Can DOD Make Better Use of Commercial Space Data and Services?

Key Takeaways

• GAO found DOD can gain more value from commercial data through better awareness, access, and licensing coordination.
• JCO spent $76.8 million through GDM, yet fragmented knowledge still limits reuse across Space Force organizations.
• TacSRT shows commercial sensing can support fast operations when procurement and data-rights rules match mission tempo.

GAO Finds an Integration Problem Rather Than a Supply Problem

On August 27, 2026, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released DOD Has Opportunities to Improve Its Use of Commercial Data and Related Services, an examination of Department of Defense purchases of commercial space data and related services. The commercial space data and services covered by GAO include information collected by commercial satellites, radars, and telescopes, along with analytical products created from those data.

GAO’s finding is less about whether useful commercial capability exists than whether DOD organizations know what has already been purchased, what licenses permit, where the data reside, and whom to contact when they want access. That distinction matters because the department has already created purchasing organizations, data repositories, contracting mechanisms, and operational programs designed to bring commercial capabilities into national security missions.

GAO focused on three organizations with distinct responsibilities. The Space Force’s Joint Commercial Operations Cell (JCO) buys unclassified commercial data and services for space domain awareness, positioning, navigation, and timing support, satellite communications situational awareness, and Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking (TacSRT). The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) serves as the lead acquirer of commercial imagery for DOD and the intelligence community, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) acquires commercial geospatial intelligence analytical services and products.

This division of responsibilities reflects a larger policy shift. The 2024 DOD Commercial Space Integration Strategy calls for commercial capabilities to be incorporated into planning, training, routine operations, crisis response, and conflict preparations. The Space Force Commercial Space Strategy similarly directs the service to institutionalize commercial goods and services within operational architectures rather than treating commercial suppliers mainly as experimental technology sources. The Defense Department’s explanation of the strategy emphasizes integration during peacetime so commercial capabilities are already incorporated into planning, training, and operations before a crisis.

A related New Space Economy analysis of commercial integration compared the task with DOD’s long experience adopting commercial cloud services. That comparison is useful because both models require government organizations to buy continuously changing services from private companies, negotiate access rights, maintain security controls, train personnel, integrate commercial data with government systems, and decide which functions should remain government-owned.

GAO’s scope is narrower than commercial space integration as a whole. The audit excluded launch services, satellite communications, commercial spacecraft hardware, government-funded academic data, integration contracts, and in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing. Its findings consequently concern the information layer of commercial space: sensing, data, licenses, analytics, distribution, and operational use.

That narrower scope exposes a problem that can be obscured by discussions about satellites and launch vehicles. DOD may possess access to useful commercial information without every potential user knowing that access exists. An acquisition program can succeed contractually yet deliver less operational value than expected if another command cannot discover the data, misunderstands its license, assumes access will disappear, or purchases the same capability independently.

The GAO findings consequently shift attention from acquiring commercial space technology to managing commercial information as a shared defense resource. That is a governance question as much as a procurement question, and GAO found evidence that existing coordination mechanisms can solve some problems without creating another acquisition organization.

How DOD Buys Commercial Space Data and Services

The scale of purchasing documented by GAO’s August 2026 review shows that commercial sensing and analytics have moved beyond isolated demonstrations. From January 27, 2023, through September 30, 2025, the Space Force purchased $123.9 million of commercial data and services through the Global Data Marketplace (GDM). JCO accounted for $76.8 million, or 62%, and System Delta 810 accounted for $35.6 million, or 29%. JCO also made 590 of the 1,315 DOD purchases recorded through GDM during that period.

Most JCO spending went directly to data. GAO calculated $42.14 million, or 54.9% of JCO’s $76.8 million, for data and $34.63 million, or 45.1%, for services. Electro-optical and radar observation data formed the largest individual category at $32.51 million, representing 42.4% of JCO expenditure. Radio-frequency services accounted for $12.36 million, positioning, navigation, and timing services for $9.52 million, and other data for $7.19 million.

