Defense Civilian Training Corps, Certificate Programs Emerge to Develop Space Workforce

Ms. Katharine Kelley, the Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Human Capital with the United States Space Force, recently announced the military’s newest service was engaged in a pilot program called the Defense Civilian Training Corps (DCTC). While similar to the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), the DCTC is a congressionally mandated initiative to streamline university graduates into civilian careers at the Department of Defense (DOD). 

While the DCTC exemplifies how the government is initiating partnerships with academia from the top down, grassroots efforts like certificate programs at engineering schools are preparing to engage the Space Force from the bottom up. All together, these initiatives demonstrate how the Space Force can engage academic institutions to foster the workforce it needs among its civilian employees, active-duty Guardians and industry partners. 

In this episode of, “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security,” Elara Nova partner Dr. B.T. Cesul provides insight into DCTC and other alternative education programs that are emerging to cultivate the space workforce of the future. 

"The Elara Edge" is hosted by Scott King and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. The full story can be found on Elara Nova's Insights page here. Music was produced by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio.

Transcript

Host: Scott King

SME: B.T. Cesul, Ph.D., Partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy

00:02 - 01:41

Towards the end of last year, Ms. Katharine Kelley, the Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Human Capital at the United States Space Force, announced the military’s newest service was engaged in a pilot program called the Defense Civilian Training Corps - or DCTC. 

Similar to the more commonly known Reserve Officer Training Corps - or ROTC  program - the DCTC is a congressionally mandated initiative to streamline university graduates into civilian careers at the Department of Defense.

And while the DCTC is a program seeking to cultivate the space workforce of the future from the top down, other grassroots efforts, such as certificate programs at small engineering schools, are seeking to provide a hands-on space workforce from the bottom up. 

Welcome to The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security.” I’m your host, Scott King, and joining us today is Elara Nova partner, Dr. B.T. Cesul. During a 20-year career in government and defense contractor service, Dr. Cesul served as a defense intelligence analyst focused on space and counterspace systems engineering, while also supporting space warfare education programs at DOD-affiliated institutions such as the United States Air Force Weapons School, the National Space Security Institute and the Defense Intelligence University.

Now, he’s here to provide some perspective on how the DCTC, as well as some of these other grassroots programs, can fulfill the emerging workforce needs across the spectrum of space: from active-duty Guardians, to civilian space experts within the DOD.

Dr. Cesul, welcome to the show!

01:42 - 01:44

Hi. Excited to be here. I’m really looking forward to this discussion.

01:45 - 02:12

Now, before we get started - I think it’s fair to say that for the broader public - when they think of the Department of Defense, their first thought is of our active-duty service members and their senior leaders. 

But according to the Government Accountability Office - nearly 770,000 civilians work in the Department of Defense - that’s around one-third of the DOD workforce. So broadly speaking, can you describe the traditional role of the civilian workforce within the DOD?

02:13 - 04:17

The civilian workforce in the Department of Defense plays a huge role in providing continuity and long-term technical expertise in a lot of different areas. The active duty folks are by nature and by inherently as part of their military service, are rotating positions in order to do career advancement, gain a broadening of skills that make them more effective as a leader in higher positions of authority as they go on through their career.

The civilian workforce is there really to backstop that long-term expertise and continuity in between processes, philosophy, strategy, technical competency that's required to make the Department of Defense the premier technical warfighting force of the world that it is. 

Especially when you start talking about space programs, many space acquisition programs, as much as we're trying to reform the acquisition process to make them faster, many of these are long-term programs that require in-depth technical knowledge, at like graduate school levels of education and technical competency in order to achieve success.

So the civilian workforce provides a lot of that in these programs. They're the program managers. They're the chief engineers that go on between these programs and live between the inherently rotational nature of the active-duty force that also supports these programs. So civilians have a huge role to play.

I'll tell you from personal experience, one of these areas where civilians play a crucial role is in the intelligence field.

