Thompson: AFSPC Will Use Mega Constellations

WASHINGTON: Air Force Space Command’s vice commander says he is “highly confident” that large Low Earth Orbit constellations (known in DoD jargon as ‘proliferated LEO’) will be part of the future military space architecture.

“We will be using proliferated LEO,” Lt. Gen. David Thompson told a New America Foundation conference today in response to my question. “It is simply a matter of for what missions.” He explained that DoD first has to understand “how close to truly operationally-capable” services can be provided by commercial firms. “We have to make smart bets.”

There has been considerable debate among national security space experts about whether the commercial constellations of relatively small satellites, which will be thousands of times larger than any that have flown, will pose significant risks as they deorbit and are replaced. The strain on military Space Situational Awareness (SSA), already having challenges spotting slow moving objects in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO), raises questions about how effective they would be in monitoring a LEO environment congested by these mega-constellations.

Thompson noted that one of the barriers to the use of small satellites has been the cost of launch, saying that falling launch costs has been fundamental to commercial innovation. He said the milspace community has to take the time to “watch” commercial innovation and “creativity” and “figure out some way to foster” it in a manner that will benefit milspace needs.

That said, Thompson explained that the Pentagon already is moving toward a de facto mixed architecture — i.e. both large, exquisite satellites in GEO and LEO constellations for missile warning and missile defense.

He also said that the Air Force had put an additional $141 million in its fiscal 2020 budget request for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Blackjack program, which he called a “pathfinder” for the use of LEO constellations. Blackjack is meant to demonstrate the effectiveness of small-sat constellations to undertake a myriad of different missions now being done largely from GE), testing bus designs that allow the use of multiple types of payloads on 20 satellites by 2022.

Blackjack’s budget profile and future home within DoD’s acquisition system remain muddy, but Thompson’s statement has helped clarify the situation. Lt. Col. Christina Hoggatt, a spokesperson for Air Force Space Command, said that the services 2020 Program Objective Memorandum (POM) included $141 million in the Future Year’s Defense Plan (FYDP) as follows: “FY20: $55M, F21: $65M, FY22: $21M, no funding in FY23 or 24. A service’s POM (which is the service’s request to DoD for the five year FYDP), however, does not necessarily get reflected in the President’s final budget request.

Air Force RTD&E budget justification documents for FY2020 show Blackjack as only one piece of a bundle of technologies being funded under budget program element (PE) 1206427F, called Space System Prototype Transition (SSPT). For example, SSPT also includes continued “design, development, build and test” of the Hosted Payload Interface Unit and Space Situational Awareness (SSA) sensor for integration into a single payload intended for hosting on the Japanese Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS). The total budget request for that PE is $142.045 million.

While the SSPT budget documentation does not show a separate Air Force investment line for Blackjack, they do show a line for a “military interdepartamental purchase request of $55 million from the Air Force’s budget to DARPA. The budget documents do not show the out year funding for Blackjack.