The service needs to better detect and track on-orbit activity, and find objects that have been "lost" to its surveillance network, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said.
"While this type of close approach activity does not automatically signify a military mission, it obviously could provide a co-orbital counterspace capability," expert Victoria Samson told Breaking Defense.
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.
Many of the sensors contributed by the 15 EU SST participating states are military assets, and the European Defence Fund also is being tapped to help foster commercial innovation in the space situational awareness domain.
Kelly Hammett, director of the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, said his organization risks being “inordinately impacted" by workforce reductions underway with the Trump administration.
“It’s essential that the [Olympic Defender] allies and partners have a shared understanding of the battlespace, to ensure mission impacting decision-making is based on common perceptions of what’s occurring and likely to occur in the Area of Responsibility," said Royal Australian Air Force Group Captain Julien Greening, CSpOC deputy director.
"Anduril will use Apex’s buses for missions where Apex’s off-the-shelf approach and scalable manufacturing enable Anduril to rapidly deliver capability to customers; such as space situational awareness, proliferated LEO architectures, and missile warning and tracking," Anduril said in a press release today.
Knowing when to build on commercial systems and when to develop something new can be the difference between parity and information dominance.
"Transitioning the spaceflight safety SSA responsibilities to DoC, a civil agency, will improve support to these users and allow DoD to focus its resources on core defense missions,” John Hill, DoD's senior space policy officer, said.
The first launch in 2025 "will serve as a testbed for maturation of multiple Anduril and third party payloads which we will be announcing in the coming months," said Gokul Subramanian, Anduril's senior vice president of space and engineering.
The Space Force today circulated a fact sheet explaining what the service called a "proactive" and "collaborative" effort to keep tabs on Starlink re-entries as SpaceX begins to de-orbit some 100 early variants.
Hiding in the sun, launching mini satellites and radar absorbent materials are just some of the tricks nations are using to hide their military satellites in orbit.
Why edge and endpoint security can’t be an afterthought.
Breaking Defense was given exclusive space tracking information showing the unique path of the Russian system, one experts say is the reason for US government warnings about space-based nuclear weapons.
The SPACECOM list includes almost $704 million for three unnamed classified programs, as well as $90 million to fund a trio of classified Navy electronic warfare-based "counterspace" capabilities.
SpaceX alone was responsible for 98 of the 109 launch attempts made by the US in 2023, and 1,937 of the 2,234 US satellites successfully orbited.
"Commercial data, commercial processing is not classified. It does not matter that the DoD wishes it were," said Barbara Golf, special advisor to Space Systems Command.