Arsenal of the Stars: DPA in the Second Space Age

The Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950 is a survivor of the broad World War II–era powers that once belonged to the executive branch.¹ Based on the War Powers Acts of 1941 and 1942, the DPA “confers upon the President a broad set of authorities to influence domestic industry in the interest of national defense.” Since the opening of the Cold War, however, Congress has clawed back some of the more expansive authorities (e.g., price controls). Only Titles I, III, and VII have survived reauthorization into the present.

Title I establishes the president’s priorities and allocations authority. Under the title, the government can force private actors to prefer public contracts “deemed necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense” and execute them.² The section also allows the executive branch to resource such contracts in a resource-constrained environment: the president may “allocate materials, services, and facilities…to such extent as he shall deem necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.”³ These powers, however, are not a free hand. Prioritization or allocation must coincide with an established inability of the market to achieve the desired output. For example, when it comes to strategic materials, the president may not allocate them unless they are scarce and national security demands “cannot otherwise be met.”

Title III governs incentives for the production and supply of critical technologies or services. Such incentives can take the form of loans “to reduce current or projected shortfalls of industrial resources, critical technology items, or essential materials.”⁴ The president’s incentive authority, however, is broad. The executive can make purchase commitments not only “for government use or resale” but also “for the development of production capabilities” (i.e., as industrial stimulus).⁵ For further stimulus, the government has access to subsidy powers to ensure domestic supply or “maximum production” of certain products. And taxpayers can even pay for equipment upgrades in or modification of privately owned industrial facilities “if the President determines that such action will aid the national defense.”⁶

As a set of general provisions, Title VII does everything from allow the creation of “voluntary agreements” between manufacturers to list definitions.⁷ The president must approve such agreements that address “conditions . . . which may pose a direct threat to the national defense or its preparedness programs.”⁸ Parties to these deals are effectively a legalized cartel, “afforded a special legal defense if their actions within that agreement would otherwise violate antitrust or contract laws.”⁹ Nonetheless, the definitions section is likely the most important component of this title, grounding the president’s expansive powers in an established scope of “national defense.” Congress amended the definition in 1970 to include the domain of space.

In the last decade, the executive has exercised Title I and III authorities for various ends. During the pandemic, President Trump compelled General Motors to “accept, perform, and prioritize contracts or orders” for ventilators.¹⁰ These orders ran close to $500 million. Another order directed the Department of Homeland Security to acquire N95 respirator masks, leading to a $133 million defense investment in domestic production capacity. President Biden later utilized the DPA to variously shore up the Covid-19 vaccine supply, require safety reporting by AI developers, and manufacture baby formula. Contrary to a rigid fossil, the DPA is an elastic shaper of industrial policy. With the president’s December order for policy to “extend the reach of human discovery, secure the Nation’s vital economic and security interests, unleash commercial development, and lay the foundation for a new space age,” it merits consideration how DPA authorities might achieve the White House’s vision.¹¹

Between the growth in American launch cadence and the victories of private operators, existing market forces have succeeded in producing rockets for defense needs. Launch vehicles, however, are the “ships,” if one will, of the increasingly contested space domain. The United States lacks the “ports.” Alfred Thayer Mahan cautioned in the nineteenth century that ships without “resting-places . . . where they can coal and repair” would be “land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores.”¹² Such characterization describes even better the bottleneck in spaceflight. If rockets exist to deliver payloads to the stars and existing spaceports prevent throughput, then space capabilities become mere curiosities. Maintaining those capabilities requires expanding the astronautical equivalent of the dock: the payload processing needed to launch any satellite into space. Where the market has failed to produce adequate processing capacity, DPA incentives can free rockets from the logjam and ensure U.S. deterrent superiority.

