For years now, Space Force officials have said the service is getting serious about defining its role and crafting an architecture for future cislunar capabilities. Now, the Space Force is taking steps to realize that vision, asking industry to rapidly invest and develop satellites and software that could be ready for operations as soon as 2029.
Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy—the Space Force’s portfolio acquisition executive for advanced programs—said he’s seen the Pentagon’s posture toward cislunar operations and planning efforts change drastically over the past year.
“There was no talk of cislunar, and basically I was told, ‘Don’t talk about cislunar, and stop getting into it,’” Purdy said Oct. 21 at AFCEA’s Space Industry Days conference.
Now, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine, and even a December 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump are emphasizing the importance of cislunar operations and advocating for more investment. The shift is in part linked to China’s lunar ambitions, Purdy said. Beijing has a cislunar roadmap of its own and has already landed several uncrewed spacecraft on the lunar surface. Now, it plans to launch a crewed Moon mission by 2030.
“I’ve got the Secretary of War and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs full on stating in public: ‘This is a warfighting domain,’” Purdy said, using the department’s secondary name. “And so, I would ask you all, please jump on my cislunar bandwagon because I need some more friends here, along with our deep, passionate crew that have been working on this for years.”
Cislunar space is the region beyond geosynchronous orbit extending to the moon and even farther to cover areas influenced by Earth and the moon’s gravity—hundreds of thousands of kilometers in distance and 1,728 times the volume of space contained within geosynchronous orbit. Purdy described the region as “painful” for satellite operations, as it is further from Earth and navigation is more of a challenge.
To date, much of the U.S. government’s cislunar planning and operations have centered on NASA and its plan to return astronauts to the moon through the Artemis program. The Defense Department has pursued research programs aimed at better understanding the vast expanse of cislunar space—including the Air Force Research Lab’s Oracle program, which plans to launch several cislunar space domain awareness satellites in the coming years. But the Space Force hasn’t dedicated much planning, funding, or personnel to those efforts.
That may be about to change. In April, the Space Force set up a new Cislunar Coordination Office, housed within Purdy’s portfolio and tasked with crafting a roadmap for cislunar technology and a future space architecture. Since then, that office – led by Jaime Stearns—has refined that roadmap and crafted strategies for various mission areas, like space domain awareness, communications, and lunar navigation.
The CCO has also drafted a list of high-priority but unfunded requirements, which Purdy said includes relatively low-dollar “ticky-tacky” efforts that can help the Space Force make real progress in this area.
The service is also pursuing multiple technology development and rapid fielding efforts, Purdy said. In partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory and the innovation arm SpaceWERX, it plans to launch an industry challenge called Lunar Prime to get after some of its more nascent technology and research needs. The effort has $30 million in funding and is targeting flight demonstrations within two years of contract award.
The Space Force also has two requests for information it plans to release “imminently,” Purdy said. The first will call for existing commercial technology that can be ready to launch by 2029.
“We’re looking for existing commercial or near-commercial means, non-developmental solutions, hardware with actual relevant evidence behind it, software that doesn’t need a huge amount of work … and ground systems,” Purdy said. “This isn’t a four- or five-year science project. This is about getting capability out soon.”
The second request is for AI and autonomous processing capabilities for spacecraft operating in cislunar space. The goal is to have “a fully autonomous system out there at cislunar that’s able to handle all its hardware faults, all its processing, all the sensor activities,” Purdy said.