Army Boasts Hottest Space Tech, Says Space Command

WASHINGTON: The US Army has the most disruptive space technology right now. So says the head of Air Force Space Command, Gen. John Hyten.

Hyten was asked about the technology in the space domain at breakfast this morning by my colleague Mark Thompson of Time magazine. Now in the good old days, the head of Space Command would doubtless have cited SBIRS or ORS or something, well, spacier.

But Hyten is all about capabilities and “resilience” — the ability to keep fighting through jamming and any other problem the enemy might throw at us. The Army program — which uses an atomic clock computer chip paired with another chip to ensure that the system isn’t being spoofed — may be the key to allowing Strykers and the service’s other tactical vehicles to fight, fire and navigate accurately during a war. The chips use the new M-code, a more jam-resistant GPS signal. This is especially important in a world where GPS jammers can be bought in most of Europe, Hyten noted. They are cheap and effective.

None of this work, to be first deployed on Army Stryker vehicles, will supersede GPS satellites and their signals, Hyten said. GPS satellites will continue to be the “gold standard,” in part because of the huge range of commercial and civil capabilities they make possible.

Now Hyten isn’t the first person to mention the Army’s work on the alternative to Position, Navigation and Timing provided by GPS satellites.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter mentioned the Army work in his speech at Silicon Valley:

“We’ll do that in part by advancing microelectromechanical systems technology for small inertial navigation units, small accurate accelerometers, and precision clocks – all on a chip,” he said. “Today this technology is in our smartphones – that’s how they know they’re being rotated – and we’re pushing it to be far more precise. We’ll push, for example, the performance envelope in timing and navigation technology by harnessing Nobel Prize-winning physics research that uses lasers to cool atoms.  Stanford has been a tremendous force in this area, with one group of researchers creating a company we work with, AOSense, to make practical cold-atom systems. The result would be a GPS of things – akin to the Internet of things – where objects, including our military systems, keep track of their position, orientation, and time from the moment they are created with no need for updates from satellites.”

In addition to the GPS work, Hyten discussed more details about the unclassified portion of the $5 billion the Air Force and Intelligence Community have scraped together from other places to spend on space control over the next five years.

First off, let’s offer Hyten’s definition of space control: “the ability to defend yourself against a threat and to deny an adversary the use of space.” It’s a boiled-down version of what appears in Joint Publication 3-14 on Space Operations. As the joint pub makes clear, that includes offensive and defensive measures. We don’t know what’s funded in the intelligence portion of that $5 billion.

But here’s what Hyten listed from the white side of space. The top priority is accelerating work on the third stage of the Joint Space Operations Center (JSPOC), he said. Once the second increment of the JSPOC is built, the United States “will have exquisite situational awareness. We will have an exquisite knowledge of what is happening in space, but what we won’t have is the ability to do anything about it.” That’s where the third increment comes in. It will provide “everything from maneuver to defense to a range of different options.

After that, the money will be spent to improve SSA, the money will also be used to accelerate: the Space Based Space Surveillance follow-on by two years; work on the Space Fence and the next version of the classified electro-optical satellites called the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSAP).

Finally, Hyten revealed that the RFP for the replacement of the Russian RD-180 rocket engine went out on, yes, Friday afternoon. It includes the four-step acquisition strategy the Air Force has crafted for the program. Hyten seems to think that the Air Force could meet the 2019 deadline set by Congress for a replacement of the Russian rocket engine since that’s what the RFP says.

The House Armed Services Committee’s chairman’s mark includes language restating that the Air Force must meet the 2019 date; senior Air Force officials up to and including Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James have said that will be very difficult.

For our readers who really love this stuff, I’ve copied the joint pub definition of space control here: