Space domain awareness. Non-Earth imaging. Orbital warfare. The language is new — but the mission is familiar: know where your enemy is, know what they can do, and be ready. At the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, John T. Seward speaks with Peter Krauss, CEO of Terran Orbital, Susanne Hake with Vantor and Space Force Chief General B. Chance Saltzman, on the militarization of space.
[SEWARD] The Space Force has spent the last several years saying something that would have sounded like science fiction not long ago: Space is a war-fighting domain.
In Colorado Springs at the Space Symposium, I sat down with the people building the capabilities that make that real and asked what it looks like to take global competition to space.
This is the CEO for Terran Orbital — I spoke to him about his company’s role in non-Earth imaging, as well as the Pathfinder mission for the Artemis program.
[KRAUSS] In partnership with a company called Advanced Space, we actually built a capstone satellite that actually flew ahead of Artemis — a cislunar orbit mission around the moon and back. And it mapped the actual route, relatively speaking, that Artemis was going to take around the moon, collected vital data, what’s happening in deep space, what’s happening in cislunar orbit. Actually got images and pictures, both of the moon and other objects — some of which we can’t talk about, obviously, right?
[SEWARD] Objects around the moon that are U.S. government-funded, imaging that is still classified.
The Artemis mission, while scientific in nature, also pushed forward U.S. overmatch in space. The cislunar zone is no longer just a scientific frontier.
[KRAUSS] Space is now a hotly contested space — pun intended, right? And whether it be Earth orbit, moon orbit, or the space between. Cislunar in particular has also become hotly contested. The harsh reality is our adversaries have assets in space, in areas of space that we do not. It’s publicly and widely known that the Chinese have an asset on the far side — or dark side of the moon, as most people like to refer. We currently do not. That’s something that I know that the government and even agencies like NASA are looking to remedy.
[SEWARD] Krauss told me that having assets in the right part of space, pointed in the right direction, is now fundamental to national security awareness.
[KRAUSS] You’ve got assets looking at other assets in space, and you’ve got to have them all pointing in the right place. They’ve got to know where to look, and they’ve got to be in the right space domain to collect the information, the data, and have the space awareness that we need as a nation. And that’s what it’s all about.
[SEWARD] That space awareness is exactly what defense intelligence firm Vantor is focused on providing. I talked to Susanne Hake, Vantor’s U.S. government lead. When Vantor made their announcement, they published something fascinating — a photograph of a Chinese satellite taken from orbit by one of their satellites.
[HAKE] What most people think of when they think of Vantor is our Earth imaging. Right. So we take our satellites, we point them down to Earth. But what we can actually do is point our satellites into space and take pictures of other things around us in space. Sure. So that’s what we call non-Earth imaging. And it means that we can look at other objects that are in space and start to understand what they are. And not only are we able to take those images, but we can start to characterize them — so we can get a better understanding of what is it, and potentially what sort of capabilities that satellite or object might have.
[SEWARD] It’s the initial stages of intelligence collection to know how the U.S. wants to conduct warfare in space. Hake told me that the Space Force is moving to integrate exactly this kind of commercial capability into its own picture of the battle space.
[HAKE] As space becomes more of a war-fighting domain — and that’s something the Space Force is now talking openly about — we have to prepare for that. One of the trends that we’re really seeing with Space Force, and honestly across the government, is the need to have integrated commercial and government capabilities. So being able to bring in commercial satellites and commercial imagery to really augment the picture of what Space Force has and what their understanding is.
[SEWARD] To understand the scale of what’s being watched and what needs to be watched, let’s look at the Space Force’s recently published numbers. There are roughly 12,000 operational U.S. satellites in orbit right now. China has around 1,600. By 2040, Space Force planners project the U.S. will operate upwards of 30,000. China, 21,000. The Space Force budget has grown from $26 billion to nearly $72 billion in just three years.
Private industry satellites are now capable of photographing adversaries’ assets in orbit and characterizing what those assets can do. The cislunar space between Earth and the moon is contested, and the United States is behind China in at least one part of it. Space Force has formally added orbital warfare to its mission set with classified annexes on exactly what that looks like.
So I asked General Chance Saltzman, the chief of Space Force Operations: Is non-Earth imaging — this capability to photograph and characterize enemy satellites from orbit — already functioning as intelligence preparation of warfare in space, the kind of targeting assessment that any serious military operation conducts?
[SALTZMAN] Space domain awareness — we get a lot out of imagery, whether it’s metric observation imagery or whether it’s radar imagery. That helps with space domain awareness. So there’s a lot of different ways to use non-Earth imaging that supports the broader mission set. Safety of flight. Seeing something that happens on a spacecraft, being able to look at it and see if you’re okay with heat shields or antenna arrays or those sort of things. So I think there’s a lot of uses. Could it extend into more national security? Of course. That’s what we think about. Are people going to use it against us? Yes, of course they are. So we have to be cognizant of it. We have to stay on top of that technology, and we have to understand what the capabilities are. And I have to look across everything from safety of flight — all the way through, could something like this be used as targeting for a weapons system? That’s my job, is to think about all those things, so we’re not leaving anything out.
[SEWARD] I followed up. Are we actively using these capabilities to assess adversaries’ assets in orbit the way intelligence services assess threats before any operation?
[SALTZMAN] I don’t know how to answer that other than to say we build capabilities to define situational awareness, and we analyze the situational awareness we see for different purposes. Could some of those be intelligence? Reasonable to assume that.
[SEWARD] The United States intelligence community is using satellite imagery to assess adversary capabilities in orbit. Commercial companies have already published photos of a Chinese satellite taken from space and seen that China is on the far side of the moon. Whether the U.S. is ready for that fight — orbital warfare, in cislunar space, in Earth’s orbit, or anywhere in between — is one question the Space Force is asking itself.
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