U.S. Space Command, the operational side of U.S. military space, is looking at the cislunar environment as a longer term focus, as the command discusses novel concepts for low Earth orbit (LEO) and geosynchronous (GEO) satellites, such as on-orbit servicing and maneuver.
“When it comes to LEO, GEO, cislunar, I have to say our primary overall mission day in and day out is to make sure that we’re getting those space capabilities that our terrestrial warfighters and our society need, looking down to Earth,” Lt. Gen. John Shaw, the deputy head of U.S. Space Command, told the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability on June 14 in New York City.
“We’re trying to sustain those capabilities that are in LEO and GEO,” Shaw said. “Kind of our second primary mission is to understand what’s going on in the [space] domain and protect and defend and understand security challenges. As more and more activity moves further and further up the gravity well, we are gonna have to keep pace to understand what’s going on.”
“When NASA and Artemis start taking humans into the lunar environment, they’re gonna want us to help with space domain awareness in the lunar environment,” he said. “The same way that we have spent decades providing awareness of potential collisions for the International Space Station and for astronauts in low Earth orbit, we’re gonna want to provide that same support to NASA, but it won’t just be NASA. About 100 missions are going into the lunar environment over the next decade, most of them uncrewed, so it’s starting to get a little congested there too.”
NASA launched the Artemis I mission last November–a Lockheed Martin [LMT] Orion uncrewed spacecraft aboard a Boeing [BA] Space Launch System (SLS) rocket (Defense Daily, Dec. 12, 2022). SLS rockets will support future Artemis missions to the Moon and beyond.
“There’s a huge amount of hype in the press about the U.S. military focusing heavily on cislunar, but in reality they are not,” Brian Weeden, the director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation, wrote in an email. “They’re certainly thinking about what those future challenges might be, but the vast majority of their time and resources are spent on dealing with other challenges closer in.”