Tactically Responsive Launch

Recent conflicts illuminate the importance of space in geopolitics. Before Russian forces crossed Ukraine’s border in 2022, a state-sponsored cyberattack crippled the commercial Viasat satellite network. The ambush disabled both military and civilian communications. An off-Earth system had become the “prime target in the opening salvos of an attack.”¹³ During its war in the Gaza Strip, Israel jammed navigation satellites to confound Hezbollah’s targeted missile capabilities.¹⁴ Operation Rising Lion, the Jewish State’s preemptive campaign against Iran, leveraged space-based reconnaissance to “collect tens of millions of square kilometers of extremely high-quality imagery,” enabling “real time” targeting and tempo in the Twelve-Day War.¹⁵ The January capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro involved “layering different effects,” including space-based capabilities.¹⁶ One military spokesman even concluded that such capabilities are “foundational to all modern military activities.” These examples illustrate space’s enabling role through a wide spectrum of military operations. Taken together, they suggest a route toward escalation in orbit, where burgeoning capabilities rise to meet adversaries’ counter-capabilities.

The Indo-Pacific might very well prompt escalation. American forces rely on space there not only for command-and-control but also for “warning of Chinese military activity . . . and enabling the employment of precision weapons.”¹⁷ A future conflict in the South China Sea could marshal systems like the dual-use Starshield and military Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.¹⁸ These proliferated constellations have inspired adversaries to deploy “methods that generate widespread effects” and to counter satellite-based advantages.¹⁹

In 2025, Space Force leader General B. Chance Saltzman testified that the Chinese not only “actively train on” a ground-based antisatellite missile system but also “intend to field weapons capable of reaching beyond LEO [low-Earth orbit].”²⁰ These capabilities augment other Chinese weapons systems, such as lasers that can damage satellites and repair satellites that can push others out of their intended orbits. A RAND Corporation report even notes that Chinese military theorists have specifically set their sights on Starshield and its civilian-use counterpart, Starlink.²¹ In a war, the Chinese would seek to “soft kill” the constellation’s individual nodes with “land-based lasers, co-orbital laser weapons, direct-ascent ASAT [antisatellite] weapons . . . and ground-based interceptors to strike targets still approaching orbit.” And the People’s Republic may not be alone in its thinking or urgency. In 2021, the Russian Federation successfully destroyed a satellite in a missile test. A 2024 congressional briefing from then-national security advisor Jake Sullivan revealed that Russia has been engineering a nuclear-armed antisatellite system that could “produce not only a massive nuclear-driven blast wave and a surge of radiation, but also a powerful electromagnetic pulse that could destroy, blind, or disable other satellites in orbit over a wide zone.”²² Hence, some American researchers have called the current era in space an “Anti-Satellite Age” where “nations fear that their satellites will be subtracted.”²³ It has become necessary to imagine a scenario where the United States fights a conflict on Earth while having to replenish satellites in the skies.

Defense stakeholders have considered the scenario and identified the need for “responsive launch.” A responsive-launch option comprises “launch[ing] space assets (such as satellites and payloads) to their intended orbits as the need arises, possibly to augment or reconstitute existing space capabilities.”²⁴ So far, the United States has met this requirement with “launching on demand . . . achiev[ing] shorter time frames from order to delivery of launch vehicles.” The Space Force’s 2023 Victus Nox mission achieved liftoff within twenty-seven hours of notice, a commendable achievement. Yet whether short-lead launches can scale from appropriated demonstrations to a conflict-ready capacity is an open question. Launching a rocket on an expedited timeline for training is one thing but launching multiple in response to a fast-evolving, real-world crisis is quite another, especially when there appears to be a physical bottleneck.

Both acquisitions and licensing regimes have caught up with the necessity of on-demand, responsive launch capacity. The National Security Space Launch Program (NSSL) fulfills statutory mandate by procuring launches from the private sector.²⁵ From 2003 to 2023, however, the defense establishment relied solely on the services of SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA).²⁶ To spur competition, NSSL began to allow new launch providers to compete for lower-stakes missions while ULA and SpaceX own the “highest value payloads.” The transition created redundancy and secured reliability. It coincided with the Part 450 reforms to the “out of date” legacy licensing schema; the updated criteria allow companies to conduct multiple launches of the same vehicle type under a single license, lowering the regulatory burden of high launch cadence.²⁷ The government has thereby built some resilience in the supply chain, attempting to enable throughput at the very least. In a security contingency, the United States will have embarkable ships for space. Nonetheless, ships matter little without ports from which to sail.

