Tag Archives: space force

Space Force Quietly Getting it Done (w SpaceX help)…While Shedding Space Missions?

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A Falcon Heavy rocket launches from Kennedy Space Center, Fla., Nov. 1, 2022. This was the first National Security Space Launch mission carried out on a Falcon Heavy rocket. (U.S. Space Force photo by Senior Airman Dakota Raub)

The eighth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, the United States Space Force, will celebrate its third birthday on 20 December, and thus far if you ask the common man in the streets what USSF has accomplished about as good an answer you will get is that it outlived the yawn-worthy Netflix parody comedy about it. Be that as it may, Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45 (formerly the Air Force’s 45th Space Wing out of Patrick AFB) has been busy.

Interim Star Trek-ish emblem of Space Launch Delta 45 compared to the old 45th SW

Operating from Cape Canaveral’s old and historic Eastern Range, in their first supported launch was a SpaceX Falcon 9 Starlink L-26 mission on May 15, 2021. That Starlink mission carried 52 satellites into orbit. Last week they saw the first National Security Space Launch mission on a Falcon Heavy rocket and the 95th consecutive successful NSSL mission.

As detailed by SLDelta45:

The payloads onboard included two space vehicles, the Long Duration Propulsive EELV Secondary Payload Adaptor (LDPE ESPA-2) and the Shepard Demonstration Mission.

The LDPE ESPA-2 spacecraft will deliver six small payloads to orbit that will advance communications and space weather sensing. LDPE ESPA-2 is envisioned as a ‘freight train to space’ for experiments and prototypes in geosynchronous high Earth orbit and will boost satellites to their final destination.

Because it is more cost effective, more companies with smaller satellites can make use of this ‘train’, increasing the speed and frequency of delivering similar payloads to orbit.

Like the LDPE-2, the Shepard Demonstration is designed to test new technologies to enhance safe and responsible rendezvous and proximity operations, providing an affordable path to space for hosted and separable payloads.

The USSF-44 mission provides a range of capabilities such as enabling safe navigation, secure communications, detection and identification of a wide range of threats, and other critical functions.

This is the second of three missions for the LDPE program. The first mission launched aboard STP-3 in December 2021 and LDPE-3A is scheduled to launch with USSF-67 in December of 2022.

Meanwhile, a mission you would expect Space Force to be all over, tracking all those objects floating around space, is being transferred to the Department of Commerce.

What?

Yup:

Right now, U.S. Space Command tracks more than 47,000 objects in space. But there are plans to transfer that responsibility to the Department of Commerce, an effort that will allow Spacecom to focus more on what’s happening in space rather than just on the tracking of objects there, the Spacecom commander said.

“My current priority is to invest in space domain awareness. To … gain a better understanding of the activities in space,” Army Gen. James Dickinson said. “Our challenges center on ensuring the warfighter has relevant and timely data to execute missions in a very complex and changing environment.”

Dickinson outlined priorities for his command and how industry might contribute to supporting them during a Thursday conference hosted in Los Angeles by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.
“Operationally our allies and partners are increasing their investments in , offering enhanced capabilities that can augment U.S. Space Command’s globally-distributed sensor network,” Dickinson said. “We must find innovative ways to create an integrated sensor network on a global scale. Through an integrated network we can build knowledge of the environment. Through knowledge, we know we can gain better wisdom.”

Space superiority, Dickinson said, means warfighters are getting the right data, in a timely manner, to allow them to make the decisions they need to make.

“Our sensor network must better enable battle management of increasingly dynamic and changing environments,” he said.

What Spacecom is looking for, Dickinson told industry members, are new, state-of-the-art technologies not dependent on limited, onboard consumables.

“Next-generation spacecraft require renewables and resupply to extend their lifespan and assure they are available for many, many years,” he said. “This is where our partnership with industry converges. Given our pacing challenge and expansion of dynamic space operations, we need to leverage commercial capabilities that are available today or maybe tomorrow.”

The general said Spacecom is looking for “existing viable capabilities that are good enough,” and pointed to systems such as the Army’s Gunsmoke-J satellite program as an example.

