MAUI — The Space Force needs a more “comprehensive program,” including more collaboration with commercial industry, to improve space domain awareness (SDA) capabilities in order to “avoid operational surprise,” according to Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman.
The key is to get beyond “just enhance ongoing efforts incrementally,” he told the annual Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) conference in Hawaii on Wednesday. “We need to solve SDA problems, not just improve SDA processes.”
Saltzman stressed that the space domain “is becoming exponentially more congested each day, and our SDA capabilities are struggling to keep pace.” And without “operationally relevant SDA,” he said, “it will be nearly impossible to win in space.”
“We must understand the domain, but it’s more than just that, we must move beyond just a potpourri of sensors and data into an era of true decision quality understanding,” he said.
The current “catalog” of space objects, their positions and trajectories maintained by the service — the public version of which is housed on the Space-Track.org website — has significant gaps, Saltzman elaborated.
“We cannot be satisfied if it takes us hours to detect on orbit activity, and we definitely cannot be satisfied [if] full characterization of on-orbit events takes weeks and months. Obviously, objects on orbit that don’t have current state vectors [a snapshot of its position] in the catalog has a problem. An object with a state vector several days old is an issue,” he said.
“The longer it takes to update the catalog, the more problematic the issue, the less domain awareness we have. We need to retire our lost list, not manage it, because that creates ideal conditions for operational surprise,” he added.
Saltzman explained that the fundamental issue is that much of the service’s SDA architecture was “built for a different era, an era where space was not a warfighting domain.” This means that the Space Force needs more personnel dedicated the mission, updated training, enhanced SDA tools, and revamped policies and procedures, he said.
Saltzman admitted that on the policy front, the problem is internal to the service and the Pentagon write large.
“Now, some of us here know what policies need to be adjusted. We lack the authority to direct the adjustment. Others have the authority, but don’t know how or which policies need to be fixed,” he said.
This includes changing policies and attitudes toward use of commercial capabilities, Saltzman noted.
“We need you, everyone in this room today, to help us turn commercial innovations into war fighting advantage for mission priorities, for interagency requirements, and to strengthen our international partnerships. I believe, as does all the Space Force leadership, that we need to shift from a largely transactional relationship with industry to a much more collaborative partnership,” he said.
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