Companies are raising questions with the U.S. Space Force about a future Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve (CASR).
“At the Schriever [Space Force Base, Colo.] wargames, as we were playing through the different scenarios, the operators very clearly wanted to use commercial assets, and many of the commercial people there in the cell said, ‘Wait a minute. You don’t have a contract. You don’t have anything in place to use my asset, and what about indemnity? What happens if I get shot at?’ Becky Cudzilo, a senior fellow at Astroscale U.S., Inc., said on Feb. 14 during a commercial space integration panel at the Air and Space Force Association’s warfare symposium in Aurora, Colo.
“It brought up all those valuable questions that need to be answered in whatever you move forward with on CASR because there are some commercial providers who probably are not gonna be willing to subject their assets–maybe they’re too critical, maybe they only have one–to a possibility that they would lose their entire company,” she said. “That is something that has to be discussed and at least made very clear to each commercial provider that signs up to CASR as to what would happen in a crisis.”
Astroscale U.S. is the domestic operation for Japan’s Astroscale.
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.
The Space Force has been considering how to help offset consumer revenue losses for future CASR members, and the service has said that DoD could ask Congress to authorize U.S.-backed war risk insurance for the commercial space sector (Defense Daily, Jan. 8).
“On CASR, the ability to let’s call it ‘buy on the spot market’ for what a commercial service might be is an incredibly hard thing to get right,” said Dan Jablonsky, the former CEO of Maxar Technologies and a current board member. “It’s wonderful that we’re doing it [CASR] because it can be an augmentation –just like with the civilian airlines and the maritime industry–it can be a force multiplier for times of combat, but it’s really hard to figure out the economic incentives and how much extra capacity you’ll have and where that extra capacity comes from.”
“Some examples where it hasn’t worked well…are things like the natural gas markets where states have said, ‘We’ll just buy on the spot market when we need a little bit more power,'” he said. “And it invariably turns out disastrously because the spot market spikes, and somebody on the wrong side of that equation comes out either losing a lot of money or not getting what they need.”
Col. Rich Kniseley, the senior materiel leader of the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command’s commercial space office, said on Feb. 14 that “there’s not going to be one CASR model.”
“I think CASR is gonna be tailored by the mission area,” he said.
Kniseley said that Cudzilo was correct in her assessment.
“The Defense Production Act, if we’re not on contract, we can’t automatically just take your capability,” he said. “That has to be negotiated, and that’s one reason why I want to get after this quickly and to get those contracts to have that discussion going forward.”
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.
Last summer, Space Force estimated 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.