At SMX, Daniel “Sphinx” Dant is looking to the stars.
“We are seeing more and more traditional terrestrial capabilities move to space, because of the benefits that you get in that operating environment: the ability to be unmolested when you are flying around the Earth, to either collect intelligence, to communicate, to have precision navigation and timing wherever you are on the planet,” he said.
As vice president for the space market, Dant is positioning SMX to take advantage of the opportunities this presents.
What’s happening in the space market these days?
With the increased interest in the commercialization of space, having a separate Space Force is a wonderful thing. I was involved in helping to stand that up, I helped write the answer to Congress when I was a contractor working for the secretary of the Air Force.
It’s a wonderful thing, but it brings unique challenges. I spent time in Los Angeles interviewing program managers, and every single one of them had manning concerns. We’ve stood up this force, but we’ve stood it up on the minimums.
Sounds like an opportunity for the GovCon world.
Absolutely. For the agencies, it means they can offload some of the work to industry and commercial entities, and leave the more exquisite mission-focused work to themselves. We can help them, and we can help ourselves.
How are you looking to take advantage of that window?
At SMX, we recently reorganized. We used to have an engineering IT business, a cloud business and a C5ISR business. We have two groups now, a mission solutions group and a digital solutions group.
In the future, we’re not going to be bending metal and putting sexy satellites on orbit. For us, it comes down to command and control. We can do that. We have the cloud expertise, we have the IT services solutions: We can build a platform to do command and control. We can do any number of services, and we can do a lot of ground support for all these exquisite systems.
How do you bring that vision to fruition?
It takes patience. We’re a privately-owned company, owned by Ocean Sound Partners, and they want to see progress. But it does take some patience to break into this market, especially if you’re not building satellites or satellite components, which is where all the primes want to be.
I’ve taken a crawl-walk-run approach to this, especially in our mission solutions group. We already have contracts with almost all of the major combatant commands to do Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. We do the processing, exploitation and dissemination of ISR data for AFRICOM, EUCOM and INDO-PACOM.
So we have a foothold, but those contracts are not yet focused on space. My approach is to add more space content to help those, to rapidly deliver capabilities to the warfighter, to the combatant commanders, with non-pro proprietary solutions. They hate getting into vendor lock, and so we try to break that paradigm.
Where do you go from there?
Nothing breeds success like success. If we can have some success on those contracts, then we’re building a portfolio and past performance that then allows us to walk and run in terms of going after new contracts where we can prime those.
We’ve already put in a couple bids on some Space Force contracts. So we’re starting to walk.
Space Force and others are resource-constrained, they have substantial but still limited budgets. How do you address that?
It starts with an internal effort. I’ve put a lot of focus on selling our strategy and the CEO supports this: I’m staying on message and pushing that message.
In terms of the customers, one of the great things about this company is its mission focus. I’m trying to leverage that, to make this space growth initiative not so much about making more money and profit, but about the good that it does for the nation.
I was in uniform 26 years. I had a parade of contractors come through my office and typically I didn’t get excited. But every now and then you get someone who comes in who actually has looked at your problem, and they have a passion about solving that problem. When you can do that as a contractor, they tend to listen to you.
On a personal note, what makes this work interesting or meaningful for you?
All the time I was in uniform, I was involved in the space enterprise. It’s an exciting mission, and it’s only going to get more exciting.
As more and more of our capabilities go to space, the Russians, Chinese, other potential adversaries are going to notice that. They will build up their capabilities to deny us those space capabilities. So we will have to protect and defend those capabilities. That is where the real growth lies in the space market: in the protection and defense of those space capabilities.