US SPACECOM Commander Gen. Stephen Whiting addresses Space Symposium 2024. (Space Foundation via Flickr)
SPACEPOWER 2024 — US Space Command is helping the Space Force figure out the circumstances under which firms participating in the service’s fledgling commercial space reserve program would be called to serve, according to SPACECOM Commander Gen. Stephen Whiting.
“We’re excited about the Space Force’s work on the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, or CASR. I think that’s going to come online starting next year and into ’26, and we’re working with the Space Force to define the triggers for when we would want to activate the CASR to bring us additional capacity,” he told the Space Force Association’s Spacepower 2024 conference in Orlando, Fla., on Wednesday.
Speaking to reporters later in the day, Whiting explained that the idea is to follow the model of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF), managed by US Transportation Command (TRANSCOM), for leveraging commercial airlines to support military logistics operations when needed.
“There’s various trigger points based on threat scenarios that might be happening, or world events where TRANSCOM can activate various stages of the CRAF to get aircraft to help with the US Air Force mobility, aircraft to move more equipment [and] people,” he said.
“So, as the Space Force contracts out CASR and we get the ability, let’s say, to get more satellite communications in a crisis, or get more space domain awareness, or some other space-related capability like ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance], at various points, when there’s a global crisis or something’s going on, I expect that these contracts that the Space Force will write to enable CASR will allow us to go the Space Force [and say], ‘Something’s going on in the world. We need that additional capacity, and we want to implement a the starting phase of CASR,'” Whiting said.
That would allow for additional capacity “that we then can leverage for operations. And then, depending on that’s how that situation evolves, there might be additional phases of CASR where we would continue to get more and more capacity,” he added.
Col. Richard Kniseley, director of the Space Force’s Commercial Space Office, said in October that the service expects to award its first CASR contracts by early next year — although he stressed that those first agreements would be baseline models that don’t address thorny issues such as compensation for participants whose satellites become casualties of war.
Whiting noted in his presentation that SPACECOM just last month updated its own “commercial integration strategy.” The first version was published in 2022 and said “it was very aspirational” in that it was a broad look at what the national security space community “at large” needed to do to engage commercial vendors. By contrast, he said, the new version is focused on “the real, core US Space Command tasks.”
Whiting explained that there are three key action items in the new strategy. First is for SPACECOM to “identify and advocate” for commercial capability. This means working to understand what industry is “bringing to the table” and then going to the military services to advocate “what capabilities should be brought online.”
“Secondly, we want to incorporate and operationalize” commercial capabilities, Whiting said. “So, as the Space Force develops CASR, and that becomes real, we’ve got to figure out what the triggers are and the mechanisms where we can now take that added capacity that CASR could bring to us in various mission areas, and how do we operationalize that into our plan so that the joint force can take advantage of that.”
Finally, Whiting explained that the “third line of effort” in the strategy is to “inform and protect” commercial partners — which is the raison d’etre of the Commercial Integration Cell at Vandenberg SFB, Calif., where space operators and industry operators share threat information with each other.
