A banner year for military space funding? with an unclear path beyond
Funding for the U.S. Space Force this fiscal year approaches $42 billion when mandatory and discretionary dollars are combined, according to a new analysis unveiled Feb. 24 by the National Security Space Association.
Across the Defense Department, spending on space programs in fiscal 2026 totals about $57.7 billion, the estimate shows, a sharp increase driven by last year's reconciliation package that injected roughly $150 billion in mandatory defense funding outside the regular appropriations process.
The analysis was conducted by Mike Tierney, head of legislative affairs at the National Security Space Association, using funding data compiled by the consulting firm Velos from individual program elements. Tierney cautioned the figures are not official Pentagon budget totals. "It's a bit of an inexact science," he said during a presentation.
The numbers reflect an unusual year for defense budgeting. In addition to its regular $26.1 billion congressional appropriation, the Space Force is benefiting from mandatory funding enacted under the reconciliation law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025. Roughly $13.8 billion of that law's defense spending is being counted toward the Space Force's fiscal 2026 resources, largely to support the administration's proposed Golden Dome layered missile defense architecture.
Golden Dome envisions a multi-orbit network of space-based sensors and, potentially, interceptors to detect and counter ballistic and hypersonic threats. Congress has supported the concept but pressed the Pentagon for more detail on how reconciliation funds are being distributed across existing programs.
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Tierney said the Golden Dome money does not appear as a standalone program line. Instead, it is "diffused across both MDA and Space Force existing program elements and investments."
In his $57.7 billion estimate for Pentagon space spending, Tierney included about $12 billion for the Missile Defense Agency and roughly $3 billion for space efforts managed by other services. Although the Missile Defense Agency oversees programs beyond space, Tierney said its growing role in Golden Dome justified including its full budget in the broader space portfolio.
"This year we started basically sweeping in the entire Missile Defense Agency budget, given its alignment with the Golden Dome initiative," Tierney said. "There's just so much of that initiative and funding inside of the missile defense budget that we thought we would track it kind of as part of this broader portfolio."
Within the Space Force itself, Tierney estimates the "space sensing" portfolio totals about $11.6 billion in fiscal 2026 - "effectively almost the size of the entire Missile Defense Agency budget," he said. That figure covers programs such as Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared satellites in geosynchronous and polar orbits, the Resilient Missile Tracking constellation in medium Earth orbit, and a Ground Moving Target Indicator effort to field space-based radar capable of tracking moving targets on land or at sea.
The sensing total would grow further if it included the roughly $5 billion budget of the Space Development Agency, which operates within the Space Force but under separate budget authority. SDA is building the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a constellation that combines missile tracking satellites with a data transport layer.
Tierney said SDA's funding profile in 2026 is notable. While the agency continues to build out its missile tracking layer, the next increment of its transport layer - known as Tranche 3 - was not funded. "It does seem this was one of the biggest surprises to me, that Congress did not ultimately keep tranche 3 of the transport layer in the budget," Tierney said. Even though some lawmakers had supported it, "Congress didn't backfill it."
The transport mission remains central to Pentagon plans for resilient space data networks. But its future path is less clear, particularly amid debate over Milnet, a proposed Space Force effort to use SpaceX satellites to provide government-operated data transport.
If SDA's role narrows to missile tracking, Tierney suggested its work could become more tightly integrated with Space Systems Command, the Space Force's primary acquisition arm. "I've heard some chatter that maybe the work of the agency could be subsumed into the rest of the work that the Space Force's Space Systems Command is doing, and less delineated as a separate agency," Tierney said, while emphasizing there is no official indication of such a move and that Congress has long supported SDA.
The broader question is whether the 2026 surge represents a new baseline or a peak. Tierney said he is watching the fiscal 2027 request closely. If reconciliation funding is not renewed, the Space Force's base budget could revert to roughly $26 billion, leaving programs launched with mandatory dollars facing tighter constraints.
"I'm concerned about what the ‘27 request is going to look like," Tierney said. "These capabilities that they're starting through reconciliation funding, they're not going away." Having more than $40 billion this year "is amazing," he added. "But how does this move over and integrate into the future requests, and is it really sustainable as a future top line, or are we somewhere in between or even below?"
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