The House Armed Services Committee just dropped a quiet bombshell. The draft fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, released on 26 May, calls for repealing the laws that established two of the Space Force’s most aggressive and successful acquisition shops: the Space Development Agency (SDA) and the Space Rapid Capabilities Office (Space RCO). If the language survives, both organisations will be dissolved as separate entities.

For those who have followed the Space Force’s short history, this is not subtle. SDA and the Space RCO have been the engines pushing the service to acquire satellites faster, cheaper, and on shorter cycles than traditional Air Force programmes ever managed. Dissolving them is either a brave reorganisation or a quiet capitulation to the slow-moving culture they were created to disrupt.

Why SDA and the Space RCO Existed in the First Place

Both organisations were created as antidotes to the Air Force’s notoriously slow space-acquisition process. SDA was stood up in 2019 with a mandate to deliver low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations on rolling two-year tranches — faster than any traditional Pentagon space programme had ever managed. The Space RCO, modelled on the Air Force RCO that fielded the B-21 Raider, was a smaller shop focused on classified rapid-response programmes.

Both delivered. SDA’s first tranche of Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture satellites began launching in late 2024. The Space RCO has handled multiple classified programmes the Pentagon will not even publicly acknowledge. By traditional Pentagon standards, both organisations have been successful — and exactly the kind of disruptive culture the Space Force was supposed to embody.

The Pentagon’s Argument for Reorganisation

The Trump administration’s broader Pentagon reorganisation, ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in February, requires all military services to consolidate acquisition under “portfolio executives” overseeing programmes by mission area. For the Space Force, that means nine such executives, each managing a portfolio that ranges from missile warning to communications to space domain awareness.

The argument from Pentagon leadership is that SDA and the Space RCO were workarounds — necessary because the Air Force’s traditional acquisition system did not work for space. With Space Force now functioning as its own service, the workarounds can be folded into the main acquisition structure.

The Cultural Risk

The concern from independent analysts and former Space Force officers is straightforward: once SDA and the Space RCO are folded into a “normal” acquisition structure, will the speed advantage survive? The disruptive culture that made both organisations effective was partly a function of organisational independence. It is not obvious that nine portfolio executives reporting to the same Space Force HQ will preserve that.

For now, the language is just draft. The full House Armed Services Committee will debate it on 4 June. The Senate will get its turn after that. Whatever survives the conference committee will determine whether the Space Force’s most successful experiments in fast acquisition continue to exist as recognisable entities — or quietly become memos.

Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine, SpaceNews, DefenseScoop.