Those numbers illustrate how commercial space procurement differs from buying a satellite. JCO can acquire a radar observation, radio-frequency analysis, positioning data set, visualization product, or analytical document without funding an entire sensing system. A government customer can select a provider according to the mission requirement and purchase the resulting information through a marketplace.

NRO operates at another scale. The agency’s Electro-Optical Commercial Layer contracts were awarded in May 2022 to BlackSky, Maxar, now operating as Vantor, and Planet. NRO described the awards as its largest commercial imagery contracting effort, valued at billions of dollars over the potential life of the contracts. GAO reported that the program has a five-year base period and five one-year option periods.

Because NRO’s annual budget and spending contain classified information, GAO reported rounded funding ranges rather than a complete expenditure total. For fiscal years 2021 through 2025, annual average available funding for current electro-optical imagery was reported in the $200 million to $300 million range, with the highest annual amount reaching $438 million. Radar capabilities had an annual average available funding range of $0 to $50 million and a highest annual amount of $119 million. These figures represent available funding rather than a statement that every dollar was spent.

NGA occupies another part of the commercial information chain. According to the GAO review, annual average obligations for foundation products during fiscal years 2021 through 2025 were $25 million to $50 million, with the highest annual obligation falling between $50 million and $75 million. Other categories included economic indicators, other data analysis, and emerging analytical products.

NGA’s broader commercial operations provide context for those purchases. In May 2025 congressional testimony, NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth described the agency’s increasing reliance on commercial geospatial intelligence and its effort to coordinate acquisition and distribution across government customers.

Commercial procurement has consequently become part of the operating structure surrounding U.S. military space. A New Space Economy examination of the Space Force describes commercial capabilities increasingly being treated as operational services rather than peripheral industry offerings. GAO’s expenditure data give that policy direction a measurable financial dimension.

The unresolved question is whether purchasing volume translates into corresponding use. Buying more data can increase capability, but fragmented licensing knowledge and incomplete visibility into previous purchases can produce a different result: agencies pay for information that eligible users never discover.

Licensing and Data Rights Shape What Users Can Actually Do

Commercial data normally enter government systems under licenses. DOD generally does not purchase ownership of the underlying commercial information; it buys defined rights governing use, disclosure, reproduction, modification, distribution, and sharing.

The Global Data Marketplace licensing structure described by GAO allows vendors to offer multiple rights tiers for the same data. Arrangements can range from licenses limited to a buyer’s organization to broader government-purpose rights that permit information to be used across federal organizations and, depending on the license, shared with foreign partners. Broader rights generally cost more because the government is purchasing permission for a larger user community.

NRO and NGA use another licensing structure for commercial imagery. Their end-user license agreements range from Public Release through more restrictive categories designed for U.S. government or national-security users. Some permit sharing with foreign mission partners, civilian agencies, contractors, state and local governments, or nongovernmental organizations under specified conditions.

The distinction between access and ownership can create confusion inside an organization accustomed to government-generated information. GAO interviewed a Space Training and Readiness Command official who said licensing costs contributed to the command’s decision not to use commercial data from GDM. The official also believed data licensed for operations might not be available for training.

Another Space Force official raised a different concern. A Combat Forces Command data and artificial intelligence official worried that data used to train an autonomous software system might disappear when the associated GDM contract ended. GAO subsequently reported that JCO officials said data purchased through GDM are stored in the Unified Data Library and that an organization possessing the applicable data rights does not lose access to previously purchased data when the buying contract expires.

Those examples reveal an important distinction. Some barriers reported to GAO reflected actual licensing costs or restrictions, but other barriers involved perceptions that did not match how existing purchases could be accessed. A technical solution could not fix that problem by itself because the missing component was institutional knowledge.

The issue becomes more significant as commercial space-domain-awareness markets expand. Commercial optical sensors, radar systems, radio-frequency monitoring networks, and analytical platforms can produce overlapping information with different coverage, latency, sharing rights, and licensing models. A New Space Economy assessment of space situational awareness describes commercial providers increasingly becoming part of operational data architectures rather than remaining separate data vendors.

