"It's not going to be like a 'boom' milestone delivery where one day there's nothing and the next day, there's a finished system," Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, said of the swap from DoD to Commerce.
"I would imagine that as Department of Commerce continues to mature this concept, we will definitely want to take advantage of what they're doing," said Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein.
"Commercial data, commercial processing is not classified. It does not matter that the DoD wishes it were," said Barbara Golf, special advisor to Space Systems Command.
There is growing concern about what happens when different countries' predictions of an on-orbit collision do not match, said Matt Hejduk, of The Aerospace Corporation. "A man with two watches never knows what time it is," he quipped.
Industry representatives meeting with Commerce Deputy Secretary Don Graves on Tuesday "stressed the need for [Commerce] to work quickly to field the new capabilities — ideally by buying and redistributing existing commercial products — in order to maintain leadership in the face of competing SSA offerings from the EU and China," a Commerce official told Breaking Defense today.