TacSat-2: A Story of Survival

With the launch of TacSat-2, the Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) program has its first on-orbit asset and the ORS community finally gets an opportunity to transition from talking about the benefits of responsive space to demonstrating them. TacSat-2, however, is far from a pure ORS spacecraft and its relevance and utility is far from restricted to the ORS arena. The spacecraft that became TacSat-2 had its origins in a formation flying program called TechSat-21. Though the TechSat-21 program was cancelled, much of the basic spacecraft design survived and reemerged under the name of Roadrunner. Roadrunner was supposed to demonstrate how a militarily relevant spacecraft could be developed and fielded on an accelerated timeframe. It was under-funded from the start and the mission architects solved the financial problem by entering into a number of military, civil, and commercial partnerships. Unfortunately, each partner brought more than money and advocacy -they brought their own sets of experimental hardware and the associated requirements. When the ORS program saw many commonalities between Roadrunner’s objectives and their own, they adopted the spacecraft as part of the TacSat ORS program, bestowing upon it additional prestige and the opportunity to become an operational military asset, but further increasing the growing list of mission