Data rights can also affect coalition operations. JCO’s commercial positioning and navigation analyses can remain unclassified, allowing findings about interference or jamming to be shared rapidly with allies when license terms permit. Commercial information can consequently provide operational flexibility that highly classified government data may not provide as easily.

This creates an economic choice each time a purchase is structured. A cheaper license restricted to one organization may satisfy an immediate requirement but reduce future reuse. Paying more for broader rights can distribute the same information across training, operations, analysis, interagency coordination, and allied cooperation. Procurement personnel consequently need to evaluate expected reuse and sharing at the time of purchase rather than treating the license as an administrative detail.

TacSRT Tests Whether Procurement Can Match Operational Tempo

TacSRT offers one of the clearest demonstrations of what commercial data procurement can accomplish when a military requirement is expressed as an information problem. Instead of asking the government to build a dedicated satellite for every request, TacSRT allows combatant commands to seek commercially generated operational planning products based on imagery and analytics.

The Space Force describes TacSRT’s commercial acquisition model as a rapid mechanism for tasking commercial vendors through GDM. During flooding in Brazil in May 2024, commercial analysis determined that planned evacuation routes for U.S. personnel were no longer viable and helped identify another route. The Space Force said the analysis was delivered within 48 hours of tasking and contributed to the successful evacuation of U.S. personnel and their families on May 9, 2024.

GAO documented another operational example from December 2024. A commercial analytical product helped U.S. Southern Command identify possible clandestine airstrips in Ecuador. The United States shared the product with Ecuador, whose authorities investigated and disabled airstrips believed to have been used by narcotraffickers.

Commercial data were also used for space-domain-awareness missions. JCO bought electro-optical and radar observations to supplement government information, including observations intended to improve coverage of the Southern Hemisphere. Radio-frequency services helped identify satellites transmitting signals and refine information about their locations and movement.

A New Space Economy examination of U.S. ISR satellites places TacSRT within a larger shift toward commercial sensing and analytical support for defense missions. Commercial providers can offer optical imagery, synthetic-aperture radar, radio-frequency detection, hyperspectral sensing, automated analysis, and data fusion without requiring DOD to own every sensor producing the information.

Procurement rules still have to operate at the speed required by these missions. Before December 2024, GDM customers used a credit system under which government funding was converted into credits for later purchases. A Space Systems Command legal review questioned the authority for that arrangement, prompting the General Services Administration (GSA) and JCO to replace credits with contract line items and a cost-reimbursement process.

The revised process created an immediate operational concern. JCO officials estimated that a TacSRT purchase could require four to six weeks because contracting officers had additional responsibilities, including determining whether proposed prices were fair and reasonable. TacSRT documentation, by comparison, called for priority, urgent, and emergency products to be delivered in less than 72 hours.

GSA responded in December 2025 by approving three purchasing categories for operational planning products. Routine products can use existing or free imagery, urgent products can include acquisition of one to 20 images and delivery within 72 hours, and emergency products can include more than 20 images with delivery within 24 hours. Pre-established price ceilings allow qualifying purchases to move through the process more quickly.

Congress has continued to support commercial sensing. The fiscal year 2026 defense funding agreement provided an additional $30 million for TacSRT and another $49.5 million to examine commercial services involving positioning, navigation, and timing, environmental monitoring, and space-domain-awareness requirements.

TacSRT is consequently testing more than commercial sensing technology. It tests whether federal acquisition processes can treat information as a time-sensitive operational service. The value of receiving an observation depends partly on when it arrives, so a purchasing process that works for planned acquisitions may be poorly suited to an event whose useful response window is measured in hours.

Coordination Can Turn Separate Purchases Into Shared Capability

GAO’s most consequential finding concerns a monthly meeting rather than a new satellite, contract, or software platform. Since 2024, JCO has led the Cross-Government Commercial Data Sharing Working Group, an informal forum for organizations that purchase and use commercial space data through GDM and other contracts.

