You can almost hear the gleam in Fred Kennedy’s eyes when he talks about the Space Development Agency, a new US Department of Defense organization. The agency's new director, Kennedy uses words like agile and innovative. He makes statements such as, "We’re going to break a little glass and be a little provocative."

Not the usual tone of a military man.

The Space Development Agency, which has only existed since March 12 (happy 2.36-month anniversary!), is supposed to define the what’s-next of military presence in space, develop it, and then make it a reality—fast. The vision, right now, mostly involves hordes of small satellites keeping constant watch and shucking constant intel to Earth (be not afraid). Later, the agency could keep watch on spacecraft speeding beyond the usual orbits.

The current administration has been hot on whipping up space initiatives, particularly in the form of new, nebulous organizations, like the (under-fire) Space Force and now the SDA. Space has become what military types like to call a contested domain, a place where one’s enemies are apt to mess up one’s operations. A Defense Intelligence Agency report details some of the anxieties up there: China and Russia can jam signals zipping up and down from orbit, and are working on satellites that can sidle up to other satellites and bully them. They have or soon will have “anti-satellite” missiles. India recently tested its own. There are laser weapons.

But are new bureaucracies the way to deal with new problems? Maybe yes, maybe no. Given that question, in its short life, the SDA has been the subject of military tumult, space sniping, and arguments about how goings on in orbit should be handled. Some say this agile space stuff should be the purview of organizations that already exist. Others say the SDA doesn't have a solid enough idea of what it even is. As in every Rashomon story, everybody is probably a little right and nobody’s not a little wrong.

Kennedy, of course, is confident that SDA's de novo nature makes it the best for doing novo kinds of space projects. Kennedy spent two years as director of the Tactical Technology Office at Darpa, everybody’s favorite creepy innovation station, before moving to the SDA. Prior to that, he'd spent 23 years in the Air Force, including a three-year stint as a Darpa program manager, and then became a senior policy advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Since the mid-1990s, his early Air Force days, Kennedy has been pushing for one of the ideas now underpinning SDA.

He never liked that the military relied on giant, expensive satellites that each hold great power and great responsibility inside their circuits, sensors, and software. Because they are costly and hard to replace, such single exquisite satellites stay in orbit past their prime and are easier to attack with missiles or hacks or whatever the favored weapon of the day is. Instead, the military could use swarms of small satellites—cheaper, simpler to update, harder to take down—that could work together to do the same big jobs.

Back when Kennedy first dreamed of distributing space labor this way, people didn’t take the strategy seriously. “If someone said ‘smallsats’ to you in 1995, mostly what you’d get would be snickers," he says. Imitating the reaction, he adds, “‘Those are toys.’”

In the decades since, though, smallsats have morphed into a tried-and-tested space technology, courtesy of the commercial world: Companies use them to do global portraiture; to detect radio transmissions; to tabulate and forecast weather conditions; to track ships and planes; to optimize agriculture; and to make more internet.