A lot of times, the relevancy of a piece of intelligence information that you would see, in the current day is linked to events that happened five, six, seven years ago in an adversary country. So having the ability to have those civilians that are able to follow that portfolio over multiple years and establish that long-term continuity and familiarity with the information allows the intelligence assessments to come out with a better cause and effect relationship or assessment at the end of the day, then it would be if someone was consistently rotating every two years and having to pick up twenty years of history on a program in a two-year period, in addition to that they have their additional duty assignments and other things like that. 

So, in many areas of the space ecosystem within the Department of Defense, the civilian workforce plays a huge role in making sure that these programs go through success.

04:18 - 04:34

Thank you, so back to the reason that we're here today. At the end of 2024, the Space Force announced they were engaged in an ongoing pilot program called the Defense Civilian Training Corps.

Can you share a little bit about the DCTC? What is it? And why is a program like it necessary?

04:35 - 05:16

Yeah. So the DCTC, as, documentation from the Department of Defense indicates it's a program that looks to increase the available pool of applicants for defense acquisition programs.

So the program utilizes partnerships with civilian universities. At this point four universities: North Carolina A&T, Purdue, University of Arizona and Virginia Tech, to collaborate in almost a civilian-ROTC type of program where the students involved in this program sign up for a curriculum program that's developed by the DOD, by OUSD [Office of the Undersecretary of Defense] for acquisition and, essentially they take a dedicated course load focused on defense acquisition programs.

05:17 - 05:22

And what are some of the challenges the DOD faces in hiring these civilian employees?

05:23 - 07:09

Yeah. So the biggest [challenge] for outgoing college students to get into the Department of Defense workforce, especially in the cleared spaces, is that lack of a security clearance and lack of familiarity with defense processes. So a lot of times in civilian universities, even the best ones that have extensive relationships with the Department of Defense, across the different branches or the intelligence community.

A lot of times, the ability to transmit the knowledge as to how the DOD works and “speak defense,” is lost in the transmission to the degree requirements for an academic program. The traditional ROTC students that go through those programs and turn into active duty folks. They get a lot of that through their summer training and through their formal ROTC education.

But for the civilian going into the Department of Defense, it can be a pretty radical shock. I remember when I came out of college and went right into the Department of Defense, there was so much I didn't know about different acronyms and contracting and relationships to contractors and how the different organizations and branches interacted with each other, even just on a processes level.

That this type of program, the DCTC program, looks to solve that bridge of getting a more ready-to-go workforce coming out of college and one of those big issues is that security clearance problem. So I think everybody's well aware of the documented problems with getting large numbers of professionals cleared out of the security industry, into defense positions.

But the backlog of security clearances that's happened for the last, basically since the 9/11 ramp-up in 2001. So it's over a 20-year problem of how to get those entry-level people cleared faster. At one point, the backlog was 24 to 36 months to get a security clearance. And that's just not sustainable for a younger workforce that's looking to enter and be productive right away. 

So this program aims to jumpstart that process by allowing the students to get into a contractual relationship with the government, without a defined billet and a final employer, and that allows them to get the security process started ahead of time.

07:10 - 07:14

Now, what are some of the advantages for students participating in the DCTC program?

07:15 - 08:46

From my looking at the program, there looks to be three key advantages to the students participating in it. One is, the dedicated curriculum that they get on the defense acquisition process, which they would not get in a regular civilian degree program.

It looks like the curriculum that they're getting - would be equivalent to a professional education that you would get after starting in a full-time job, then you'd have to go away on long-term, full-time training for or additional remote classes for, so having that integrated into their undergraduate experience is a big advantage for the students.

The second is the opportunity to get the internships at their potential employers. So that way they can get a firsthand knowledge of what it's like to work in some of these offices, especially when these offices can't be entirely clear in terms of what they're doing or overt about what they're doing. 

I remember my first opportunity when I went to work for the intelligence community coming out of school. I had to do all my interviews for potential positions with that employer, but they couldn't really tell me what they did. So it was a lot of winks and nods and just ‘trust us.’ If I would have had the opportunity to do an internship or co-op at a classified level with that employer, I would've had a much better idea of what I would be walking into and the culture, the capabilities, the work tasks, the daily life that I'd be experiencing. 

