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ORLANDO, Fla. — Space Force Association leaders announced Thursday the creation of a space-focused think tank and research center to better educate government officials, military planners, defense industry firms and the public about the importance of space in everyday American life and the crucial role of the nation’s youngest branch of the armed forces.
Bill Woolf, president and CEO of the Space Force Association and a retired Air Force officer, introduced the National Spacepower Center during a keynote speech kicking off the Spacepower 2025 conference here. He said the center will help “bridge the knowledge gaps” among policymakers, private industry and military officials.
“The future is not waiting, and neither can we,” Mr. Woolf told a packed ballroom. “We must ignite a new era of integration between commercial and space capabilities. The pace of the threat is accelerated, and if you move at yesterday’s speed, we fall behind. That is not an option.”
The Spacepower conference is one of the country’s largest gatherings of Space Force officers, enlisted Space Force personnel and top defense companies from around the world. The annual event reflects the rapidly growing focus on space as a crucial domain for U.S. military power projection abroad and, for private industry, as a financially lucrative turf in which to do business with the federal government.
Closing a knowledge gap
Mr. Woolf said the National Spacepower Center will help drive innovation and clearly explain to decision-makers what tools the Space Force and its Guardians need to ensure America maintains its edge over adversaries in space.
“It will be a place where leaders, innovators and partners come together to experience the power of the space domain firsthand,” he said, “and to understand why the U.S. Space Force is indispensable to our national security and to a thriving space economy.”
The nonprofit Space Force Association advocates for the Space Force in much the same way that the Association of the United States Army has been advocating on behalf of the Army for decades.
The Space Force and the Space Force Association, founded in 2019, are in their early years. In Congress and even corners of the Pentagon, the national security challenges and opportunities in the space domain are still not fully understood, space-focused insiders say.
The National Spacepower Center, advocates say, will serve as a clearinghouse for academic research and a laboratory for testing theories and gaining knowledge about the nature of space warfare.
They say the center will provide an environment for testing and validating policy ideas and concepts tailored explicitly to the Space Force.
For example, the center could host unclassified tabletop exercises, including “war games,” to simulate how confrontations with adversaries in space might unfold and assess their potential impacts on the American public. The knowledge gained from such exercises could then be used to inform lawmakers tasked with writing space-related legislation and allocating funds through annual federal budgets, proponents say.
A laserlike focus on in-depth policy recommendations, strategic concepts and capabilities tailored toward space power can differentiate the center from the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. Founded in 2013, the Mitchell Institute has been among Washington’s most respected organizations for aerospace research and policy discussions, proponents say. It is an affiliate of the Air and Space Forces Association, a separate organization.
A crucial moment for space
The National Spacepower Center is being established at a crucial moment, as U.S. adversaries are making major strides in fielding commercial and military space assets.
Russia is thought to be racing ahead with a program to field nuclear-armed anti-satellite weapons. A nuclear blast in space could destroy another nation’s satellites.
China has invested heavily in building space weapons that can destroy or disrupt satellites to “incapacitate” U.S. communications, intelligence and missile warning and undermine the military’s ability to conduct joint operations and project power.
High-stakes discussions are taking place in national security circles about the best ways for the U.S. to counter these assets and protect its own capabilities in space.
The National Spacepower Center’s first major policy paper, written by retired Air Force Col. Daniel Dant, examines the degree to which the Space Force and industry partners should pursue “dynamic space operations.”
Such operations refer to satellites and other systems capable of maneuvering, being serviced and refueled in orbit, making rapid orbital changes, and taking other steps to make them “dynamic” in the space domain, rather than being stationary.
Some specialists have urged the Pentagon to focus heavily on those capabilities.
In his policy paper — an example of what proponents say will be the highly detailed policy research coming from the National Spacepower Center — Mr. Dant raises questions about that point of view.
Dynamic space operations “helps spacecraft avoid threats and complicate targeting, but it cannot fully solve problems like cyber intrusions into ground networks, attacks on data links, or political escalation risks … and certainly not without massive expenditures,” he writes in the paper.
“Many proliferated low-Earth-orbit constellations are designed to be short-lived and cheap, so heavy investment in refuelable or highly maneuverable platforms is not always economical or necessary for these missions. Moreover, over-reliance on maneuver also risks rapid depletion of valuable propellant and can increase operational complexity, making command and control and space traffic management more difficult under high stress situations.”
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
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