Space Force seeks up to five cislunar seed satellites in first acquisition Bid

The U.S. Space Force posted its first cislunar acquisition request for information on SAM.gov on Nov. 2, 2026. The document asks industry to propose as many as five seed satellites for space domain awareness, navigation and positioning, and communications relay work across the Earth-Moon corridor. The five seed satellites will form a first-generation testbed whose lessons will guide a later acquisition strategy for a larger permanent constellation. Space Force has not announced the eventual number of satellites for that full system, leaving the final fleet size undetermined.

Officials could award as many as five cislunar design contracts in early 2027 under the request. The acquisition plan puts satellites in orbit by late 2029 and starts initial operations in 2031, establishing a multi-year deployment schedule. The timeline reflects Space Force acquisition leadership’s demand for a compressed pace in its advanced capabilities portfolio. That demand shrinks a typical decade-long development cycle into roughly five years for programs in that portfolio.

Today, Space Force sensors cover Earth orbit to roughly 36,000 kilometers (22,370 miles), while the Earth-Moon corridor extends to approximately 385,000 kilometers (239,239 miles) from the planet. No persistent U.S. military surveillance presence covers the region between Earth orbit and the Moon, leaving that entire expanse without dedicated military monitoring. The cislunar region’s volume is roughly 1,728 times larger than the volume inside geostationary orbit. Ground radar performance degrades beyond geostationary orbit because signal strength falls with range as objects move farther away.

At ten times the distance, reflected signal energy drops to one-hundredth of its strength closer to Earth, a steep decline that complicates ground-based detection of distant objects. GPS signals lose functionality beyond roughly 36,000 kilometers (22,370 miles) because of path loss at distance, removing that navigation aid for spacecraft farther out. Direct Earth-to-Moon links face geometric limits and carry a minimum round-trip latency of roughly 2.5 seconds for signals traveling between the two bodies. Space situational awareness tracks where objects are, while space domain awareness adds intent attribution and characterizes the broader operational picture.

Current U.S. military surveillance sensors such as Space Fence on Kwajalein Atoll and the Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance network were built for Earth orbit. They were not built for the cislunar region, leaving a gap in coverage as traffic increases toward the Moon. The gap leaves the Moon and surrounding space outside the reach of current military sensor networks. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is working to establish a cislunar positioning, navigation, and timing framework, but no operational system has been fielded to provide that service yet.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin say cislunar tracking needs space-based sensors and estimation algorithms adapted to local gravity, and neither capability exists operationally today.

The Earth-Moon-spacecraft three-body problem has no general closed-form analytic solution, a result proved by Henri Poincare in the late 19th century. Earth-Moon three-body dynamics offer just five analytically stable locations, known as Lagrange points, which complicate tracking and station-keeping across the corridor. Forecasts from industry and government project about 30 spacecraft traveling to the Moon from 2024 through 2030, adding traffic to an unmonitored corridor that current sensors cannot fully cover. A May 2026 Mitchell Institute analysis warned that China could gain strategic dominance over the Earth-Moon corridor by establishing a permanent lunar presence before the United States can monitor and operate in cislunar space.

A December 2025 Trump administration executive order called Ensuring American Space Superiority ordered the Defense Department to create cislunar capabilities as a matter of policy. Space Force leaders routinely call cislunar space a warfighting domain, a description that now appears in official public statements. Purdy said he was once told not to discuss cislunar space, but senior leaders now publicly describe it as a warfighting domain. The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Cislunar Highway Patrol System began in October 2020 and has spent six years developing experimental cislunar spacecraft under the Oracle program, an effort that predates the new request.

Blue Canyon Technologies is building Oracle-M, expected for delivery by the end of 2026 and launch in 2027 as part of the experimental effort. Oracle-P, also called Oracle Prime, is targeting a 2027 launch to continue the laboratory’s cislunar work. Purdy told the October 2026 AFCEA SPACE conference that the effort is not a four- or five-year science project. He has managed more than $24 billion in Space Force research and development spending since February 2026, overseeing a large portfolio of programs.

Space Force called off or reorganized 14 major acquisition programs because of performance failures dating back to May 2022, a record of setbacks in recent acquisition history. Jaime Stearns leads the Cislunar Coordination Office within Purdy’s portfolio, organizing the office’s work under his authority. Tech Times reported the office was established in April 2026. Purdy told Breaking Defense that the office was established in May, creating a discrepancy between the two accounts of when the office stood up.

Purdy reports to Air Force Secretary Troy Meink, placing the cislunar effort within the Air Force secretary’s chain of command. China’s Queqiao-2 relay satellite has operated in cislunar space since 2024 in a highly elliptical frozen orbit covering the lunar south pole. The United States has no declared military equivalent to that operational asset, creating a gap in American cislunar communications. China also launched 30 Cubesats into a highly elliptical orbit near an Earth-Moon Lagrange point and a circular lunar orbit, according to a September report in the Chinese-language version of People’s Daily.

China called the Cubesat project a science experiment at recent United Nations meetings, but experts said it is meant to support cislunar surveillance rather than pure research. Beijing also targets a crewed Moon landing by approximately 2030 under its International Lunar Research Station program, developed jointly with Russia. Purdy said China is moving out in cislunar space while the United States traditionally has not. Pete Hegseth said on Oct. 20 in Dayton, Ohio that whoever controls subsea and cislunar is going to destroy and control the next fight.

Space Force wants cislunar capabilities fielded by the end of fiscal 2029, setting a deadline for the new capabilities to reach the force. Purdy said two forthcoming requests for information will seek commercial technology for cislunar missions and AI software for autonomous spacecraft between Earth and the Moon. The Office of the Secretary of Defense is forming interagency working groups on cislunar policy to coordinate across agencies. Space Force is coordinating infrastructure plans with NASA instead of building separate systems, avoiding duplication of effort.

Air Force Research Laboratory, SpaceWERX and DARPA have been experimenting with cislunar technologies across multiple organizations, building on years of earlier work. The seed-then-proliferate architecture matches the service’s broader move away from exquisite single-platform systems toward resilient distributed architectures. The new request for information arrives as the service works to close a surveillance and communications gap that China has already begun to occupy with its operational Queqiao-2 relay. It is the Space Force’s first cislunar acquisition request for information, posted after leaders declared the region a warfighting domain.