The lede: The Pentagon has spent the last three years quietly rewriting the rules of military space procurement — away from exquisite, billion-dollar, decade-build satellites and toward "proliferated" constellations of small, cheap, fast-to-orbit birds that can be replaced as fast as an adversary can shoot them down. The Space Development Agency's Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture is the doctrine; Trump's January 2025 executive order launching the "Iron Dome for America" (Golden Dome) missile-shield program, with its explicit call for space-based interceptor and tracking layers, is the budget accelerant. That policy shift rewards companies that can build and launch small satellites in-house — and it just handed Rocket Lab the playbook to stop being a launch subcontractor and start being a prime.