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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Tournear said that the optical intersatellite link demonstration was final success in a trifecta of baseline challenges to SDA’s plan to network hundreds of military satellites in LEO, as well as to eventually to integrate commercial satellites into the mix.
One of the key challenges for tracking enemy aircraft from space is that airplanes and drones move much faster than tanks, trucks and ships; confounded by the fact that satellites themselves also move around the Earth extremely fast.
With today’s announcement, KBR will begin to integrate the boutique space data analytics firm into its “Government Solutions” segment and “Defense and Intel” business unit.
Criticizing European allies for not “paying up” to support NATO, Trump also said he would demand that NATO members spend 3 percent of their GDP on defense.
The company’s capability to precisely measure land surface temperatures — using data from a wide variety or Earth monitoring satellites and a software suite for data fusion — has potential military and national security applications.
When completed, the six-satellite WorldView Legion constellation will “be able to revisit certain areas of the world up to 15 times a day,” Susanne Hake, general manager of Maxar Intelligence, told Breaking Defense.
“This paper … provides a framework that could help ensure that verification challenges are not used as a convenient excuse for giving up on space arms control as an option,” writes author Mick Gleason.
The President’s National Space-based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board recommends that the Biden administration create a new “locus of authority and accountability for PNT decision-making beyond DoD GPS program management.”
The IG further is urging NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce to move out more aggressively to craft a plan to set binding rules to manage the ever increasing amount of on-orbit traffic — despite the fact, as pointed out to Breaking Defense by senior NOAA officials, that Congress has yet to give OSC the legal authority to do so.
The satellites carry a handful of different payloads, including the two US Space Force Enhanced Polar System-Recapitalization jam-resistant communication payloads, an X-band communications payload for Norway’s Ministry of Defence, and a Ka-band payload for commercial firm Viasat.
“Missions are ramming into each other, overlapping each other. The integration challenge is large,” Lt. Gen. Heath Collins said. “[S]ilos exist between services, between entities within the services, between MDA.”
Space & Missile Defense Command has been pushing to make space a formal “military occupation specialty” for enlisted personnel wishing to specialize, and has submitted a proposal to that effort to Army personnel leaders to that effect.
