UPDATED: Air Force General Praises CHIRP, Hosted Payloads
COLORADO SPRINGS, NATIONAL SPACE SYMPOSIUM: After almost a decade of discussion, hope and frustration, the time appears to finally be ripe for what the space industry calls hosted payloads, the Remora fish of satellites. Keep reading →
COLORADO SPRINGS, NATIONAL SPACE SYMPOSIUM: Spend $5 million to help track possible threats like North Korean missile launches by leaving an Alaskan radar site on at full power. Turn off East Coast radar receivers that provide data about satellites and space debris.
Gen. William Shelton, head of Air Force Space Command, has cut Space Fence radar coverage by one-third, making what he called a prudent risk decision to use a radar at Eglin Air Force Base “that can operate in Space Fence mode” to plug any holes that might develop. That means he’s shut down two of six radar receivers. That’s how tough the balancing act is getting for Shelton as he fights his way through to saving $508 million from his command’s budget. (Perhaps Congress wants to consider how prudent this risk is as it decides what to do about sequestration.)
Shelton said he decided against shutting down the Alaskan radar receiver because of the highly uncertain North Korean situation but now he’s got to find that $5 million from somewhere else in his budget. In addition, he’s cut his civilian contractor workforce by 50 percent.
And he sounded as if the decision has been made to cut spending for the upgrade of the Space Fence, the radar and data system that monitors Earth’s orbit for satellites and the debris that has accumulated there over the years.
Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are competing for this and Shelton said a contract award could be made in the next month. But he also made very clear that they might drop the program. “Is this a priority investment for the future?” he asked. “Some serious decisions need to be made whether it is a capability we need to invest in for the future.” He said he’s “all for it but” he made it pretty clear that others in the Air Force may not agree with his position.
At the same time as cost is making it hard to justify new systems if they are expensive or don’t provide immediately needed capabilities, Shelton said there had recently been a near miss between a “spacecraft that was not maneuverable and objects that got to within 23 meters. That’s close. That’s close.” He also made clear the US cannot accurately monitor many of the smaller pieces of debris, which he estimated at nearly half-a-million. We can monitor a small sliver of that debris, roughly 22,000 pieces.
Finally, the general spoke about Boeing and Ball Aerospace’s Space-Based Surveillance System, which has been very expensive. A study is underway to decide what to do after SBSS, Shelton said. “There are lessons learned from SBSS. We, unfortunately, let requirements creep get the best of us. It’s far more expensive than it needed to be,” he told reporters here. That has been the case for so many space systems over the last 15 years and it is not, Shelton made clear, a pattern that bears repeating.
Keep reading →
COLORADO SPRINGS, NATIONAL SPACE SYMPOSIUM: The Boeing Company, better known for building big satellites in clean rooms and charging big prices for them, has spotted what it thinks may be a sweet spot in the satellite market and plans to build prototypes of three small satellites to show the market what it can do.
The “key” reason for building smaller satellites very quickly is to avoid being left behind by Moore’s Law, which says that computer processing power doubles every 18 months, Bruce Chesley, director for advanced space and intelligence systems at Boeing said. “It’s taking advantage of smaller cheaper components and taking advantage of Boeing’s quality control and procedures.” Keep reading →
New DASD for space policy: Douglas L. Loverro appointed to SES. Loverro was executive director for the Space and Missile Systems Center colinclarkaol
Michael Donley is the Secretary of the Air Force. This is the conclusion of a series of four op-eds Sec. Donley wrote exclusively for Breaking Defense on the future of the Air Force. Today’s piece makes the case that investments in new technology cannot be deferred — a modernization challenge that Army aviators are facing as well.
Among the most difficult challenges facing the Air Force is the need to modernize. In the sine waves of defense spending since World War II, most resources during defense buildups have supported wartime operations in Korea, Vietnam, and more recently Iraq and Afghanistan. The early-1980s build-up was the only one to focus on modernization without the burden of large combat operations, and to a significant degree we have been living off the investments from that era or even earlier. Keep reading →
The U.S. aerospace industry got an early Christmas present this week, when House and Senate conferees approved defense authorization legislation that gives the President discretion to determine export jurisdiction for satellites. The legislation next will be voted on by the full Congress, and signed by the President. That process will conclude a necessary-but-not-sufficient, long-awaited first step in reviving the health and competitiveness of an industry critical to U.S. national security, but long crippled by political shenanigans that make it difficult to believe there won’t be attempts to derail this move toward rationality.
It is sadly evocative that titles of articles on government acquisition and satellite export control reform — two different but related areas similarly bogged down in efforts that have heretofore gone nowhere — sometimes descriptively include terms from fantasy or horror movies. For example, my own 2000 article on satellite export control, “Alice in Licenseland,” referenced a satellite export licensing variation of an impossible and often-scary imaginary journey. Louis V. Victorino’s 2011 article on data rights in the acquisition process was titled “Frankenstein’s Monster.” Keep reading →
[Updated Friday 12/21] CAPITOL HILL: It looks like the country’s getting a defense bill for Christmas, with provisions on everything from boosting cybersecurity to sanctioning Iran to loosening export controls on satellites.
In what passes for high efficiency in Congress these days, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees completed their conference on the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 only two and a half months after the start of fiscal ’13 and just two weeks before sequestration may make many of their carefully wrought compromises moot. Keep reading →
In a move toward a more efficient National Reconnaissance Office, analysts for the agency operating the nation’s spy satellites are on the verge of getting their information through a top-secret open-source cloud environment housing intelligence data.
Jill Singer, the agency’s chief information officer, offered the latest details on the project at this week’s Red Hat Government Symposium in Washington D.C. Keep reading →
WASHINGTON: The Pentagon named three Air Force officers to high-level assignments in military space today: the man who oversaw the first successful launch of the troubled Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS), a veteran of the space shuttle program, and the outgoing overseer of the nation’s ballistic missile defense efforts. Keep reading →
Colin Clark
Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr.
Fix Arms Export Laws For Commercial Satellite Sales: AIA
By Marion BlakeyIt is long past time for Congress to reform the current laws governing the export of commercial satellites – an outmoded and counterproductive system intended to enhance national security while inadvertently undermining America’s domestic space industry, a recent Defense Department report makes clear.
Whatever Congress’s good intentions when it passed this law in 1998, the results have crippled the U.S. space industry. The barriers to export have, in effect, turned the domestic space industry into a de facto arsenal sustained almost exclusively by U.S. military purchases. Keep reading →