Make it appealing for private industry to bring the latest space innovations to the military and strengthen the nation’s warfighting capability. That’s the thinking behind the creation of the hub known as the U.S. Space Force Front Door.
Easy to describe, but it’s a tall order to accomplish in a system built on partnering with a few major contractors. Long after the Pentagon set out to expand commercial integration, and nearly three years after the creation of this Space Force welcome mat, United States War Secretary Pete Hegseth told commanders in a January 2026 memo that it wasn’t working: “Industry faces a maze of competing front doors. Councils proliferate while accountability diffuses.”
The man who directs the Space Force Front Door said his office is determined to help streamline and modernize the way private innovation gets in front of the right government agencies — agencies within the Space Force for now, but eventually, he hopes, the wider military, intelligence and civil space communities.
Vic Vigliotti is a former Army intelligence analyst with experience in space acquisition who has worked for U.S. Space Command, U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command. As evidence of the Front Door’s progress, Vigliotti points to the 2,100-plus submissions from 1,700 vendors that the hub has received since kickoff in September 2023.
His staff of 10 people has averaged a turnaround time of five days on these submissions. Among the tools they offer are Orbital Watch, a quarterly unclassified intelligence briefing about on-orbit threats to help companies plan their work, and application programming interfaces (APIs) for synchronizing data with commercial providers. Front Door also helps international companies with the War Department’s Foreign Comparative Testing Program.
Front Door is working on another level to retire a truism in the acquisitions community: that success with a sales pitch can depend as much on who you know — say, a well-placed colonel, or O-6 — as it does on how much the growing government space community needs your product. The office helps connect and hand off companies, often startups, to agencies such as SpaceWERX, the service’s innovation arm.
The Space Force Front Door, based at Los Angeles Air Force Base, is part of the Commercial Space Office of the service’s Space Systems Command. There are other commercial engagement offices in national security space, each operating independently. The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has the Acquisition Research Center, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has the Compass office, and the Defense Innovation Unit as well as the CIA venture arm In-Q-Tel investment platform also provide entry points.
These offices have attracted so much interest from a growing commercial space sector that one corporate leader, Isobel Porteous with satellite manufacturer EarthTraq, echoing Hegseth’s lament, called them “a blockade to absorb the mass of companies that assail defense leadership with sales pitches.” The comment is from a January 2026 essay at the War on the Rocks national security website.
Managing expectations from commercial providers like these is part of the job at Front Door, Vigliotti said. It’s as important to get the relationship right today as it was during an earlier generation, he said, when U.S. industry converted into the force — dubbed Freedom’s Forge — that helped win World War II. The part that Front Door plays, according to its website, is to facilitate “collaboration with commercial companies that seek to grow or share tested and emerging technologies.”
Vigliotti spoke with Apogee in February 2026 about the work of Front Door. Here are excerpts from the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
The March 2025 Space Force document “Space Warfighting: A Framework for Planners” codifies a shift for the service from a supporting role to one as a warfighting branch. How does this affect potential commercial partners?
I always go back to Gen. [Michael A.] Guetlein’s tenets that he coined; the “exploit, buy, build” model. We don’t have the time to wait on those, often, 10- to 15-year-plus timelines for acquisitions to really get after the pacing challenge. We really focus on exploiting what we have, buying what we can and only building what we must to be able to get after these capabilities today.
I think commercial has a huge presence in that realm. I came from the U.S. Space Command side of the house, helping them execute their commercial integration strategy, where we were focused on enhancing the space warfighting architecture through commercial capabilities. I see Space Force taking a similar approach as we’re trying to find what’s available today, what we can do quickly — space warfighting capabilities at the speed of need and the speed of relevance.
Space Force spells out publicly the types of warfighting capabilities they’re seeking from commercial space. Is response for some capabilities stronger than for others?