The third advantage, I think, for the students participating in this program is the financial one. So having the opportunity to offer the scholarships that offset the cost of tuition, plus cost of attendance in the form of a stipend is really advantageous.

And honestly, that's a big draw for the ROTC program, too, right? A lot of students can get their college education and high-quality institutions paid for by the government in exchange for the years of service and the uniform, at least at a minimal level. So, bringing that type of economic benefit to civilian students that are coming into the workforce should be a big draw.

08:47 - 08:54

So how does the DCTC program relate to a more typical pathway for a student interested in pursuing a career in space?

08:55 - 13:06

The typical path in the space workforce really went along two different paths. One was if you were prior active duty, and the other is if you were a strict civilian.

So if you were a strict civilian, you would typically have to come from one of the top ten, top 20 types of academic engineering schools with a formal degree in engineering, usually aerospace or electrical engineering, sometimes mechanical. You would have to have a university campus experience where space was integrated into the university curriculum, either formally in a degree program or with a lot of research laboratories where those students would have experience working with faculty or graduate students on those types of space programs.

And typically the student would come out also with a graduate degree. There were entry level, bachelor's level types of jobs available. But if you really wanted to get into the national security space area, typically the employers that were hiring either at the cleared defense contractors or within the Department of Defense, those would be more your typical, like, Master's level students, at least.

So that was a pretty long training passage to get in. And then once you got in, a lot of times the civilian entry level employees, again, unless they came from a family that had military connections or they were lucky enough to have one of these very, very select internships or co-op positions with someone like a Boeing or a LockMart or a Raytheon, where they got to work on our defense program, they would have to spend the next, 12 to 18 months just learning how to “speak defense.”

What does formatting look like on a memo? What's a staffing process? Why can't I just go to the contractor that I want and tell them to build me something? Why do I have to have a competitive acquisition process? So all these types of lessons learned, would add to the educational experience that those students would have to have both on-the-job training and formal post-graduate education.

So what that did, though, in the defense space area, though as well, would lead a lot of employers, especially the contracting side, to look to hire from an active duty background and were separating out, or came from other contractors and in certain communities because of the requirements on the acquisition side, when these commercial contractors have to respond to proposals and things, there was never really a built-in option into the contract to grow a workforce. You had to come with the workforce that was cleared, that was experienced, that was trusted, and sometimes even known within the community for their expertise in order to win the contracts. And so that necessarily biases the hiring process towards, like I say, those who had prior existing contacts or, came out of the active duty side with the experience on that.

So what happens is that it becomes a vicious cycle in the hiring process because those people with that experience level that are necessary require a higher salary and with a higher salary, you then have to bid a higher hourly rate for those people's services. And so then the contracts start getting higher and higher in value because you have to have that experienced workforce.

There's no real pathways to build an entry level workforce into some of these defense programs. And so you get this vicious cycle building up of ‘Okay, so now you have a smaller cleared pool of workers that could go after this specific type of work, but now you have to pay them more in order to keep them in your company.

Or if you want to go after or try to win work from an incumbent, you then have to go poach people from other companies. And then, what's the number one way to poach someone? Offer them a bigger salary. Well, you offer them a bigger salary than they come with a higher hourly rate and so now the cost for the program gets higher.’

And so the government side and the acquisition side, costs start growing without any control because the labor costs keep going up because you have to keep the same shrinking pool of experts, especially with this downturn in population that we have from the cleared defense workforce of the 80s and 90s to now, so that you have a smaller pool, you have a lot more work that's being requested by the Space Force to the defense industrial base, both inside the government and exterior to the government.
And so necessarily, your costs are going to go up because the competition for those resources are getting [smaller]. So it’s simple supply and demand. So I think what a lot of these programs like DCTC and some of the other alternative education programs that we're going to talk about in a couple minutes, what they're going to try to solve the problem was: how do you develop a bigger pool of applicants and space development, the human capital development problem - if you will - so that a lot of these programs can continue to go on without breaking the bank on the continuous vicious cycle of competing over smaller and smaller human capital resources to go after an increasing number of problems.

