WASHINGTON: Senior Air Force and Space Force officials will meet Thursday to hash out an overarching architecture for missile warning satellites, part of a larger effort to figure out both what space systems the US needs for today and tomorrow, and which agencies are responsible for acquiring them.
Thursday’s meeting is a follow-on to the so-called Space Enterprise Architect Summit held Feb. 26-28, an Air Force spokesperson said. That first meeting kicked off the overarching effort to ensure that US military satellite programs across the board are integrated into a single, interconnected architecture. This includes figuring out the roles and responsibilities of Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), the Space Development Agency (SDA), the Space Rapid Capabilities Office (SpRCO) and the Missile Defense Agency (MDA).
The first step is looking at the current and future missile warning satellite architecture. The central early warning satellite constellation in use today is SBIRS, the Space Based Infrared System. When it’s completed in 2022 SBIRS will comprise six satellites in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) and two hosted payloads on classified satellites in polar orbits. The Air Force also continues to operate a small number of older Defense Support Program (DSP) early warning satellites.
And, as Breaking D readers know, the Air Force is speeding work on the SBIRS replacement, the Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next Gen OPIR). The service’s 2021 budget request includes $2.3 billion for the program.
However, congressional appropriators in the 2020 budget bill mandated that DoD put together an architecture study about the various DoD agency efforts fit together and will feed into the Next Gen OPIR program. In particular, Congress want more clarity about how MDA’s “Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (formerly SpaceSensor Layer)” fits with SDA’s plan to develop missile tracking satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) — for which appropriators added $108 million to MDA’s 2020 request.
Shawn Barnes, who is currently charged with transitioning Air Force space acquisition authorities to the new Space Force, told reporters this morning at a Mitchell Institute event that the summit meeting focused not on what the space-based missile warning requirements are, but on hashing out which agencies are responsible for mapping out and acquiring those capabilities.
“On the secretariat side, last week we had an architecture summit that was really about understanding the ‘architecture enterprise,’ not the ‘enterprise architecture,” he said. “The enterprise architecture would describe all those things that are part of the actual architecture. It’s the DSP satellites, and the SBIRS satellites and the ground missile warning architecture.”
On the other hand, he said, the architecture enterprise is, “who are the people, who are the organizations that participate in developing that architecture, and that’s fairly complicated.” It includes not just SMC, SDA, MDA and SpRCO, but also “folks here in the national capitol region” all working on varies pieces of space-based missile warning.
“The big question is who owns the architecture for space?,” one senior industry official told me. “All these acquisitions agencies are nice, but they should all be driving to same plan.”
Barnes said that at his level here, the Space Force has to think about issues such as how to integrate innovative commercial capabilities into DoD’s portfolio, and “how do I bring in allies and partners?” SMC, for its part, ought to be concentrating on the “technical architecture to make sure that I’m ensuring a common ground system for all my new satellite capabilities.”
“Those are two very different things, but they’re complementary,” he added. “We got a pretty good understanding of all the different pieces and parts of architecture development within the Department of Defense.”
The next step, to be discussed Thursday, is how to translate current and planned efforts into a coherent concept for investment, including prototyping, that Space Force head Gen. John Raymond can argue for in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. This will include, for example, figuring out how to integrate SDA’s plans for a LEO-based missile tracking constellation of small satellites with SBIRS and Next-Gen OPIR as it comes on line. It also includes looking at how to ensure the planned architecture is readily able to adapt to new threats.
What Air Force leadership wants to get out the Thursday meeting, Barnes said, “is that Gen. Raymond would say: ‘yes, I like the plan.”
“Then, he can go advocate for resources,” Barnes said, and for any policy changes that might be necessary.
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