The U.S. Space Force is considering helping offset consumer revenue losses for future members of a Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve (CASR).
Space Force has received more than 70 responses from industry on a CASR request for information (RFI) released in July, and the service may soon update that RFI.
While federal war risk insurance is available for aircraft and ships called up at war time under the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) and the Maritime Administration’s Ready Reserve Fleet, no such insurance is available for satellites.
“DoD could ask Congress for statutory authority that provides USG [U.S. government]-backed war risk insurance to the commercial space sector,” according to a July briefing by Col. Rich Kniseley, the senior materiel leader of the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command’s commercial space office.
Yet, Kniseley noted that only 64 of 6,100 satellites in low Earth orbit and 232 of 870 satellites in medium Earth orbit and geosynchronous Earth orbit are commercially insured. “No indication that commercial insurance is inadequate,” according to Kniseley’s briefing.
Rather, than indemnifying companies under the 1958 P.L. 85-804, the Space Force may instead guarantee companies that form the CASR a revenue stream for up to a decade as protection against the chance that wartime provision of commercial satellites would decrease the quality of consumer broadband and the chance that adversaries would destroy or damage such satellites. Such a guaranteed revenue stream would be akin to the DoD’s multi-year procurement program.
Satellite insurance companies, such as AXA‘s AXA XL subsidiary, have policies that guarantee the safe launch and deployment of satellites but do not have policies that protect satellites from acts of war.
In November, Kniseley said that threat sharing among satellite companies and the Pentagon would be a key part of CASR (Defense Daily, Nov. 6). Cyber attacks on U.S. commercial satellites are already a concern.
In March, the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Space ISAC) in Colorado Springs said that it had opened an Operational Watch Center alongside the National Cybersecurity Center in Colorado Springs to monitor, analyze and respond quickly to cyber threats to space systems (Defense Daily, March 30).
Established in 2019, Space ISAC said that it shares free alerts and advisories from members and partners with current adversary activity. Its members receive daily notices of cyber threats, incidents, and vulnerabilities to critical systems, Space ISAC said. Founding board members of the organization include Microsoft [MSFT], Lockheed Martin [LMT], Northrop Grumman [NOC], L3Harris [LHX], Kratos [KTOS], Booz Allen Hamilton [BAH], and Parsons Corp. [PSN].