Theresa Hitchens is the Senior reporter, Space 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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“More than 100 lunar missions are planned for this decade alone, including many that are commercial,” said Jessica West, of Canada’s Project Ploughshares.
The Ohio Air National Guard’s 178th Wing on Aug. 10-11 hosted the annual Vulcan Guard space exercise, that this year included personnel from US Space Command, the Brazilian military and all seven National Guard states conducting space operations.
The award to Northrop Grumman Space Systems has a total value of approximately $733 million; the Lockheed Martin award, approximately $816 million, the SDA release said. All totaled, the Space Development Agency up to now has awarded nearly $4.5 billion for the Transport Layer.
The EU move, which comes in the run up to the final meeting of the UN working group to prevent space threats at the end of the month, brings the number of countries supporting the limited ASAT testing ban up to 35.
IARPA hopes to transition the results of its debris detection and tracking research to the Space Force, NASA and other Defense Department and intelligence agencies.
The five finalists in the Hack-A-Sat 4 contest competed in nine different challenges, seven of them involving hacking into the Moonlighter CubeSat built by The Aerospace Corporation and Space Systems Command as a on-orbit cybersecurity testbed.
The Defense Department in particular has been keen to build up military space ties with its allies and partners in Asia in the face of China’s rapid buildup of its own space capabilities, including the development of technologies that could hold US and allied space assets at risk in a regional conflict.
“In addition, shared global challenges, including climate change, human and health security, as well as emerging and disruptive technological advances, are converging in ways that produce significant consequences that are often difficult to predict,” DNI Avril Haines writes in the 2023 National Intelligence Strategy.
MDA Acting Director Rear Adm. Doug Williams said that the agency’s plans include beginning tests of its Next-Generation Interceptor in 2027, “with the anticipation of operational testing of NGI at the end of 2029.”
“The best missile strategy is to destroy the missiles prior to launch. A focus on missile defeat could enable distributed non-kinetic systems with larger magazines and the ability to engage missiles before they can deploy complex decoys, countermeasures, maneuvers or multiple reentry vehicles,” said Rear Adm. Sean Regan, NORTHCOM’s director of operations.
The changes included, among other things, the removal some restrictions on non-Earth imaging and rapid revsits of ground targets, NOAA explained, “and most notably,” a removal of all of the restrictions imposed in 2020 on X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR).