The Problem of Spaceports

The port of space is the launch range—the physical infrastructure, apart from the vehicle and payload—that facilitates a mission. NSSL relies on two legacy ranges: Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida (the “Eastern Range”) and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California (the “Western Range”). Both accommodate several launch complexes. A single complex is its own enterprise, containing the launch pad, mission control, fueling equipment, machinery, and buildings required to bring a rocket and its payload together. The location of complexes and their parent ranges is a strategic consideration: Florida’s proximity to the equator enables cheaper geostationary orbits, while California’s higher latitude means easier polar and sun-synchronous orbits. America cannot simply “build more.”

Unfortunately, the Eastern and Western Ranges have not kept pace with contemporary launch pressures. Since 2004, the price for heavy-lift launches (which NSSL requires) has decreased by an order of magnitude. Reusable rockets, such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9, have supplied demand driven by commercial (OneWeb, Amazon Leo) and governmental (National Reconnaissance Office) constellation projects. At the top line, launch cadence increases year-over-year and rockets become larger and more advanced. This concurrent growth strains the heritage infrastructure at Vandenberg and Canaveral.

NSSL may, in fact, be a victim of its own and the space industry’s success. “Multimanifesting” refers to the practice of packing several payloads onto one launch vehicle. As when multiple businesses share one standard shipping container, it cuts the expense of deploying individual satellites in a constellation. The technique is so cost-effective that it characterizes more than two-thirds of Department of Defense launches.²⁸ But all efficiencies have trade-offs: multimanifesting has capitalized upon rockets’ ever-expanding cargo space but exhausted available payload processing capacity. One rocket may carry multiple payloads, but each payload requires its own bespoke preparation for launch.

Processing is the unavoidable chokepoint of any launch when technicians integrate the object for delivery into the cargo area of the rocket. Like fragile items prepared for cross-country shipment, satellites and other payloads must undergo final assembly, testing, and packaging on the side or inside the nose cone of a rocket. Processing facilities must be clean and secure enough to accommodate delicate and/or highly classified materials. Quickening launch cadence has booked out facilities at the ranges, while multimanifested government satellites might each “require unique handling procedures and security protocols.”²⁹ The new constellations compel constant replenishment, just as the supply chain breaks down.

Accordingly, the Space Force has deemed payload processing “the greatest challenge facing DOD’s space launch efforts.”³⁰ The service predicts “an annual shortfall of up to two processing bays from fiscal years 2026 through 2030.” One must remember, however, that the projection is a “known known,” an estimate based on the expected growth in and pressures on the space industry. Yet a change in the country’s strategic situation could confound such an estimate. In a contested orbital environment, tactically responsive launch at scale would be imperative for victory. How much larger could the shortfall grow during, say, a conflict in the South China Sea?

Inertia in the Market

So far, the government has invested in filling the payload processing gap. The Space Force’s Spaceport of the Future program has promised $1.3 billion in infrastructure upgrades across the Eastern and Western Ranges by 2028, with another $80 million for processing at Vandenberg.³¹ Partnerships with Blue Origin and Astrotech Space Operations have also expanded capacity in the east and west respectively. Nonetheless, projection-based investments or dual ventures are unlikely to fill the gap in a wartime contingency. Alignment of public and private interest disintegrates when applied to such responsive launch needs.

The example of Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit is instructive. The firm sought to specialize in on-demand government business. It nudged defense stakeholders to fund development of tactically responsive launch in the early 2020s. By 2023, however, the company had declared bankruptcy. Orienting the company’s efforts around quick-turnaround missions did not make for a sound business model.

After all, tactically responsive launch capacity hinges on the risk that adversaries disable American satellites en masse. That context makes public-sector demand for the capability “unclear and inconsistent.”³² In some years, the Space Force has not requested funds for it at all. A contingency on the military’s part, without a history of steady funding, does not constitute a capital-justifying emergency on industry’s part.

Launch operators have little incentive, then, to embrace tactically responsive launch capacity as a core service within their portfolio. They have even smaller incentive “to put their money where their rockets are”: to build out payload processing capacity beyond NSSL’s or their own predictable requirements. One new facility at the Western Range costs $77.5 million.³³ A conflict in the stars might require ten or twenty more, but business-as-usual only requires a couple. The difference cripples the maturation of responsive launch capacity as a strategic option, the precise type of market failure that DPA’s antecedents unlocked.