“We are filling space domain awareness capacity gaps with missile warning and defense sensors such as the Army/Navy’s TYPY2, and the Navy’s Aegis BMD ships,” he said. “I encourage aerospace companies to become partners with U.S. Space Command in our mission … by joining the Commercial Integration Cell and/or the Commercial Operations Cell.”

Spacecom’s commercial integration strategy, Dickinson said, is meant to set priorities and synchronize industry integration to mitigate capability gaps, but that it’s not an acquisition strategy.

“Commercial mission partners can formalize their provision of space capabilities through cooperative research and development agreements with our functional and service component commands,” he said. “We pursue the objectives of commercial integration because we know that industry contributes greatly to our ability to protect and defend the United States, our allies and our partners. Our mission success is dependent on the partnerships and relationships that we build with all of you.”

Dickinson said Spacecom needs a comprehensive and diverse space domain awareness network capable which is capable of supporting dynamic space operations, and that industry will be key in making that happen.
“As America has always done, we must harness the best and the brightest to address our most significant operational challenges,” he said. “Military cooperation with the commercial sector is essential to our national defense. Industry is a solution provider and force multiplier, which expands the military’s warfighting capabilities. U.S. Spacecom will not go it alone in our commitment to ensure, along with all of you, that there is never a day without space.”

So Space Force is Now a Thing

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From DOD: “President Donald J. Trump signed into law legislation creating the first new armed service since 1947 — the U.S. Space Force.”

The establishment memo from SECDEF Esper, which specifically mentions China and Russia:

The legislation, the $738B NDAA, also funds 3.1 percent DOD pay raises, new aircraft (20 more F-35s), ship construction (lots of DDGs, SSNs, and carrier dollars), more tanks (that the Army doesn’t want) and armored vehicles (that they do), provides $70.6 billion for overseas contingency operations, and more while raising the minimum age to 21 for buying ciggies (which is sure to rile up the E-1 to E-4 crowd).

The new force, just 16,000 strong for now, will be largely carved off from the Air Force. USAF Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, the current commander of USSPACECOM, will direct the effort. The president named Raymond the chief of Space Operations, and the general will be a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Space is the world’s newest warfighting domain,” Trump said at a speech Saturday at Andrews AFB. “Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital. We’re leading, but we’re not leading by enough, and very shortly, we’ll be leading by a lot.”

All of this is a good time to recall a 12 May 1962 speech that Gen. Douglas MacArthur delivered to the cadets at West Point on the occasion of his receiving the Sylvanus Thayer Award:

We deal now, not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms of harnessing the cosmic energy, of making winds and tides work for us, of creating unheard of synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; to purify seawater for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundred of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of spaceships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all times.

Maybe old Dugout Doug could read the tea leaves.

Stargazer still pumping em out after 25 years

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The U.S. Air Force 45th Space Wing, NASA, and Northrop Grumman used the latter’s Pegasus XL rocket to heft the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) spacecraft into orbit last night.

The cool thing about Pegasus is that it was carried aloft by the L-1011 Stargazer aircraft, which took off from the Skid Strip runway at CCAFS before reaching an altitude and location where the rocket was released for launch.

The Stargazer serves as the “air-breathing reusable first stage” of Pegasus, which, according to Boeing, is the first winged vehicle to accelerate to eight times the speed of sound.

A converted Air Canada Lockheed L-1011 TriStar built in 1974, Stargazer has logged at least 43 missions, launching 94 satellites since 1994.

That’s just not something you see every day

Welcome, Space Force

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ICYMI, get ready to sign up as Space Shuttle Door Gunners:

Centered around 140 current military satellites and the hardware to support them, the U.S. Space Force is set to become 6th branch of Armed Forces, pending Congressional approval of course.

The Pentagon says about 80 percent of “space-qualified personnel” would come from the Air Force, who are sure to love the proposal, but all services have personnel with space expertise. There are roughly 18,000 people in the services with a space qualifier badge, in addition to civilian personnel “and thousands of contractors” who could be drawn into the new command.

More here.

