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.
"Progress has not been as great as we wanted it to be" in the Space Force's effort to reduce the number of disparate satellite ground control centers, according to Clare Leon, head of Space Systems Command's (SSC) Space Systems Integration Office (SSIO).
Four Pentagon offices are working together on an ambitious hybrid architecture that spans orbits as well as classification levels, officials told Breaking Defense.
Why edge and endpoint security can’t be an afterthought.
The next, and deciding, step in the controversial basing process will be the decision by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on which proposed site will allow SPACECOM the speediest path to "full operational capability (FOC)."
Many of the technology challenges facing the Space Force are "fundamental and architectural," requiring the service to figure out how "to get these new, rapidly evolving ideas into the system in a way that makes sense and it's not utter chaos," said Joel Mozer, director of science, technology and research.
NROL 162, nicknamed by Rocket Lab "Wise One Looks Ahead" is scheduled to launch as early as 1:00 am EDT on June 13 from New Zealand, according to a company press release. NROL-199, "Antipodean Adventure" is scheduled to launched on July 22.
Another idea, said SSC's Col. Dennis Birchenough, is for SSC to serve as a kind of "matchmaker" to pair ISR sensor developers with commercial operators with capacity to carry payloads extraneous to their own capabilities.
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.
Slingshot 1 is a 12-unit CubeSat, about the size of a shoebox, carrying 19 experimental payloads — 16 of which were designed by Aerospace's lab. The experiments range from on-board processing software to a novel small thruster engine.
Joy White, SSC executive director, said that information about the July 28 reverse industry day on space domain awareness out to the cislunar region should be available on the Front Door website within a few days.
AFRL's experimental CubeSat, called Recurve, uses artificial intelligence/machine learning to autonomously decide how to route data through large constellations of interlinked satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
For Northrop, Airbus U.S. is supplying a larger, higher power version of its commercial ARROW bus, being built at its joint production facility with OneWeb in Florida.
The GPS network continues to prove its unmatched reliability, and it’s only getting stronger.
The WFOV satellite, being built by Boeing's Millennium Space Systems, is expected to launch this evening on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas 5 rocket, under the National Security Space Launch program.
The prototype, called Space End Crypto Unit (ECU), is being developed in tandem electronics firm Aeronix, with planned delivery in 2024.
Frank Calvelli says he will use the congressionally mandated Space Acquisition Council to herd the various Space Force acquisition cats.
The $87 million in funding for the Commerce office is a step in the direction of implementing the long-stalled plan to transfer authority for tracking non-military spacecraft to a civil agency.