13:07 - 13:40

That does lead us into the next phase of our conversation. While the DCTC is an academic program the DOD is implementing from the top-down, there are some other grassroots efforts looking to engage the DOD - and the Space Force in particular - from the bottom up.

Prior to your role with Elara Nova, you had first-hand experience developing some of these academic programs and as I understand it - continue to be involved in some capacity with them today.

Can you share with our audience some of the alternative education and workforce development programs for space that exist today?

13:41 - 19:14

So even from my earliest days as a government employee, I had a passion for education and got involved in a lot of different development training programs. So whether it was, the revamp of the military space professional education programs at the National Space Security Institute, where I helped re-develop the space intelligence curriculum as part of a couple of the different core series.

But also within my own squadron helping to develop the first IQT - MQT program for space intelligence professionals, the Counterspace Analysis Proficiency Program, at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center.

All of these things that I've done have been with the knowledge and goal that we just don't have enough people to work these space programs, across the defense industry that are needed. Everybody wants more space capabilities, but there's not enough space folks in the community. And there's a number of statistics out there that show, basically we are going to have a shortfall in the space professional workforce, probably between 50 to 75,000 people per year starting in around 2030, based on the current graduation numbers and the current estimated job requisitions that are going to be out there across both government and industry.

So one of the things that I've done since I left government, started a little bit while I was in government, was try to forge better connections between academia, and the defense community and the space defense community in order to try to find ways to get creative on solving some of these workforce development issues from a strict volumetric perspective - we're just not graduating enough students.

But since I left government, I've been involved in the traditional academia programs, working at places like Ohio State and Penn State and the University of Michigan on kind of traditional: how do you add additional classes into an existing curriculum, or maybe provide guest lecturers or seminar courses to increase the visibility and accessibility into how the defense space program works and how students can get jobs in that.

So I've been doing that for a number of years, but one innovative thing that I've been involved in the last two years that I was really proud of was, we started a program with some support from the state of Michigan to look at developing a new way to train space professionals without going through the traditional, theoretical engineering design type of curriculum that's offered at a lot of the legacy aerospace engineering institutions.

So at a small school called Lake Superior State University up in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, my previous company, I was brought on contract, and we helped develop from scratch a Space Operations Certificate program. And so the idea there was to build on the idea of certificate programs, which have been around now, and they start gaining popularity at civilian institutions in terms of micro-credentialing, right? Targeted pragmatic education and specific job skill development across a number of areas, but try to focus on the space operations portion. 

So how do we get more folks that can work at the ground stations and at the data centers and at the operations centers for the military that have the pragmatic skills on what is necessary to do space operations.

How do you manage a satellite’s life? How do you manage solar charging and command uploading and anomaly resolution? Without having to necessarily go through a four-year traditional aerospace engineering design degree. 

So we worked with Lake State, who didn't have any space experience at all. They were a small engineering college, technical college, 1700 students. And they had a robotics engineering program and a mechanical engineering degree program, but they didn't have any space legacy. So we started from scratch and through the Chippewa County Economic Development Corporation and State of Michigan funds, we worked with the university to develop a one year program that was two classes, focused on introducing students to a very fundamental level of space operations.

So not necessarily deriving the equations of orbital mechanics, but showing them the final: this is a TLE and this is what it means. And these are the key factors of how to figure out things like orbit maneuvers and link budgets and satellite lifetime and radiation exposure limits. So, giving the students the equations in boxes type of technical competency, but then also integrating laboratory classes that allow the students to exercise what they're learning in the classroom in an experiential learning environment.

So we developed labs in orbital mechanics and satellite orbit determination and, digital twinning and a couple things that we're most proud of is using a facility that's also was developed with state of Michigan money called the Homestead Mission Operations Center, which is a brand new, from scratch, satellite ground station, built just south of campus to support potentially commercial and government research activities in doing space communications.

And we worked with that, with RedWire Space and Oakman Aerospace and a couple other companies to develop a mission operations center, that the students could actually work in. And it had live active satellite antennas, and we had state of the art digital simulators to do mission simulation and so the students actually went in and did satellite communications for real as one of their laboratories.