We do have a team on the Front Door trying to extract more from the various PAEs [portfolio acquisition executives] in the different field commands at Space Force. That’s something that I’d say is a call to action — what we need, what we want. I look at Space Command’s model — through their memo to industry, their ability to take their annual needs, requirements — and extract out those aspects they can share with commercial to say, “Here are the, say, top 10 items that we are looking for this year with regard to commercial integration.” I would love to see the Space Force go in that same direction: “Here’s the unclassified, sanitized aspects we can share with industry.”
Go seek these out or leverage the Front Door process and system we’ve developed to get in there and proactively identify those capabilities that meet those needs. From a demand signal perspective, we’re fully postured to be able to publicly post those once acquired. We would love to gather those requirements, those needs, those demand signals, post them publicly and start actually pulling them in and extracting them from commercial so we can get them into that space warfighting architecture.
Space Force is making it easier for industry to approach by specifying missions, creating templates and using other methods. Is there more streamlining to be done?
Absolutely. I would say that one of the gaps right now is that we have a lot of different organizations using different processes across the board. A lot of people are using legacy processes for engaging with industry, communicating with industry, maintaining relations with those vendors out there.
We see a lot of gaps, a lot of overlapping efforts that aren’t really tied together under one construct, so that’s what we’re here to solve as a front door. We’re looking to build a system to be able to tie all that information together and come up with those standardized processes across organizations to mitigate those stovepipes and reduce silos across the board.
Some commercial space interests that have used the Front Door say it doesn’t open much of the acquisition budget to them, that they’re relegated to a kind of kids table. Might more money be available through this process in the future?
From the industry side of the house, just about every vendor out there is not going to be happy with the process if there’s not a multimillion-dollar reward at the end of it. What we like to do is to set expectations as a front door. We’re in the business of connecting stakeholders to commercial capabilities and vice versa.
At the Front Door, we’re not awarding contracts. We’re not the ones acquiring capabilities. We’re connecting these vendors to those acquirers and to those operators, those acquisitions organizations, and we’re giving them full autonomy to sell themselves. And if they don’t sell their wares, the government doesn’t want to buy it, often they shoot the middleman. We’ve seen a small yet vocal minority that have had displeasure in the process.
When some vendors have submitted to one organization in the past, that pitch, that capability could die on the vine if it’s in a mailbox somewhere on Outlook while an O-6 is away on [temporary duty travel]. But when it comes through the Front Door process, we’re expanding visibility into those capabilities tenfold. When it goes through the Front Door, those capabilities are not ending up in the shredder. They’re ending up in a database and in a custom relationship management system that allows us to maintain visibility on every new government user who accesses that.
Do you have updated figures on how many companies use Front Door?
Right now, we have over 2,100 all-time submissions to the Front Door. We are working on ways this year to automate the process even more, automate the matchmaking aspect behind our system and reduce the reliance on some of the manual human-in-the-loop processing we do. As we automate the system, I think we’re going to reduce timelines in the system from days and hours to minutes and seconds.
Is response to the Space Force’s commercial outreach growing from international companies?
I would say that it’s been pretty stable. We are helping support and provide lessons learned on the development of a NATO front door to be able to facilitate better connections with our international allies and partners out there.
What we’re pushing for is standing up those federated Front Door approaches across our allies and partners, whether that’s a NATO front door that services the 32-member NATO alliance or that’s individual front doors internationally that each nation wants to stand up on their own so that they can identify their funding pathways.
The opportunities for international vendors differ from domestic vendors, of course, and we have a few different processes available to them. We leverage organizations like the Defense Innovation Unit. DIU has opportunities for international vendors.
We’re developing commercial portals compatible with close allies such as the United Kingdom and Canada. Can this approach facilitate relationships and missions?
We do see ourselves as matchmakers and connectors through the process. We’d never want to take over any authority from the acquisitions and operational communities out there, but we will provide service to them as needed to help facilitate those things. We try to avoid getting our hands in any operational elements, outside of providing support to the operators as needed and same with the acquirers.
