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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The needs analysis comes as Congress has been keeping a watchful eye on what some lawmakers worry is a brewing turf battle between the Space Force and the spy satellite agencies.
The review, to set out Space Force’s “playing field,” was tasked to the Defense Department and the IC by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, said Lt. Gen. Bill Liquori, Space Force head of strategy and plans.
The annual “State of Military Communications Technology” poll finds that only about a third of repondents believed that the Pentagon was moving quickly enough to adopt commercial technology and streamlined acquisition rules to be able to make necessary upgrades quickly.
ICEYE currently is planning to launch another five satellites this year, Jerry Welsh, CEO of the Finnish firm’s US arm, told Breaking Defense. But he did not provide a breakout of those to be built in Finland vice the US.
Though even global rivals had substantive discussions this time, “I imagine that it will start to get spicier,” an allied expert said of the next meeting of the UN group that will focus on threatening behavior by military space operators.
Under the $324.5 million contract, the team will develop the “ground Operations and Integration (O&I) segment for Tranche 1 of the National Defense Space Architecture.”
Space Force’s Delta 6, known as the “Cyber Delta,” currently has three squadrons assigned to cyber defense. Four new squadrons will stand up in the summer, Col. Roy Rockwell, who heads the delta, said.
Commercial imagery has proven invaluable in the Ukraine conflict, both to the US government’s information war against Russia and to the Ukrainian military.
“Infrastructure today is not hard; it’s not survivable — at least what we’re talking about here, that is commercial infrastructure,” said Robert Spalding, CEO of the firm SEMPRE, which had a research contract with the military.
“It’s a big acknowledgement that [Low Earth Orbit] is expanding rapidly. It’s of national importance. It’s of commercial importance. And there’s a need to have more eyes on the sky,” CEO Dan Ceperley told Breaking Defense in an interview.
With an eye on China, the plan is to start in the Indo-Pacific, Lt. Gen. Chance Saltzman, deputy chief of space operations, cyber and nuclear, told the Defense Writers Group.
The member agencies of the Program Integration Council now are all “cross-cleared” so they can share information about their planned space acquisitions, said Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, head of Space Systems Command.