They ran a mission, a real mission operation simulation, similar to what the government folks would use in places like, Air Force Lifecycle Management Center or Space Systems Command where they're doing simulations in AFSIM and other state-of-the-art software packages. 

So now instead of a student with a robotics engineering degree from Lake State who really wants to get into the space industry, but they have no relevant experience, they can point to, ‘Oh, I've got a robotics degree. And I went through the Space Operations Certificate program, where I actually did live satellite operations and mission control and anomaly resolution.’ 

So now I can go to a place like, Raytheon or Naval Research Laboratories or someplace else that's doing space robotics work and say, ‘Hey, I actually know, I can link this together. I know orbits, I know ground station operations, I know link budgets, and I can make it relevant to my increased technical discipline.’

And that helps the students build a narrative that's more attractive to potential employers when they're going through resume searches and keyword searches, right? That are generated when they go through these job applications.

19:15 - 19:26

It seems to me that this Space Operations Certificate program is really targeted toward a niche skill set. So how does it differ from some of the more traditional pathways for space careers that we discussed earlier?

19:27 - 21:56

Yeah. So traditionally, if you went to a four-year university for an aerospace engineering degree and you wanted to do space stuff, you would do all the theoretical classes and orbital mechanics and space systems design and space environment, where they'd each be a semester long or more.

You'd work on senior design capstone projects, but you'd be focused more on the theoretical design side of a space system. So what are the optimization variables for? Or how do I pick my reaction wheels and how much Delta V do I put on spacecraft and things like that. Which are great skills, they are still needed. They are - you go to a defense contractor or a requirement generations shop. You need those type of systems engineers, design engineers, that are playing in those fields. 

But what we don't have is a lot of times, those kinds of, working level, the grunt work at an actual satellite ground station, ‘How do you actually do command uplink? How do you actually do data downlink and processing? How do you plan pass times? How do you optimize your network of satellite dishes that you have in the ground to communicate with your constellation of satellites in order to get the data, the tasking and data down, up and down from the satellites in a way that meets your customer deadlines or your requirements for executing a military operation?’

So those types of skill sets aren't necessarily attractive a lot of times too, to the students that come out of an MIT or a University of Michigan or a Stanford who just spent their last four years doing intricate design and optimization on variables or the design of a new reaction wheel and control arm associated with it.

They don’t want to go and sit in a terminal, or at a ground station and do satellite operations or go out and do field maintenance on a remote satellite operations system. And a lot of these other students at other schools that don't have this traditional space background, they really want to do that. 

They want that hands-on work. They want that technician, that field work, in addition to using their engineering knowledge that they gain. So this is what we're trying to do with this program is provide a way to bridge that gap between the operator technician level that's really needed to make these things work in actual ongoing programs. And the design back at the factory type of operations, that go on in traditional engineering background.

So that's what this program is trying to do, is bridge that gap and for the Space Force specifically, that's a huge need. If you take a look at the career fields in the Space Force, the number one populated career field in the Space Force right now in enlisted and officers is space operators. So the Space Force recognizes that having this operations focus is a need.

And so that's what we're trying to fill with this program, So we want to provide them the opportunity to get their foot in the door in the space industry with some of these entry level positions, providing a pragmatic service that has application. So we think these types of programs fulfill that need.

21:57 - 22:03 

And then - does this Lake Superior State program have any immediate connections to - or engagements with - the Space Force today?

22:04 - 23:35

Yeah. So we're actually, and as part of my work, I still am on adjunct faculty staff with Lake State advising the program as it matures.

In addition to my day jobs that I do with Elara Nova and with Umbra. We're working actively with Space Training and Readiness Command. So Space Force’s STARCOM, to look at different educational initiatives.When I helped design this program at Lake State, we did it with the mindset of we want to have as much duplication or at least, synchronicity with existing Military Basic Training programs.

So whether that's the officer undergraduate space training program or the enlisted undergraduate space training program that the STARCOM runs where, that's your first training assignment you get when you enter the Space Force as an officer or enlisted, you go to someplace like the Vandenberg Schoolhouse, or you go to Colorado Springs for a two or three month course set to get introduced to the idea of space operations and space technology for the Space Force.

