US to Trim Commercial-Satellite Use

The Pentagon's latest spending plan marks a little-noticed but important shift for the space industry, scaling back a push to use commercial satellites to supplement the military's communication and space efforts. Defense Department budget cutters have long favored leasing satellite capacity in certain cases over developing, building and launching costly dedicated systems. But industry officials say the budget package unveiled this week backs away from that decades-long privatization drive in two key areas: leasing private communication-satellite capacity to provide more bandwidth and buying commercial imagery to augment spy satellites.