The more nations launch satellites into space, the more crowded the orbit layers become, especially in the burgeoning low-earth orbit. NASA has a Space Environment Sustainability Advisory Board to help guide policy for an area of space that is starting to look like the Beltway at rush hour. The board has defined the problem in terms of five challenges. For more, The Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with the associate administrator for NASA’s office of Technology, Policy and Strategy, Charity Weeden.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin The more nations launch satellites into space, the more crowded the orbit layers become, especially in the burgeoning low earth orbit. NASA has a space environment sustainability advisory board to help guide policy for an area of space that’s starting to look like the Beltway at rush hour. The board has defined the problem in terms of five challenges, and here with more, the associate administrator for NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, Charity Weeden joins me in studio. Ms. Weeden, good to have you with us.

Charity Weeden Hi. How are you doing?

Tom Temin All right. Good to have you in here. And let’s begin with a definition here. What is sustainability in space to begin with?

Charity Weeden That’s a really important question to ask, so we’re all on the same page. In layman’s terms, it means what we do today, make sure it doesn’t negatively impact what we do tomorrow and those opportunities. When it comes to space, make sure our activities are responsible in orbit so that we can continue to use space for all the benefits we get from it, and future generations can use it as well.

Tom Temin And let me just ask a technical question before we get into the broader policy issue. Lots of companies are launching space items, small satellites, maybe, in fleets of them, sometimes clouds of them for various purposes of earth observation or communications. When they do that, what is required of them? Can they just say, “Tuesday, I’m going to launch”? And then, Tuesday afternoon, the belly of the mothership is going to open and these things are going to get ejected? Is there any rules of the road now, for, well, “you can do it at 3 a.m., but you can’t do it at 3:15 because you’ll be too close to the last week’s satellites”?

Charity Weeden Well, private operators do need a license from the government. And this comes back to an international treaty called the Outer Space Treaty, where every nation is responsible and liable for private and citizens and their actions in orbit. So in the United States, that means your activity in space needs to be licensed. And there’s several license authorities in the United States. NASA is not one of them, but there’s the FCC, there’s NOAA, there’s FAA, to name a few of some satellite companies would have to go through those license authorities first.

Tom Temin But is there a protocol for making sure that when they are released into the low earth orbit, that they are done in a way that they won’t crash into something that might be orbiting by two minutes later?

Charity Weeden Right. So, in that license process, there are questions asked about their debris mitigation plans. The FAA has some of that. FCC certainly has the requirement to show your debris mitigation plans. So, that’s part of the license process. But it’s not 100% clear the entire world is using the same rules, and that’s where we are right now. Space is congested. We’re not quite sure where everything in orbit is, especially the small stuff. And we’re not quite sure what other actors are doing in orbit. And that can create havoc when you’re trying to get good science done, inspire new generations to look towards the space environment. And so it’s important to have common rules, like you said, to have that authority and supervision and make sure we keep the space environment clean.

Tom Temin And two other questions then, do we have a sense of the order of magnitude of quantity of satellites in low earth orbit at this point?

Charity Weeden Well, we certainly have a good understanding of the number of satellites in orbit. It’s on the order of 5,000 or so right now. The problem is, we don’t necessarily know exactly where all the small pieces of debris are. And we modeled upwards of 500,000 or more pieces of small debris that we can’t even track. And that could be really devastating for a mission. So that’s the essence of the issue; if you can’t maneuver out of the way of debris, then we have more debris getting generated.

Tom Temin By the destruction of satellites that run into debris.

Charity Weeden Right. In low earth orbit, satellites are really going fast. And you talked about the highways and the Beltway. That’s a great analogy because there are orbital highways, common orbits that we use for earth observation or communications. And so those are getting crowded as well. And debris-generating events, they could really create havoc. If you can imagine on the Beltway, a bunch of cars, you know, crashing into each other, what that would look like.

Tom Temin And are there other effects of this crowding? Could it be not just debris and crashing situations, but is there RF interference or some degradation that could happen in what the satellites are doing if they come too close? Is that a possibility also?

Charity Weeden So, in the license process, the RF interference issue is dealt with by the FCC. We’re talking here about the physical process of making sure we don’t run into each other in orbit.

Tom Temin And therefore, then, to add this all up then, sustainability for this strategy that we’re about to talk to, is having to do with just the crowding issue and the collision issue.

Charity Weeden The strategy is really about what NASA can improve in its processes, decisions, what technologies we can start to invest in to help mitigate the situation. So it’s really looking internally across the organization, at the agency and making sure we can be the best to help solve the issue.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Charity Weeden. She’s associate administrator for the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy at NASA. And so the strategy has laid out the strategy for sustainability. I guess it’s one of a series you’ll be doing, the first one dealing with low earth orbit. That sounds like the most critical.

Charity Weeden Correct. Yes. The most immediate issues right now are the inability to track the small debris, to create a sustainable space environment in the low earth orbit, which is getting very crowded. But also, there are other regions we need to start thinking about, like the cislunar environment. We’re going back to the moon. And it’s not necessarily the same situation around the moon as it is here around earth, when it comes to mitigating debris. So, we need to start thinking about that as well. And even looking forward to the rest of the solar system. How are we going to be responsible space actors when we’re going to Mars?