So we built the curriculum with the mind that we wanted to, to replicate what was going on in those other training environments and STARCOM has actually been very receptive recently in some conversations that we had. 

Our ultimate goal for the Lake State program is to get reciprocity recognition from STARCOM that this program could be equivalent to one of those other introductory training programs. 

And the idea there is that we can increase the volumetric throughput of students through this type of basic training, so that we're not overwhelming the Vandy Schoolhouse or Colorado Springs, so that there's not a six month or eight month or 12 month waiting list to get these new Guardians coming into these programs, we can service that need through a variety of partnerships with civilian institutions and military institutions. So we're looking at replicating this program at other schools as well.

23:36 - 23:46

Now, understanding that this certificate program is still a pilot program in and of itself, in what ways is it similar to some of the other top-down efforts like the Defense Civilian Training Corps?

23:47 - 26:16

There are some similarities. So from what I've seen out of the DCTC, there seems to be a focus on hands-on experiential learning. And that's what we also want to provide in the certificate program - is that experiential learning, not just lectures and simulations, but actually letting the students get their hands on doing real things.

And that seems to be the focus of the DCTC, as well as getting the students in hands on real life situations where they're working in program offices, learning that acquisition process and execution in a real world environment. And on the space operations side, that's what we want to do, too. We want to get these students interacting.

You know, there's a lot of great simulation and training tools out there. Students can sit in front of monitors and screen time all the time. But there is a difference between sitting in front of a computer simulation that's preprogrammed, and even the anomalies are preprogrammed that you have to respond to a lot of times in these simulations. Vice - having to go out and set up the antenna yourself at a communication station and do the verification that you have RF energy coming into your antenna, and your software works together, and you're having to do things like reposition to get more gain or turn the volume up on your software-defined radio in order to get the data down and make sure that your software can do the decoding and understanding what you're seeing in the signal strength - all these types of things that happen in the real world, in real time with hands-on learning. 

Those are the type of things that really start building that intuition for entry level employees that normally would take years or even decades to gain. Students are gaining that now in this type of academic experiential learning programs - right away.

And so that's what we're really trying to do with a lot of these certificate and alternative education paths is solve that human capital development problem in the space workforce with a combination of of book learning, traditional lecture material, watching videos, but also getting them hands-on experiential learning with industry standard software tools, with real life experiences in doing satellite operations.

So this type of experiential learning, again, builds that intuition and that intuition, that's the thing that's missing right now in crafting, what General Saltzman wants is that Space Warfighter Mentality, right?  I've heard General Saltzman say that he's got plenty of R&D engineers that know how to do simulations, but he doesn't have a cadre of space warfighters yet. 

And so part of these experiential learning programs, that's what we want to build, is that intuition, that inherent knowledge as to how things work, not just how they're supposed to work, that can provide that jumpstart into building the other things that fold into a Space Warfighter Mentality where we actually know - you know it’s the difference between, doing the flight simulator and then actually getting it in F-15 and feeling the G’s yourself and actually going through the whole checklist and flying a plane and having things go wrong in-flight that you have to correct. That's what we're trying to do with these types of programs to provide space for a better cadre.

26:17 - 26:25

So Dr. Cesul - what do you see as the next steps for this program to better meet the Space Force’s workforce development needs moving forward?

26:26 - 28:15

At some of these smaller schools, we're trying to stand these programs up. It's also helpful to try to find other partners in the region that don't have these capabilities, so that you don't have multiple smaller institutions competing for the same pool of students and duplicating resources replicating the program.

So one of the things I'm trying to help with on the state of Michigan side is utilizing individual programs that are being developed at these smaller schools in niche areas. So for example, Lake Superior State, their space operations program. There's another smaller public school in the state. There's work on a space for cyber certificate program.

And so what we're trying to do now is partner up with other smaller regional schools that maybe have one or two or three students in their cadre that want to do space stuff, but that doesn't make sense to stand up an entire program for one or two or three students. But however, if you have six or seven universities that each have two or three students every year that want to do space stuff, and you can link it to singular programs, well, now you've got a certificate program that's pumping out 20 to 30 students a year. And now that starts to become viable for the school that's developing that certificate program.

