As NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis heads home for its final landing of the 30-year program this week, it’s fitting to consider that space is changing in fundamental ways, the deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy said yesterday.
“Space is increasingly congested, contested, and competitive,” Amb. Gregory Schulte said at the Defense Writers Group breakfast.
It’s congested in terms of debris, he said. U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) tracks more than 22,000 objects, a number only taking into account objects that can be seen. Last year, for example, STRATCOM sent out 2,000 warnings of potential satellite collisions with debris, and 150 warnings to China alone.
Space is increasingly contested as a range of countries are developing space and counter-space capabilities.
The United States is no longer the only player in space, which is becoming increasingly competitive, Schulte said. “There are 11 countries operating 22 launch sites.”
Addressing change while continuing to invest to keep the national strategic advantage of space comes as the roughly $26 billion space budget faces a restrictive budget environment, as do all government programs.
Even though DoD left the space shuttle program in 1986, the end of the program and other actions NASA takes affect DoD. The industrial base serves the military, commercial and civil space sectors.
The National Security Space Strategy, issued in January by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, points the way to addressing those challenges. That strategy will continue as current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta affirmed at his confirmation hearing he would implement the strategy.
Efforts to meet the challenges include promoting “norms of responsible behavior in space,” he said. This would include sharing data for space flight safety. Creating “rules of the road” would also make it clear if a country or entity was stepping over the boundaries. The European Union has a code of conduct for space activities, a non-binding set of volunteer guidelines the U.S. government is looking at.
The space strategy also calls for partnerships with the commercial sector and with foreign partners to augment DoD capabilities and to increase the resilience of our constellations against attack or disruption. For example, Schulte said the Air Force works with SpaceX and Orbital [ORB].
The strategy also calls for ensuring that space can provide what warfighters need “even if our space systems come under attack or [are] otherwise disrupted,” he said.
All this takes into account a tight budget environment. To reduce costs and increase resilience, the strategy points to the possibilities associated with hosted payloads, or putting national security payloads on non-DoD satellites.
The strategy also said space goals can be achieved by actions as leveraging commercial capabilities, and forging foreign partnerships to augment capabilities. This is also a way to create collaborations with potential competitors. For example, China, making a major investment in space, has agreed in principle to talk about space issues, such as “rules of the road,” or behavior.
The strategy also makes clear that “it’s OK not always to strive for state-of-the-art but sometimes state-of-the-world technology is good enough to meet the specific requirements of the warfighter.”
To illustrate this, Schulte pointed to Air Force preparations to launch the Commercially Hosted Infrared Payload, developed by SAIC [SAI]. The advanced IR test payload has been delivered to Orbital, which will install it on the SES-2, a SES World Skies commercial communications satellite, for launch this year.
The hosted payload saves money. “CHIRP is costing us something like $65 million,” Schulte said. “If we had launched it as a free flying satellite it would have cost more like $500 million dollars. And, we get to meet 80 percent of the requirements, with a considerable savings of money. “