The conversation at this year's Space Symposium has had a strong focus on the acknowledged need to embrace commercial services, and what has to happen to enable that.

In SpaceNews interviews, Aerospace CEO Steve Isakowitz and Jamie Morin, head of our Center for Space Policy and Strategy, join General John Hyten (Ret.) in calling out specific changes and blockers.

Gen. Hyten lamented what he perceived as a lack of change despite multiple administrations calling for it. The time has come, he said, to let decision makers off the leash.

"I think we have to start giving military leadership—and I’m a military person, so I’m biased—authority and responsibility to go buy things and give them a flexible budget in order to do that," he told reporter Sandra Erwin. "We are working all those things in the traditional bureaucratic, slow process. I’m worried that means we’ll fall further behind."

Isakowitz echoed this, adding some of the thoughts he put in an article of his own yesterday: "You’ve got to develop with speed from the start. And part of it is how you go about setting requirements... These things have to be written so that you can adapt much more quickly, rather than setting requirements that might be five to 10 years old based on obsolete thinking."

Morin pointed out that "U.S. capital markets and the entrepreneurial sectors are a critical source of U.S. advantage. And so it’s really incumbent on the government to figure out how to maximize the leverage we get from that."

You can read the full piece and interviews over at SpaceNews.