According to the GAO review, participants have included Space Force organizations, U.S. Space Command, the Department of the Air Force, the Defense Intelligence Agency, NRO, the Department of Commerce, NASA, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. The group discusses planned purchases, cost sharing, data rights, and opportunities for organizations to combine demand.

GAO observed the mechanism working in June 2025. JCO, NRO, and the Department of Commerce coordinated a multi-month purchase of electro-optical data covering geostationary orbit to supplement an aging DOD capability. Each organization contributed funding, and the purchase included government-purpose rights that allowed the resulting data to be shared across the federal government.

That model changes the economics of commercial space data. If three agencies independently buy access to similar information under narrow licenses, the government can pay repeatedly for overlapping capability. A coordinated purchase with broader rights can spread cost among users and increase the number of organizations able to exploit the result.

The Global Data Marketplace is already being used outside the Space Force. On April 30, 2025, the Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commerce placed three GDM orders for commercial tracking data, orbit-determination services, and data-quality monitoring as part of the Traffic Coordination System for Space Commercial Collision Avoidance Gap Pathfinder. The Office of Space Commerce announced the resulting awards on June 11, 2025, with a combined value of $10.1 million.

NGA uses its own coordination mechanisms for commercial geospatial intelligence. Its Commercial Initiative to Buy Operationally Responsive GEOINT, or CIBORG, is designed to provide centralized and standardized contractual access to emerging commercially available imagery, data, analytical capabilities, and services.

The policy case for coordination is already well developed. DOD’s commercial integration strategy says commercial capabilities should be incorporated before a crisis so operational organizations know how to use them when demand increases. Day-to-day use, training, and exercises are part of the integration process rather than activities that occur after procurement has been completed.

GAO found that some personnel who could have benefited from JCO’s working group did not know it existed. Information about the group was absent from the public Space Force websites, publicly accessible JCO presentations, and the internal Intelink resources GAO reviewed. JCO officials also said they did not maintain a central source explaining current purchases and access because the information changes frequently.

That finding points toward a relatively low-cost reform. DOD already has the marketplace, working group, data repository, contracting expertise, commercial suppliers, and operating users. The missing capability is discoverability: knowing what the government has bought, what rights accompany it, where it can be found, and who can authorize its use.

Commercial Dependence Creates Security and Resilience Questions

Commercial space data provide DOD with capabilities that can be acquired quickly, shared more easily than many classified products, and refreshed as companies deploy new sensors and analytical techniques. The same commercial characteristics create security issues that government-owned systems do not face in identical form.

Commercial companies operate businesses rather than exclusive government assets. Depending on law, regulation, company policy, and contract terms, the same company may serve U.S. agencies, allied governments, private organizations, and foreign customers. GAO notes that commercial availability can distribute capabilities that once belonged mainly to governments among a much larger set of users.

The GAO report provides a 2026 example involving Earth observation. A U.S. commercial company told GAO that it temporarily restricted customers from ordering imagery of the Middle East in February 2026 to protect U.S. military interests, then worked with NRO in March 2026 to adjust restrictions governing access and publication. GAO did not identify the company in the publicly released report.

Commercial providers can also become targets because their data and infrastructure have military value. Cyberattacks against a commercial company, disruption of its ground systems, loss of satellite capacity, changes in corporate ownership, regulatory action, or business failure can affect government users that depend on its services.

This does not mean DOD should avoid commercial dependence. It means the department needs to distinguish between missions that can rely heavily on commercial capacity and functions for which government-controlled alternatives remain necessary. The DOD Commercial Space Integration Strategy uses mission suitability, security, resilience, government responsibilities, and market maturity to guide the degree of commercial adoption.

Commercial sensing can also make defense information easier to share. A product based on commercially available imagery can sometimes be distributed to allies without exposing the collection characteristics of classified government satellites. That attribute has gained operational significance as coalition warfare increasingly depends on information exchange among countries possessing different intelligence authorities and technical systems.