Tom Temin Sure. Well, we don’t want to be like two shoppers, you know, trying to get the same parking space at Christmas time, with us and China. “No, I’m there first! No, you’re going to—” bang. You know, here we got both in the same spot at the same time. Not good. Anyhow, the sustainability strategy so far then lists five challenges the agency and I guess the world is facing with respect to this. What are the principal challenges? I think you mentioned one is simply situational awareness — knowing what’s up there, including the debris.

Charity Weeden Right. So, one of them is knowing those uncertainties. What do we not know? What can we use our technical and scientific understanding to understand the environment a little better, understand how debris interacts with other debris? That’s an important issue. So is making sure that NASA is organized for success. We have a lot of stakeholders across NASA that do something to do with space debris, and we need to integrate that a little better. And so, part of the strategy is to organize for success and have that integration and collaboration across the agency, and hire a director of space sustainability to champion that.

Tom Temin All right. So, what measures could sustainability itself take? Because people need to do this launch, it’s an open, almost a wild West, really, with launching now that it’s become such a commodity and the satellites are so small and numerous. What can NASA do and who do you need to cooperate with, or who needs to cooperate with NASA to ensure the situational awareness and greater sustainability?

Charity Weeden Right. We all use space right now. You and I are probably using space. Those that are listening in a car, probably using space right now. It’s a benefit to our society. We get satellite communications, earth observation, you name it. We also get to explore and leverage space that way. So what this strategy is doing is, first and foremost, building a framework of what are all the pieces that go into creating a sustainable space environment. And that’s a complicated thing to put together. But it’s an important one, because based on this framework, NASA can take those insights and understand where are those gaps. Where are those gaps in knowledge, the gaps in technology, the gaps in policymaking? And then go out and engage, engage with all the stakeholders, not just amongst the U.S. government, but it’s important to recognize that the commercial industry is thriving, and we want to keep it thriving and create inputs from industry as well. And then further, this is not just a U.S. issue. I want to make clear, this is six decades of the world going to space. This is the world accessing space now and reaping those benefits. So, we need to engage with international partners and come up with a common plan of how to move forward from here.

Tom Temin Do you get the sense that even nations that we might be in conflict with in other domains, agree on this general need, say, like, Russia? You know, they’ve been pretty good in space over the years also. And they could be designing a satellite to shoot down all the other satellites. But on the other hand, they have some semblance of a commercial system also.

Charity Weeden Right. This is the back and forth of making sure we all get to use space in a peaceful manner. And here, I point you to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, a committee specifically designed to have this dialogue. Russia’s a part of it. China’s a part of it. There’s over 100 nations in this committee coming together to build out guidelines on how to make space more sustainable, and that’s going on right now.

Tom Temin And with 500,000 pieces of debris and maybe 5,000 satellites, which could be 6,000, you know, in another year or two, what can be done with what’s already there? Because it may be unsustainable already with 500,000 pieces of debris. What are the sources of debris, and is there anything that can be done to filter them out, like a big giant mesh in space to catch it all?

Charity Weeden Well, the earth-orbiting environment has a kind of a built-in cleaning system very low down.

Tom Temin Called gravity?

Charity Weeden Well, called drag. The atmosphere extends actually way past, even though it’s very thin. And there’s drag on some of these objects, and that will eventually burn up into the atmosphere. Saying that, there’s a certain level where this stuff is not coming down. If you generate debris, it’s expensive to go track it and retrieve it. So, we have an economic problem here as well. And so we really need to prevent any future debris, create the rules so that we prevent that future debris, but also start to think about remediation techniques as well.

Tom Temin What produces debris, by the way, in the first place?

Charity Weeden You know, so, it’s just simply launching. Sometimes there are objects that come off of the launch that aren’t part of the payload. Sometimes satellites just don’t work and they have an incident and there’s eject —  you know, there’s pieces of satellite that come off of that. And sometimes we don’t know what happens. But there’s an event whereby two satellites might have hit each other, or a piece of debris might have hit a larger satellite, and now it’s defunct and we don’t know what happened. So, there’s a lot of sources of debris. And the largest stuff is the upper stage rocket bodies, you know, meant to take all this great capability into space, but sometimes it’s left there. And these are large multi-ton objects that just linger, for decades, sometimes.

Tom Temin Wow. And, also, the satellites themselves eventually die out.

Charity Weeden Correct.

Tom Temin And then that renders them into debris.

Charity Weeden Well, there’s a trend going on that some satellite operators are deorbiting their satellites while they’re still active, so they can not create a bigger problem on space debris. And so that’s the trend we’re seeing. Also, there are companies building satellites to capture other satellites. So, we’re in this new world of not just collecting ones and zeros and transmitting ones and zeros in orbit, but we’re actually having a lot of vibrant activity called in-orbit servicing and manufacturing.

Tom Temin Wow. Crazy world. And by the way, while we have you — your office, Technology, Policy, and Strategy — what do you cover? That sounds like a pretty broad portfolio.

