The U.S. Air Force is promoting technical standards for operationally responsive space (ORS) payloads and satellite buses, with an eye toward enabling quick and cost-effective block purchases of small military satellites.

The standards effort began in the former Office of Force Transformation (OFT). In December, it transitioned to the Joint ORS office at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M.

Following an unofficial mantra of "cheaper, faster, good enough," ORS seeks fast-response space capabilities that can be defined and launched within weeks. Nonproprietary technical standards are crucial to the ORS vision, according to Air Force Lt. Col. James Griswold, ORS bus standards sponsor at the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

"To be operationally responsive, you can't just start from scratch when the call comes," Griswold told Aerospace Daily. "It would be advisable to have ... some sort of modular satellite bus components sitting on the shelf."

Although DOD is guiding the effort, the standards themselves are being developed primarily by industry, through an Integrated Systems Engineering Team (ISET) that includes Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, ATK, Orbital Sciences Corp., Microcosm, and Space Systems/Loral. The ISET has developed four technical standards documents for ORS, each of which addresses 225 standards requirements.

"They were encouraged to keep whatever information they wanted to keep proprietary, but to share as much as they felt like they could share," Griswold said. "From my viewpoint, they seem to have shared quite a bit."

The standards are built around a generic class of ORS satellite in the 1,000-pound class with an average design life of 1-2 years.

"We're not saying that everyone has to develop a standard satellite bus," Griswold said. "The idea, though, is [to create] kind of an envelope for how you develop it -- constrain the development, to a degree." The standards also will cover the interfaces between the satellite bus and payload, as well as fuel and power connections.

For future block purchases of small ORS spacecraft, the agreed-upon "magic number" appears to be procurements of at least five, according to Griswold. If industry is going to break even, and government is going to succeed, "you need to build five of whatever you're going to do," he said.

Although the schedule for the first block acquisition of a standardized ORS spacecraft is still to be determined, the likeliest first operational use of these standards will be in TacSat or TacSat follow-on acquisitions, according to Griswold.

Gaining approval for the block buy approach - which some might consider a challenge given the recent history of overages on military space programs -- will be key to the success of ORS. Representatives from the Joint ORS Office are due to brief Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne on the ORS block buy concept later this month.

The bus standards plan has four phases. The first two phases are complete, and culminated with the delivery of the TacSat-3 small spacecraft, which includes some of the standards. Phase three will end with the delivery of TacSat-4, and phase four will be led by the Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base.