-02-12T13:58:28","slug":"us-space-force-looks-to-accelerate-shift-to-fixed-price-contracts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/us-space-force-looks-to-accelerate-shift-to-fixed-price-contracts\/","title":{"rendered":"US Space Force Looks to Accelerate Shift to Fixed-Price Contracts"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

The U.S. Space Force<\/strong> is moving to shift a traditional 50-50 cost-plus versus fixed-price development contract split even more toward the use of fixed-price contracts with low non-recurring engineering costs and two to three year development cycles, a top service official said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf fits in the modality of getting us into a good space of good acquisition principles \u2014 short, sweet, quick, rapid, and delivery of that capability,\u201d Space Force Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, told a National Security Space Association (NSSA) conference in Reston, Virginia. on Tuesday. \u201cIf anything, think of us continuing those efforts, but doing it more aggressively,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The White House has yet to announce a nominee to replace the Biden administration\u2019s space acquisition executive, Frank Calvelli, and Purdy has stepped into the role.<\/p>\n

In a discussion with reporters after his address at NSSA, Purdy said that Calvelli had moved to the use of more fixed price contracts but \u201cleft a few as cost-plus, and I\u2019m re-looking at some of those, not because he made the wrong choice but because life has changed and the situation has changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s not too many cost-plus programs left,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are some big ones that are in the cost-plus realm that we never did switch out. Everything is screaming, \u2018We need to get faster. We need to make sure that we get commercial, that we don\u2019t get locked in.\u2019 That\u2019s what I\u2019m asking, to step into each one of those and talk to the requirements side to figure out if there\u2019s some kind of requirements that\u2019s driving it and see if there\u2019s something we can do. Sometimes, the requirement is such that, if you need a post-nuclear exchange communication \u2014 there\u2019s a lot of requirements like RAD-hardened; etc. there\u2019s not a lot of commercial for that. That\u2019s a straight up military domain. That\u2019s fine. We understand that, but I want to be able to explain it to any senior leader coming along, that we\u2019re going down a cost-plus [path] and here\u2019s the reason why we couldn\u2019t go down a commercial [path because of military-specific requirements] or because we couldn\u2019t break it apart and get commercial sub-pieces. I want to double down and make sure we\u2019ve done all the rigor that we can. \u201d<\/p>\n

Before the NSSA audience, Purdy also brought up Calvelli\u2019s stress on accountability.<\/p>\n

\u201cAccountability is a two-way street,\u201d Purdy said. \u201cAs of May 2022 to today, we\u2019re at about 14 major acquisition programs that have had contracts or entire programs restructured or cancelled. Why? Typically, due to performance. Costs have skyrocketed. We aren\u2019t getting the capability we need. Unlike the Space Force acquisition of old, we\u2019ve stopped just piling money into that. We\u2019ve stopped these contracts and re-competed them, for the most part, across the board. This includes unclassified and classified activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re also looking at taking action against poor performing U.S. government program managers \u2014 first to give them help and provide guidance and additional acquisition help, and then, if it\u2019s not making it, get rid of the roles,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Space Force acquisition executive oversees a more than $24 billion research and development portfolio. The latter includes 59 unclassified major acquisition programs \u2014 38 traditional Major Capability Acquisitions, 12 Middle Tier Authority, 8 software pathways, and one Quick Start \u2014 the Resilient Global Positioning System (R-GPS) by Space Force\u2019s Space Systems Command (SSC) to launch up to eight R-GPS satellites by 2028.<\/p>\n

Astranis, Axient, L3Harris Technologies and Sierra Space have been working on the R-GPS concept design phase.<\/p>\n

Troy Meink, the principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office who spurred acceleration of the use of fixed price contracts at the agency, is Pres. Trump\u2019s pick to become Air Force secretary.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re really looking to explore risk exposure on our programs,\u201d Purdy said on Tuesday. \u201cThere are a couple of programs that we have that I would declare are nearly unbounded risk exposure \u2014 they\u2019re sitting in a cost-plus environment, there\u2019s really difficult technology, and, basically, this is like future Nunn-McCurdys.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re gonna look hard at figuring how to get out of that,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s gonna be painful on all sides. We\u2019re gonna have discussions like how do we convert this to fixed price? How do we start breaking this apart. I wanna give a fair warning to industry out there because we\u2019ve already given it to our program managers, and I\u2019ve already started diving on a couple of key programs that are in that shape. That\u2019s a multi [step] evaluation process. We\u2019ve got to look at the requirements. A lot of times that\u2019s one of our key problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

This story was first published by Defense Daily<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The U.S. Space Force is moving to shift a traditional 50-50 cost-plus versus fixed-price development contract split even more toward the use of fixed-price contracts with low non-recurring engineering costs and two to three year development cycles, a top service official said on Tuesday. \u201cIf fits in the modality of getting us into a good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49697"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}