The National Space Policy of the United States of America (2010) calls on the National Security Space (NSS) community to continue to "develop and apply advanced technologies and capabilities that respond to changes to the threat environment." This national policy reinforces a trend within the NSS community that places a greater emphasis on the ability of NSS systems to operate in an uncertain future. This dissertation informs policymaking by presenting three essays that address some of the challenges associated with improving the flexibility of NSS capabilities. In addition, each essay includes an application of the decision logic that would be required to optimally support the next generation of flexible space systems.

"This document was submitted as a dissertation in September 2011 in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in public policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. The faculty committee that supervised and approved the dissertation consisted of William Welser IV (Chair), Brien Alkire, Adam Resnick, and Ben Van Roo.

Introduction: uncertainty, flexibility, and national security space policy -- Essay one: risk-tolerant small satellite launch strategies -- Essay two: challenges associate with expanded national security space ridesharing -- Essay three: systems analysis frameworks for flexible space architectures -- Conclusions and future research -- Appendix A: exponential growth in the number of launch strategies -- Appendix B: launch vehicle assignment program derivation -- Appendix C: Bayesian estimates of the rideshare reliability effect -- Appendix D: cost-centric framework for a notional fractionated space system -- Appendix E: launch system technical summaries.