Intervening for Velocity

In the late 1930s, little could motivate business to stand up the Arsenal of Democracy: the defense budget comprised 1 percent of GDP. To fight a world war, the United States had neither sufficient naval vessels nor ships of the sky. Preparation for war, especially air war, required government inducement. Incentives arrived as a gargantuan carrot. From 1940 to 1941, “Congress appropriated $36 billion for the War Department alone.”³⁴ These outlays, combined with streamlined regulation of contracts and the prioritization authority of the War Powers Acts, catalyzed the American war machine. By late 1945, the Army Air Forces possessed 41,163 combat airframes.³⁵

Despite the production victory, however, the Axis still outflanked America’s air bases. The country had entered the 1940s with small installations dotting the Pacific and the “impregnable” Pearl Harbor.³⁶ Of course, island-hopping had to make up for the fact Pearl Harbor was not, in fact, impregnable. That tension informs American space strategy in the modern day. Supply of capabilities alone cannot stop or win a war. Resilience of infrastructure must match the emerging threat.

Preempting conflict in orbit, the government can use the DPA to correct the historical oversight. As mentioned, America has the rockets; limitations lie in the spaceports. President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act appropriated $3.3 billion for the Department of War’s (DoW) Industrial Base Fund, which the statute established, among other uses, “to address critical issues in the industrial base relating to urgent operational needs.”³⁷ Title III composes the carrot to leverage this funding and expand payload processing.

Specifically, Title III authorizes the president to commit to purchasing critical needs, issue loans to the private sector, and “make provision . . . for the development of production capabilities,” like subsidies.³⁸ Title III also establishes a funding mechanism for the Defense Production Act Fund. Pending official determination of a processing bottleneck, the new Industrial Base Fund could supplement existing appropriations in the standing Defense Production Act Fund. The government could then attack the gaps in capacity with two concurrent lines of effort.

First, purchase commitments for government-dedicated facilities in Florida and California could attack the Space Force’s peacetime needs, on an expedited timeline. Fresh contracts would add to ongoing capital improvements (e.g., the new facility at Vandenberg). Liberated from annual budget wrangling, DPA-resourced purchases could allow the Space Force to maintain a “strategic surplus” at its ranges. This would ensure that ranges always have more payload processing facilities under construction than projected shortfalls call for.

Second, the government could provide low-interest borrowing to private launch operators, like SpaceX, that already do business with NSSL. SpaceX dominates the launch industry and shows little sign of slowdown. Loans could finance the construction of dual-use payload processing facilities at the company’s Starbase. Lines of credit would signal a public vote of confidence in the continued growth of launch cadence and anticipate the company’s own potential shortfalls. All the while, they would create a second layer of redundancy for wartime responsive launch.

If Title III sweeteners do not sufficiently entice, Title I of the DPA establishes how the White House may compel fulfillment of federal contracts via prioritization and penalties.³⁹ The two-pronged approach would make that stick unjustified and unnecessary. The first line of effort would broadcast a stronger commercial demand signal than exists for payload processing, while the second line would begin to fit governmental space infrastructure needs within a broader commercial framework. The Government Accountability Office has identified the need for integration before, and public-private synthesis would conform with the Space Force’s messaging on the matter.⁴⁰

Launch Sovereignty

Some might assume the worst of DPA authorities applied to the space industry. One man’s dirigisme is another man’s Atlas Shrugged. But first impressions should not color or replace an honest analysis of tactically responsive launch capacity, or the market’s relationship to it. Simply described, responsiveness is a deterrence capability: something as vital to ensuring national security as Patriot missile systems.⁴¹ Air defense systems work by intercepting incoming munitions, preventing friendly bloodshed on the ground and denying the enemy its desired effects. Responsive launch works much the same way, shortening the length of time that any combat in space forces network downtime and chaos on Earth. Both capabilities force adversaries to price into their planning that even their best weapons may not be able to set the conditions for victory.