A broader New Space Economy review of satellite applications describes defense demand expanding beyond traditional government-owned spacecraft into commercial imagery, communications, radio-frequency sensing, analytics, and related services. The economic consequence is a hybrid market in which government demand can support commercial providers whose infrastructure may also serve civilian and foreign customers.

That hybrid model creates resilience when government and commercial systems complement one another. It can create concentration risk if too much mission capacity depends on one company, one marketplace, one ground architecture, or one licensing mechanism.

DOD’s commercial-space policy consequently requires more than purchasing whatever the private sector can provide at lower cost. Procurement officials need to consider continuity of service, wartime access, data custody, cybersecurity, licensing, supplier diversity, allied sharing, and the availability of alternative sources. Commercial integration becomes stronger when those conditions are designed into contracts before operational demand exposes them.

Budget Policy May Determine How Far Commercial Integration Goes

GAO’s recommendation is narrow. The Secretary of the Air Force should ensure that the Space Force develops ways to inform current and potential users about the Cross-Government Commercial Data Sharing Working Group and about how to access and use commercial data and services that government organizations have already purchased.

DOD agreed with the recommendation and said it plans to have JCO work with contracting officers to increase awareness of the working group and post additional information explaining how users can access commercial space data and services already purchased by government organizations. As of August 27, 2026, GAO lists the recommendation as open, meaning GAO has not yet confirmed implementation sufficient to close it.

Implementation could begin with straightforward measures. A searchable government catalog could identify commercial data already purchased, the organization responsible for the purchase, the applicable license category, authorized user groups, storage location, retention terms, points of contact, and procedures for requesting access. Such a catalog would need access controls because some acquisition details and operational requirements cannot be broadly distributed.

Licensing education deserves similar attention. Acquisition personnel, operators, trainers, analysts, and data specialists need a shared understanding of the difference between organizational licenses, broader government licenses, government-purpose rights, and NRO commercial imagery agreements. A user who assumes commercial data cannot be reused may create the same practical result as a license that actually prohibits reuse.

Budget structure presents a harder problem. An April 8, 2026 Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis argued that Space Force funding for non-launch commercial services has frequently depended on congressional additions rather than strong requests through the department’s normal budget process. The analysis cited TacSRT and other commercial services as examples of tension between policy support for commercial integration and the amount of funding requested for those services.

That tension matters because service-based procurement requires continuity. Commercial providers make investment decisions based partly on expected government demand, and military organizations need confidence that a service used in exercises and operations will remain available over future budget cycles. Short funding horizons can encourage pilots without guaranteeing operational transition.

Congress has shown sustained interest in TacSRT. It has funded the program, directed study of a possible program of record, and requested examination of potential overlap with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities elsewhere in DOD. NGA and the Space Force also signed a TacSRT memorandum of agreement on May 21, 2025, establishing a governance framework for acquiring and providing commercial imagery-related remote-sensing data and associated products. The agreement is intended to support combatant commands without duplicating NGA and Space Force responsibilities.

That agreement addresses another issue relevant to commercial integration: institutional boundaries. Commercial products do not necessarily conform to government organizational lines. A single vendor may produce imagery relevant to NRO acquisition, NGA analysis, Space Force tactical operations, Commerce Department space-safety functions, and allied missions. Clear responsibilities reduce duplication without requiring those missions to be centralized in one organization.

A New Space Economy analysis of U.S. operational ISR satellites discusses this convergence between government intelligence assets and commercial sensing. The growing overlap makes coordination, licensing, and tasking policy increasingly significant because the information chain now crosses organizations that historically operated under different acquisition and oversight structures.

GAO’s communication recommendation addresses the immediate administrative weakness its audit documented. Longer-term performance will depend on whether DOD makes commercial services a predictable part of requirements development, exercises, acquisition planning, data architecture, and budget formulation. Without that institutional support, commercial programs can remain successful individual initiatives rather than becoming dependable components of military operations.

