To envision, rapidly develop, deploy, and operate advanced systems that provide transformational capabilities for the national Space community.

The go-to organization for pioneering high-risk, first-of-a-kind Navy, DoD, IC, and Commercial Space-based capabilities to secure U.S. strategic advantage.

Principal functions of NCST include understanding and clarifying requirements, recognizing and prosecuting promising research and development, analyzing and testing systems to quantify their capabilities, developing operational concepts that exploit new technical capabilities, performing system engineering to allocate design requirements to subsystems, and performing engineering development and initial operation to test and evaluate selected spacecraft subsystems and systems.

NCST is a focal point and integrator for NRL divisions whose technologies are used in space systems. NCST also provides systems engineering and technical direction assistance to system acquisition managers of major space systems. In this role, technology transfer is a major goal that motivates a continuous search for new technologies and capabilities and the development of prototypes that demonstrate the integration of such technologies.