You have to wonder how much of NASA and the Army’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) program would be absorbed into the mix. Then there are SM-3 Aegis ships with a BMD tasking, would they become part of USSF? Further, would Project Blue Book be reborn and SETI get pulled in as a contractor for good measure, just in case “They” arrive?

Anyway, the Presser from DOD as follows:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 9, 2018 — The Defense Department will establish a sixth branch of the armed forces, the U.S. Department of the Space Force, by 2020, Vice President Mike Pence announced today.

In a speech at the Pentagon, the vice president also announced plans to establish a new combatant command — U.S. Space Command — as well as a Space Operations Force and a new joint organization called the Space Development Agency.
The announcement follows a seven-week review by DoD, directed by President Donald J. Trump, of “the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces.”

A report outlining the results of the study will be released later today.

“In his inaugural address to the nation, President Trump declared that the United States stands ‘at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space,’” Pence said.

Space Force

Just as advances in aviation technology drove the emergence of air as a new battlefield in the 20th century, advances in space technology have made it clear that space is the new battlefield for the 21st century, the vice president said. The U.S. will meet the emerging threats on this new battlefield, he said, and carry on the cause of liberty and peace into the next great frontier.

“The time has come to establish the United States Space Force,” Pence said.

The new branch will be separate from, but equal to, the five other branches, he said.

“To be clear: the Space Force will not be built from scratch, because the men and women who run and protect our nation’s space programs today are already the best in the world,” the vice president said.

“Across this department and our intelligence agencies, there are literally tens of thousands of military personnel, civilians and contractors operating and supporting our space systems — and together, they are the eyes and ears of America’s warfighters around the globe,” Pence said.

Peace Through Strength

Actions by U.S. adversaries make it clear that space is already a warfighting domain, the vice president said.

“For many years, nations from Russia and China to North Korea and Iran have pursued weapons to jam, blind and disable our navigation and communications satellites via electronic attacks from the ground,” Pence said. “But recently, our adversaries have been working to bring new weapons of war into space itself.”

In 2007, China launched a missile that tracked and destroyed one of its own satellites, the vice president said. And Russia is working on an airborne laser to disrupt space-based systems, he added.

“Both nations are also investing heavily in what are known as hypersonic missiles designed to fly up to 5 miles per second at such low altitudes that they could potentially evade detection by our missile defense radars,” Pence said. “In fact, China claimed to have made its first successful test of a hypersonic vehicle just last week.”

In every domain, America will always seek peace, the vice president said. “But history proves that peace only comes through strength,” he added. “And in the realm of outer space, the United States Space Force will be that strength.”

Action Steps

The report to be released today represents a critical step toward establishing the Space Force, he said. It identifies several actions that DoD will take as the nation evolves its space capabilities, “and they are built on the lessons of the past,” Pence said.

First, the report calls for the creation of the U.S. Space Command, a new unified combatant command for space. “This new command … will establish unified command and control for our Space Force operations, ensure integration across the military, and develop the space warfighting doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures of the future,” he said.

Second, the report calls for the establishment of a Space Operations Force — an elite group of joint warfighters, specializing in the domain of space, who will form the backbone of the nation’s newest armed service. This force will draw from across the military to provide space expertise in times of crisis and conflict, Pence said.

“Third, the report calls for a new joint organization — the Space Development Agency — that will ensure the men and women of the Space Force have the cutting-edge warfighting capabilities that they need and deserve,” he said.

Finally, the report calls for clear lines of responsibility and accountability to manage the process of establishing and growing the Space Force, including the appointment of an assistant secretary of defense for space, the vice president said.

“Creating a new branch of the military is not a simple process,” Pence noted. “It will require collaboration, diligence and, above all, leadership. As challenges arise and deadlines approach, there must be someone in charge who can execute, hold others accountable, and be responsible for the results.”

Ultimately, Congress must establish the new department, the vice president said. “Next February, in the president’s budget, we will call on the Congress to marshal the resources we need to stand up the Space Force, and before the end of next year, our administration will work with the congress to enact the statutory authority for the space force in the National Defense Authorization Act,” he said.

I have to confess, when I first heard of the concept, I thought of this