The Space Force has formally claimed cislunar space — the stretch beyond Earth's orbit out to the Moon's orbit — as a domain it will manage and buy for. What it cannot yet see there is a separate problem.
The service completed that bureaucratic claim at the Space Symposium this week, where Gen. Chance Saltzman released two planning documents — the 68-page Future Operating Environment 2040 and the 104-page Objective Force 2040 — formally naming cislunar alongside low Earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit as operational territory SpaceNews. A named acquisition office will manage it. The tracking satellite meant to justify that structure, Oracle-M, is not scheduled to launch until the end of 2026.
Air & Space Forces Magazine reported in March that the Space Force was treating cislunar as a genuine planning domain Air & Space Forces Magazine. What Saltzman's documents add is completion: the policy aspiration now has a budget line and an office. The sensors that would make the domain legible to buyers do not exist yet. Oracle-M, the Air Force Research Laboratory satellite built to track objects beyond geosynchronous orbit, is manifested as a secondary payload on a USSF mission Aviation Week. The tracking network the Space Force already operates is concentrated in low Earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit. By the service's own description, visibility farther out is limited.
The 1,728-times figure reflects the scale of that gap. Cislunar space is 1,728 times the volume of geosynchronous orbit, according to an Air Force Research Laboratory primer AFRL cited by Air & Space Forces Magazine Air & Space Forces Magazine. Covering it is not the same as covering low Earth orbit, and the existing sensor architecture was not designed for it.
The move follows the Trump administration executive order signed December 18, Ensuring American Space Superiority White House, which extended national space responsibility to the cislunar domain as a matter of policy. The order defined the mission, the service stood up the office, the office will buy what the mission requires.
Jaime Stearns, a veteran program manager with experience at the Space Rapid Capabilities Office and the Air Force Research Laboratory, will lead the office. Stearns has described the cislunar program landscape as a valley of death: the gap where promising technology runs out of funding before it matures enough to attract serious acquisition interest. The coordination office is meant to close that funding gap. It cannot close the tracking gap.
For defense contractors, any company building deep-space communications, lunar-distance tracking, or navigation services for orbits beyond geosynchronous orbit now has a named procurement office where before there was only a policy aspiration. That is how a presidential directive becomes a line item.
Saltzman put it plainly: the Space Force goes where U.S. interests go SpaceNews. Oracle-M is the test: if it launches on schedule and delivers, the office has sensors to pair with. If it slips, it buys blind.
