Theresa Hitchens is the Space and Air Force reporter at Breaking Defense. The former Defense News editor was a senior research associate at the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM). Before that, she spent six years in Geneva, Switzerland as director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).
A sci-fi geek, voracious reader, enthusiastic cook, dabbler in poetry, Theresa is also the proud mom of a wonderful young man by the name of Nicholas.
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“This oversight regime will balance economic competitiveness together with safety, security, sustainability, and responsibility,” states the new United States Novel Space Activities Authorization and Supervision Framework.
“The key word here is persistence,” study author Masao Dahlgren told Breaking Defense. “How do we get persistence over the regions we care about? That hasn’t been as explicitly put into prior work until now. This report puts into sharp relief.”
The US and its allies managed to block a move by China to open up the 6 GHz band Beijing uses for 5G mobile wireless communications to global use — a move that would have empowered Chinese telecom firms such as Huawei.
The declaration comes as Congress put a hold on any spending in fiscal year 2024 on a new SPACECOM headquarters building in Colorado Spring, Colo., pending a DoD IQ investigation into President Joe Biden’s decision to keep the HQ there.
Space Rapid Capabilities Office Director Kelly Hammett declined to share much about the new “threat warning” sensors, but gave updates on other closely held programs.
“This is a new type of capability. It’s not completely the Intelligence Community supporting the [Defense Department]. It’s not completely a DoD mission without the help of the Intelligence Community. It’s this combination of the two,” said CSO Gen. Chance Saltzman.
“I don’t care what it takes to get after the threat. That’s really the cultural change that we’re embarking upon,” SSC head Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein told the Space Force Association’s inaugural Spacepower conference.
A senior Space Force official said the Air Force was getting “rid” of the current structure as part of a great power reoptimization, but later walked back his comments as “not concrete.”
CSO Gen. Chance Saltzman said that the service is already looking at “criteria and processes” for future changes to integrate operations and sustainment, and better align with acquisition efforts.
The company said that on Thanksgiving, for instance, a Russian satellite’s sub-satellite — in a Matryoshka-style — released yet another satellite, in what a LeoLabs analysis said could’ve been timed for fewer American eyes on the sky.
“In a sense, we drive our satellites today as if we’re going to church. Our adversaries drive their satellites as if they’re going to combat,” Lt. Gen. John Shaw, who recently retired from US Space Command, told Breaking Defense in this Q&A.
Quasar Satellite Technologies is planning to open a US office in 2024, “most likely in Colorado,” with the other option being in the Washington, DC area, CEO Phil Ridley told Breaking Defense.
Advances in RPA technologies signal a future where aircraft could operate from a variety of austere locations, making it much more difficult to find and target large air bases.
Advances in RPA technologies signal a future where aircraft could operate from a variety of austere locations, making it much more difficult to find and target large air bases.
