The U.S. Space Force wants the upcoming VICTUS HAZE demonstration to point toward future satellite launches within hours, not days, of order receipt.
As part of a Space Force effort to achieve tactically responsive space by 2026, the service last September launched the VICTUS NOX mission–a Firefly Aerospace Alpha rocket lifting a Boeing [BA] Millennium Space Systems satellite into low-Earth orbit (Defense Daily, Sept. 26, 2023).
Space Force said that VICTUS NOX achieved launch-ready status within the 24-hour goal of launch notice and then lifted off within hours once the launch window opened. The VICTUS NOX satellite achieved checkout and operational readiness within 37 hours after launch, 11 hours ahead of the two-day goal.
In the next 14 months, the Defense Innovation unit wants to conduct a follow-on VICTUS HAZE mission to demonstrate rapid launch of a satellite and its positioning near a simulated spacecraft to inspect it.
“There’s a lot of great lessons there [from VICTUS NOX] about what you do procedurally to integrate spacecraft, to move spacecraft, what’s the critical path, how do you shrink that critical path, what are the contracting actions that need to be pre-canned so that they can move fast,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman told reporters on Feb. 13 at the Air and Space Force Association’s warfare symposium in Aurora, Colo.
“We learned lessons when weather delayed the launch for a certain time because there was lightning in the area,” he said. “What can we do in terms of serial processing to take advantage of that delay so that we can more rapidly check out the system when it’s on orbit. All of that was extremely valuable. I still think we have margin with the schedule. In VICTUS HAZE, we’re gonna set standards to say, ‘We gotta compress this more.’ Five days from warehouse to on-orbit operations is pretty fast, but in the grand scheme of things [with satellites] moving 17,500 miles per hour, five days is still a long time. A lot can happen in five days so I’m gonna be pressing the team to continue to reduce that critical path down to hours and hours and hours, rather than days.”