Better Information Management May Matter as Much as Better Satellites

The commercial-space discussion often centers on spacecraft performance, launch costs, sensor resolution, revisit rates, constellation size, or analytic speed. GAO’s findings point to another source of military advantage: the ability to discover, license, share, retain, and reuse information already purchased.

The Unified Data Library and GDM relationship illustrates that distinction. GDM supports commercial acquisition, and the Unified Data Library supports storage and distribution. JCO officials told GAO that data purchased through GDM remain in the library and that an organization possessing appropriate rights does not lose access to data already purchased simply because the related buying contract ends.

This model can make commercial information cumulative rather than disposable. An observation purchased for one mission may later support training, algorithm development, historical analysis, space-domain-awareness research, or another operational requirement if its license permits those uses.

The economic effect can be substantial even without increasing the procurement budget. Reusing data already purchased increases value per acquisition, and coordinating planned purchases can prevent agencies from paying separately for overlapping access. GAO warned that poor visibility into existing purchases can increase costs when organizations make separate buys.

Commercial markets also produce more sensor types and analytical services than a single government program can practically replicate. Optical imagery can provide visual identification, radar can collect through clouds and darkness, radio-frequency systems can detect emissions, positioning data can reveal interference, and analytical services can combine more than one source into operational products. The government can select among these capabilities according to the problem it needs to solve.

The acquisition model works best when DOD treats the resulting information as managed enterprise data rather than as an isolated contract deliverable. That means designing metadata, access controls, licensing information, retention, application programming interfaces, and user discovery into the purchasing process.

A recent New Space Economy discussion of Space Force development describes commercial capabilities becoming part of the service’s operating model. GAO’s audit suggests that the transition requires administrative infrastructure that receives less public attention than satellites but can determine whether commercial capacity reaches operators.

Commercial integration also changes the relationship between acquisition speed and information management. A rapid marketplace can solve the buying problem, yet speed loses value if the resulting data cannot be found or reused. A centralized repository can solve the storage problem, yet storage alone does not tell a user what a license permits. A working group can solve coordination problems, yet only for organizations that know it exists.

The stronger model connects all three functions. Marketplaces acquire information, repositories preserve and distribute it, and governance mechanisms explain rights and coordinate demand. When those functions operate together, commercial space data become a reusable operational resource rather than a sequence of unrelated purchases.

Summary

GAO’s August 27, 2026 examination of DOD commercial space data does not describe a department that has failed to engage industry. It describes a defense organization already spending substantial sums on commercial sensing and analytics, operating a data marketplace, maintaining a data repository, coordinating purchases among federal organizations, and using commercial products in real missions.

JCO alone spent $76.8 million through GDM between January 2023 and September 2025. The Space Force as a whole purchased $123.9 million through the marketplace during the period reviewed by GAO, and NRO and NGA operated much larger commercial imagery and geospatial-analysis acquisition structures outside GDM.

The weakness GAO identified sits between acquisition and use. Licensing costs can discourage adoption, but misunderstandings about licenses can do the same. Data may already be available through government-purpose rights or stored in the Unified Data Library, yet a potential user may not know that access exists.

TacSRT demonstrates the operational promise. Commercial sensing and analytics have supported disaster response, counter-narcotics activity, space-domain awareness, positioning and navigation monitoring, and combatant-command information requests. Procurement reforms have also shown that acquisition rules can be adjusted when ordinary contracting timelines conflict with missions measured in hours or days.

The next phase of commercial integration may depend less on discovering whether industry can produce useful data and more on making DOD an efficient institutional consumer of that information. Discovery systems, reusable licenses, coordinated purchasing, predictable funding, clear agency responsibilities, secure repositories, and supplier continuity can determine how much military value emerges from every commercial purchase.

GAO’s recommendation appears administrative because it calls for better communication about a working group and existing data access. Its implications are broader. In a defense environment where commercial sensors can generate more information than any single organization can independently collect or exploit, knowing what the government already owns the right to use can itself become an operational capability.