But I do foresee enabling space operations through commercial capabilities across the international spectrum as we move forward with our relationships with these allies and partners. We’ve had nothing but positive, awesome interactions — especially with the nations you mentioned — with Canada and the U.K. One of the biggest shifts back in 2025 was the focus on the NATO front door program. That is something that’s still in the works. They are working through a different system than us, but we’re trying to understand ways to ensure interoperability between the data.
That’s the keyword, interoperability.
Absolutely. Yeah. I always push back against anyone standing up anything with regard to commercial engagement that is not interoperable with existing systems. If we can’t connect to it, don’t waste the money building it. Let’s put it toward something that can communicate with something else. We’re currently in the business of building as many API connections as possible, to be able to connect some of those stovepipe systems.
One of the big initiatives we’re going after right now is with the [Air Force-led] Office of Commercial and Economic Analysis [OCEA], to tie into their systems to get that high-level analysis the OCEA is building proactively on the commercial enterprise, so that we can pull that data into our system, so government users aren’t having to go to multiple different databases to find data. We want them to be able to go to a one-stop shop.
Can you think of any cases where private industry might have introduced capabilities that weren’t on the radar yet?
We do have opportunities for any vendor to submit to us at any time. We don’t just try to extract mission area-specific things. We obviously try to tie them as close as possible to vernacular that we understand in the Space Force today, but we do not limit any commercial capability out there from submitting to us. If there’s a new innovative capability, we welcome all space capabilities into the system.
Can you point to any Front Door success stories that might help show the advantage of using the service?
I’d say there’s been quite a few startups and nontraditional, innovative new startups out there that have come through the Front Door because they don’t necessarily have those retired O-6s or retired general officers on their staff to help them with business development, help them know who to talk to.
We’ve been able to connect a lot of vendors and help walk them through processes like SPACEWerx, innovation processes, to help them find those right signatories to be able to get their customer memorandums together, to bring them to that potential award and get them to that end state. So that’s a very common thread. We don’t get as many of the major prime vendors out there as we do the small nontraditional ones. We do have a heavy focus in our system on those innovative capabilities.
We see the Front Door system in the future as almost a catalog of commercial wares that the government can access and proactively identify capabilities of interest, as opposed to just reacting to everything that’s being thrown at them. And hopefully someday, mitigating the need for vendors to knock on the doors of the O-6.
Space Force leaders have called private industry the United States’ competitive advantage when it comes to space warfighting. What do you think industry brings to the battle?
The commercial sector’s ability to very rapidly get after development of capabilities. On the government side of the house, we have a lot of bureaucratic red tape holding us back through the acquisitions process, making it very difficult to move. We put our own roadblocks in place. We see the commercial enterprise as a rapid arm of capability development and innovation that we have access to — leveraging through relationships beneficial to both, the United States government and commercial, as well.
How does our system give us an advantage over our adversaries, especially our pacing threat in space, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with its top-down approach?
With the process that they’ve put in place, they can move very quickly. Even with the speed of the commercial industry in the United States, we still have restrictions in place that make it difficult to acquire things quickly. They [CCP] are very effective in their process. I would say from an innovations perspective, however, the U.S. still maintains its strategic advantage with regard to commercial capability and innovative development.
Space Force leaders note that industry has helped the service think differently about speed over perfection. How might this play out at the Front Door?
I always go to the commercial integration process. When we think about integrating commercial capabilities, often organizations are very focused on the more exciting and attractive aspects of commercial integration, and that includes the funding piece, the acquisitions piece, the integration into the space warfighting architecture piece. But they often overlook the identify piece, which is the first step in commercial integration.
Being able to identify those capabilities that are going to bring the most quality to the space warfighting architecture and ensuring that we’re responsibly identifying the most appropriate fit. When it comes to speed versus quality, we’re here to try and ensure that we identify the best possible quality at the speed of relevance and at the speed of need. We don’t want organizations just saying, “We need to move quickly. This is the first capability that sounds good; we want to buy it.”