So that's one of the things that we're trying to generate, and trying to build on with that program specifically in the state of Michigan, is developing those reciprocity agreements and tuition-sharing agreements at the administrative side, so that students from other smaller schools can take these programs remotely on the academic side or at the at least on the lecture side.

And then when it comes to the experiential learning, proceed with the experiential learning opportunities with the labs. They just come up to campus for one or two days, three times a semester to do the labs. 

So we think that's replicable in a lot of areas where that type of collaboration and cooperation exists, so that you don't have to have the flagship university always driving the thing.

And, you can take advantage of some of the cost savings that you get. Some of these universities with a lower tuition or registration costs. So you can increase the opportunity to access these types of learning opportunities, really more of a democratization of the space learning experience, than what has occurred in the past.

28:16 - 28:52

So, to summarize, it seems that - ideally - we’re going to have students coming through the DCTC program that will have both immediate security clearance and familiarity with the DOD’s acquisition process by the time they start working for the DOD.

In tandem, we may also have students coming from certificate programs like the one out of Lake Superior State University, that can provide some of the hands-on support at the ground-level. 

So, in what ways do these efforts - both from the top-down and the bottom-up, come together to create a workforce development solution for the human capital needs of the United States Space Force?

28:53 - 30:39

The simple answer is it's a numbers problem. Now, you're now not graduating, 100 students a year out of a flagship university.

Now you're graduating three, four, 500, students a year out of a series of universities that have the relevant skill set to start filling some of these positions, and then they naturally get the increased depth and knowledge and experience by going through these entry level jobs, through on-the-job training and on-the-job experiences. So, replicating these types of certificate programs across multiple universities just increases the throughput. And really that's what we're dealing with now, is a volume problem. 

We have really excellent, technically competent people coming into the space ecosystem for the defense and for industry. We just don't have enough of them to fill the problem sets in the programs that we need.

A quick example: when I came into the space field as a Master's graduate in 2001-2002 time frame, the average launch cadence per year was five to ten launch vehicle opportunities with maybe a launch of ten to 20 satellites. If you launched 20 satellites in a year, that was a really good year for the space industry.

Now we're looking at government entities like the Space Development Agency talking about thousand satellite constellations. So just the sheer volume of increase of space operations that's going on from launch, from managing constellations, to the building of satellites, to the test and evaluation of these satellites at the factory.

A lot of these satellites, they still have to go through things like thermal vacuum testing. We don't have enough thermal vacuum engineers and enough thermal vacuum chambers to do the throughput for all these different systems. So, just having that ability to increase the throughput of folks in the workforce that can do those jobs, that can increase and fulfill some of these desires that we have for these large constellation operations or for the huge increase in commercial space activity that we're anticipating.

That's really the goal at the end of the day, is trying to just increase the numbers and that's what these programs are doing.

30:40 - 31:03

Since its initiation five years ago now, the Space Force has placed an emphasis on this idea of strategic partnerships.

I’d like to tie this emphasis back into the DCTC and these alternative academic programs we’ve been talking about today. 

What do these programs demonstrate about the future of partnerships between the Space Force and academic institutions to develop the space and civilian workforce of the future?

31:04 - 33:22

Yeah. So I've had a number of discussions with STARCOM folks and other just general Space Force active duty folks about this exact question. And, it's not just the DCTC program. There are a lot of other programs that the Space Force is involved in, in terms of establishing partnerships with academia and it's beyond what traditionally has been done when a service would reach out to academia.

The two main ways were either, the most mature way was the establishment of a university-affiliated research center. A UARC, which is the university equivalent of an FFRDC. So places like Johns Hopkins, APL or Utah State SDL. And they would get, you know, that congressional advocacy line item funding on a year-to-year basis to establish the linkages between the service and the need for an in-depth, long-term R&D research base to draw upon to feed their next generation programs.