As one startup summarized, “a state that can rapidly regenerate space assets is far harder to neutralize.”⁴² To “neutralize” means disrupting at best and destroying at worst, components of the satellite constellations that underpin modern society and militaries. These distributed orbital networks comprise everything from the shared military and civilian Global Positioning System (GPS) to the relay nodes of the SIPRNet, the armed forces’ classified internet network. American military doctrine might have qualms about targeting systems with which even commercial aircraft navigate, but adversary concepts of systems warfare will not.⁴³ If the Chinese believe that “[war] is won by the belligerent that can disrupt . . . the operational capability of the enemy’s operational system,” then Americans must expect Chinese aggression to treat the information networks that drive our military operations as fair game, notwithstanding civilian use of navigation satellites. Hence, when the United States is better able to mitigate the effects of fighting in space, it is more likely to preserve peace or secure victory, should the worst come to pass.

President Roosevelt followed a similar calculus under the War Powers Acts. Redundantly resourced armed forces discourage warfare while preparing a country for conflict. He did not optimally execute the calculus, but an exercise of the descendant legal authorities could enable us to learn from historical mistakes. After all, war looms again in the Pacific, and current infrastructure will not support the extreme end of martial requirements. If industrial policy could guide the economy to meet the contingency and possibly deter total war in orbit, would it not meet the criteria of restraint, “reducing” the number of battles Americans have to fight?⁴⁴

That logic seems to have guided the second Trump administration’s and Department of War’s recent market interventions. The DoW’s February 2026 deal with rare earths firm MP Materials has made the government the largest shareholder in the “only fully integrated rare earth producer” in the country.⁴⁵ Support for MP Materials comes just months after China imposed then halted an export ban on its own domestically produced and refined critical minerals.⁴⁶ Given these minerals’ importance across supply chains, the deal weakened China’s economic and strategic leverage. More secure American sourcing of rare earths mitigates a carrot-and-stick dynamic in ongoing trade negotiations with the People’s Republic and establishes the foundations of wartime resilience. The military’s investment in the firm is also a response to market failure, supporting a national champion against cartelized Chinese producers that can drive down prices at will. This and other interventions coincide with the Department of War’s new Acquisition Transformation Strategy, in which President Trump’s intent in the defense industrial base is clear: “to transform the current defense acquisition system . . . to deter and, if necessary, defeat our adversaries.”⁴⁷

Beyond the logic of deterrence, however, sovereignty presupposes the ability of the state to defend what it is sovereign over. American constellations and information networks are an extension of this country. If the state lacks the ability to vouchsafe such networks in war, it has failed the first test of statecraft. Hence, enabling the supply chain for tactically responsive launch is perhaps a granular but critical consideration of national security and power. Deploying the DPA to shore up space infrastructure would be a natural application of the government’s charge.

Prudence in Orbit

Incentivizing greater payload processing capacity when market forces discourage it neither equals a blank check to industry nor carte blanche for nationalization. At this point, it seems that the fusion of governmental support and private entrepreneurship in the stars is here to stay. Public dollars have flowed into the heavens since man began to explore them.

On that foundation, application of DPA authorities to a recognized bottleneck is a response to strategic realities. In scale and moral weight, current realities may not perfectly match those before World War II, but they move in parallel. Mastery of a new domain of warfare secured victory in the 1940s.⁴⁸ Mastery over the space domain would secure the wars to come. Satellite constellations enable the information networks that feed into all levels of warfare, from reconnaissance assets that inform strategic planning to the GPS equivalents that direct guided munitions.

As China exemplifies, the space arms race has become mimetic; the People’s Liberation Army is attempting to develop capabilities while seeking to weaken those same capabilities in American hands. Should China subtract from our satellite constellations in war, Americans will have to fight strategically, operationally, and tactically degraded, as a weaker and more vulnerable target. Thus, maximizing responsive launch capacity would be an effective course of action in the age of orbital conflict. A nation that can get (its satellites) back up when hit again and again deters sensible opponents and exhausts the overzealous.

World War II–era industrial policy partly achieved that end state in the twentieth century. The Defense Production Act may fully actualize it in the twenty-first. Ships cannot sail without ports, nor planes without runways. Similarly, tactically responsive rockets cannot launch without payload processing facilities. To establish the shield-and-spear of deterrence-through-resilience, policy must now step in.

This article is an American Affairs online exclusive, published May 20, 2026.

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Notes