We want to ensure that the government is postured to be able to move as quickly as possible while also being able to maintain that quality through awareness of that available catalog of commercial capabilities. Who’s talking to who? We see that maybe some organizations might go fast with the loudest vendors who know exactly who to communicate with and go through a war of attrition, communicating with just about every O-6 and above across the board until they find someone to buy their wares.
But we’re trying to mitigate that. We’re trying to create a system that allows the government to reduce the need to communicate with every vendor that comes knocking on their door and more proactively going after ones they think are the right fit.
Space acquisition has a chicken-and-egg quality to it: Industry awaits Pentagon demand signals and the Pentagon asks industry to show your innovations first. Can the Front Door play a role in easing this tension?
There are a lot of vendors that are waiting for a demand signal. I would say that there are also a lot of vendors out there who are just passionately creating things that there might not necessarily be a demand signal for today and they are developing innovative things that the government is struggling to catch up with.
For example, when we think of dynamic space operations, how long has the government been talking about sustained space maneuvers? Requirements for things like on-orbit refueling, while industry has been building it for many years now. They’ve been going after these capabilities, building and developing them without the proper demand signal from a funding and resourcing perspective.
We rely on industry’s ability to continue innovating without waiting for the demand signal because that’s what’s going to help, in my opinion, create a demand signal. If the government doesn’t know they need it, they’re not going to create requirements for it.
But when industry develops it and we see it, we say, “Holy crap, that’s something we didn’t even know we needed. We need to start developing requirements. We need to integrate this into the resourcing process.” I think without industry continuing to innovate without that demand signal, it’s going to continue that chicken-and-egg thing.
As we expand the concept of Front Door and cast a wider net for warfighting capabilities, this can expand security risks. Is this something Front Door must deal with?
We will do everything we can to identify potential risks prior to connecting vendors to stakeholders. We’re going to do a very broad kind of review of our own to ensure that these are viable businesses out there, that they’re real, they’re not just spam coming through the mail, before connecting.
We will always expect that the different acquisitions organizations and operators take ownership to go through the required processes to ensure security measures are met. That would be something through the acquisitions process, through the contracting processes within each respective organization.
But we will put measures in place to try to do at least a very high level of due diligence to see what we can come up with through our team’s assessments on these capabilities. We are working on including additional capabilities in the system to help streamline that process.
Leveraging industry to improve the nation’s warfighting capabilities is a militarywide imperative. Are there needs and approaches when it comes to space that are different from the other domains?
I’d say from a War Department perspective, there are needs that are unique to space in many ways. I would also say that some of these capabilities might have defense applications that [others] might not realize. We are in the business of trying to expand this process into a concept of a streamlined front door that brings together these stovepipes — not just in the War Department but across the lines of civil and intelligence space. Say you have a vendor who thinks they’re building a capability that’s only applicable to science and research and technology development at, say, NASA in the civil domain, and the War Department has no idea they even need that thing.
If we don’t start connecting these capabilities across the lines of defense intelligence and civil, we’re not going to know. Maybe some of these defense capabilities could have major intelligence applications these vendors don’t realize because they’re strictly working with some mission area in the Space Force. If only they could have access to NRO and NGA, for example. So we’re trying to help reduce those stovepipes not just here in the War Department, but also in the intelligence community.
This is a concept of knowledge management and customer relationship management that I personally have seen to be broken across just about every aspect of government when it comes to how we manage these records, how we manage this data, how we communicate with each other and with the commercial side of the house. There’s no reason this couldn’t be applicable to the other warfighting domains, at least from a defense perspective.
I believe once we do get this right, we get this process fully fleshed out for the space community, there’s no reason we can’t take it and replicate it across the air, land, sea and cyber communities and domains, as well as to leverage a similar process to go after commercial integration.