And then what we're seeing more recently is more of a partnership on that human development side with programs like the University Partnership Program, the UPP, that the Space Force started, the DCTC, where they're trying to get after that problem of not just funding the traditional, go do a research lab at a university and fund my research lab type of relationships that happened in the past.

But getting more to that, recruiting and human capital development problem set where, ‘Hey, we realize we need to do more things like internships and co-ops and sponsored research programs for undergraduates on campuses that don't necessarily result in a traditional, you know, SBIR type of research program.’ But more of a ‘Hey, we have a quick design project that we need a study on, or we need a digital model built for a certain space component in the next six months.’

And it's not a multi-year fund to a professor's graduate student lab for ten years type of relationship. It's a ‘No, we need this one-off type of relationship where we get things done fast.’ But also it allows us to kind of pre-evaluate some of the candidates that may be coming from your school into our hiring process.

It allows us to establish key relationships with professors so that they know that they can start to establish recruitment pipelines for hiring, because even the professors realize, the undergraduate senior student in year one, in year four might be my program manager that's evaluating my research proposal down the road. So now there's motivation on the academia side as well to establish these partnerships for workforce development, because they realize there's a pipeline there for not just providing the nation with expertise, but also kind of establishing their pipeline to potential funding sources in the future.

33:23: - 33:53

Now, Dr. Cesul, you are a partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy, which has positioned itself as a strategic partner in various aspects of space - whether that be national security space, international space, commercial space, and even the investment community. 

But what about academic institutions and their role in workforce development across the spectrum of all of these space stakeholders?

What opportunities exist for Elara Nova to engage these institutions in support of the Space Force’s workforce development goals?

33:54 - 36:56

Yeah. So the one thing that Elara Nova brings to the fight overall is experience and expertise.

And in standing up these different academic programs around the country that I've been involved in, whether it's the Lake State program or, or helping other universities figure out how to establish a curriculum to start a space program from scratch. 

A lot of the on-staff faculty have limited experience in space, or if they do, their ideas about how to interact with the defense space community has been limited to Air Force Office of Scientific Research proposals or NSF grants or 6-O level basic fundamental research out of AFRL.

They don't really know the front doors or the back doors or the intricacies and connections between different acquisition offices, policy offices and even warfighter offices in terms of how these things that they're doing at their campus actually impact real-life space operations. So, one of the things that I found is that bringing on experienced industry experts into the development of both curriculum and programmatic goals for some of these academia programs has been really helpful.

It's jumpstarted the program. It's provided the universities a cost-effective way to bring that expertise onto their teaching staff or into their research staff, without having to hire a traditional tenured faculty person, right? There's a lot of different things, like professors of practice and consulting agreements and contract faculty opportunities, where folks from Elara Nova can provide some of that expertise to these universities in terms of, ‘Hey, this is really important, this is what you should be emphasizing. This is what the new policy guidance coming out is.’

So that type of expertise can be useful to the academia community in starting up some of these programs. And then for the government, it's providing that linkage, right? 

The career civil servant who's never done anything outside of sit in his one building, from GS-7 through GS-14 or SES level. They may not have that network of linkages and connections to both academia and to industry that some of our experienced Elara Nova partners have established over time.

So some of the value proposition that we can bring to this development of the human capital development program set is, the ability to make those linkages and provide our expertise in real-life, developing some of these programs to make sure that there's utility to the three stakeholders. 

You've got the students - providing them value and to their dollar that they're paying in tuition that they feel like they're getting something out of this program that's useful. 

To the academia side, in establishing these programs and running these programs so that we can provide a cost effective way to continually increase their expertise and provide linkages to the current events.

What's really happening? What's the latest thing that's going on? How does this policy change affect what they want to do? 

And then to the government side - because now we're providing that pragmatic linkage all the way back to the training portion, right? So that the government knows that they have a trusted path that's been developed with a curriculum and a set of values and a set of experiences that really will pay off in the end to the government hirer that wants to have that human capital that can contribute on day one, not so that they're waiting 18 months, 24 months for someone to get up to speed, to be a productive employee in a government office where budgets are tight and personnel is tighter.

36:51 - 37:26

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security. As a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in space security.

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. This episode was edited and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.