The Lockheed Martin built Space Fence location in the Marshall Islands. (Lockheed Martin)

COLORADO SPRINGS: The Space Force needs more sensors to keep track on the ever-growing numbers of satellites and orbiting junk, but funds — including for a second Space Fence radar site in Australia — remain elusive, said Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of Space Operations Command.

“We definitely want more sensors, and so Space Fence, a second site, would be outstanding,” he told reporters here today at the Space Foundation’s annual Space Symposium. “But we still have more requirements than dollars, and so we’re having to make some difficult calls there. … I don’t yet know if we’ll get Space Fence 2 here in the next couple years.”

Space Fence is an S-band radar that now has been integrated into the Space Force’s Space Surveillance Network (SSN) that detects, tracks, catalogs and characterizes objects in space. Space Fence is aimed at finding satellites and debris in Low Earth Orbit — LEO, below about 2,000 kilometers in altitude — where the number of objects, including dangerous debris, has exploded in recent years. Space Operations Command is responsible for operating those sensors, that include both radar and telescopes based on Earth and in space.

Whiting said that the SSN is now following 35,000 space objects, a 22% jump in only the last two years. Some of that increase is due to improved monitoring capacities, including the fact that the first Space Fence site at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands came online in March 2020. However, he explained, the bulk of the increase is due to the large constellations of hundreds of satellites being orbited by companies like SpaceX and OneWeb to provide Internet access.

“Certainly I would say the majority of that growth has come from the mega-constellations that we now see, and a few debris causing events that have happened on orbit,” Whiting said.

The first Space Fence radar was built by prime contractor Lockheed Martin, under a $1.5 billion contract issued in 2014. Last February, as first reported by Inside the Air Force, DoD’s Director of Operational Test & Evaluation Robert Behler raised concerns that while the radar is “operationally effective” and can find objects “the size of a cherry” in LEO, with only one radar site, Space Fence “does not have the power to continuously detect, track, and maintain awareness of all of these small objects.”

Whiting indicated that some of the capability that a second Space Fence site could provide might be fulfilled by a new(ish) program, the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC).

“There’s a new radar program called DARC that’s coming online,” he said, that is “complementary” to Space Fence.

“The DARC system will affordably field an advanced, 24/7, all-weather capabilities, not supported in any existing ground-based radar,” states the Space Force’s solicitation to industry published in March. In April, the service updated that request for information (RFI) to explain that it now plans to rapidly prototype DARC under an Other Transaction Authority procurement via the Space Enterprise Consortium (SpEC).

The Space Force requested  $123 million for DARC its fiscal 2022 budget request, a huge jump from the roughly $33 million it asked for in 2021. According to the service’s budget documents, a request for proposals for the first prototype site will be issued sometime this year; with a contract award planned for 2022. That site is to become operational in 2025; and two more sites are being planned.

In addition, Whiting said, Space Force continues to be interested in working with allied and partner nations to improve space domain awareness. 

For example, he noted that Australia already operates a radar for DoD and Space Force is building a new telescope facility there as well.

Further, he said, Space Force is “talking with Japan as they stand up a Space Squadron … a radar, about how we are going to partner and have access to that data.”