Charity Weeden It is broad. It’s meant to bring data-driven decisional advice to the NASA leadership on a number of issues to do with technology, policy and space sustainability, and space debris is one of those issues. I mentioned this earlier, but there’s not a lot of research on the economics of all this. And as the commercial community is relying on the ability to get into orbit and generating revenue, here we have an opportunity to put a dollar number to what is a space clean environment worth to us. So I think that’s a really important research that my office is doing that can contribute to the bigger conversation.

Tom Temin Charity Weeden is associate administrator for the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy at NASA. Thanks so much for joining me.

Charity Weeden Thanks for having me.

Tom Temin And we’ll post this interview along with a link to the space sustainability strategy itself at federalnewsnetwork.com/federaldrive. Hear the Federal Drive on demand. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

The post NASA’s worries are not just about space, but about space sustainability first appeared on Federal News Network.

Last year, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman announced two Integrated Mission Delta provisional units: one unit focused on electromagnetic warfare and another one on positioning, navigation, and timing. The idea was to bring all aspects of mission area readiness, including personnel, training, equipment and sustainment functions under one umbrella instead of  separating functions into different commands.

“In the next few months, you can look for missile warning and space domain awareness as two mission areas, and then in the future satellite communications, for example, and then orbital warfare,” Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, the Space Systems Command chief, said during the Mitchell Institute event Tuesday.

“But the intent is for all mission areas to be in this Integrated Mission Delta approach. And all done personnel neutral — you’re not going to require additional manpower to support these efforts. We’re not making people move. We’re not making people to [permanently change stations].  Now, in time, ten years down the road, maybe it makes sense to move some people around. But near-term, that’s not the intent.”

When Gen. Saltzman first announced the new pilot, he said the intention was to reduce organizational inefficiencies within the service. Under the traditional model, Space Operations Command is responsible for space, cyber operations and intelligence operations, while Space Systems Command is responsible for acquisition and program management. The new model allows the service to bring those space and cyber operators, acquisition specialists and program managers under one commander.

Since these efforts have already yielded such positive results, the goal is to complete the rest of the mission areas within the next year and a half.

“It is a pretty significant lift when you look at organizational change requests and some of the restructuring and then making sure that we’re not hurting anyone’s career when we stand up these commands, or we are not making anyone lose their jobs. It’s a very deliberate process. And to make sure we pair these system deltas as appropriately as well,” said Garrant.

Space Operations Command consists of several deltas, each with a specific mission area. That includes Delta 2—Space Domain Awareness; Delta 3—Space Electronic Warfare; Delta 4—Missile Warning; Delta 5—Command and Control; Delta 6—Cyberspace Operations; Delta 7—Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance; Delta 8—Satellite Communications and Navigational Warfare; and Delta 9—Orbital Warfare.

Under the new structure, the EW sustainment offices have been moved from Space Systems Command into Space Delta 3. But the positioning, navigation, and timing unit is brand new.

Garrant said he is working with Lt. Gen. David Miller, head of  Space Operations Command, on mission analysis of the two existing operational deltas —  Delta 2, Space Domain Awareness, and Delta 4, Missile Warning. 

“Gen. Miller and I owe Gen. Michael Guetlein an integrated progress review here in a couple of weeks. We’re doing mission analysis,” said Garrant.

These changes come amidst the Air Force’s efforts to reshape the service’s structure.

The post Space Force to create more integrated units first appeared on Federal News Network.

“I don’t know if ‘comfortable’ is the right word,” Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton, the Space Force’s chief of space operations and strategy, said during the Atlantic Council event. “I think the great discussion is how much are you willing to go to commercial? Is it 30%, or 40%, or 50%? And across the board, the answer is probably, ‘We’re not sure.’ If we go too far, we start to get uncomfortable. That’s too much reliance on commercial.” 

“What we’ve seen in current conflicts within the world is those are capabilities that we want to have access to, so we’re trying to find that balance. I wouldn’t say that we have settled on a percentage, but it’s the discussion that we really want to have is how much we can bring in. More is better, I think, is what the strategy is trying to say.”

The strategy has been more than a year in the making. It also comes months after Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman sent the draft strategy back, requesting a more comprehensive roadmap for the industry on how it can work with the Space Force instead of being an “aspirational” document.

Now, the document lays out eight mission areas the service considers acceptable for commercial integration. Those include satellite communications, space domain awareness, command and control, cyber operations, space-based environmental monitoring, space access, mobility and logistics, as well as tactical surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking.

The service wants to increase commercial integration of some of the mission areas where commercial solutions already exist, including satellite communications and space domain awareness. At the same time, the service is actively looking for more partnerships in areas such as command and control or cyber operations.

“Communications – clearly, we have gone there in the past and we’ll continue to go there. I think domain awareness in recent years has really been on the uptick, and we’re relying more and more, and we’re more comfortable relying on commercials for looking into the space domain, helping us keep track of objects out there, providing data and sharing data on what’s happening in the domain,” said Bratton.

“When you step beyond those, when you start talking about navigation and timing, when you start talking about environmental monitoring — some of these other areas, I think we’re trying to understand what’s possible from commercial. And what makes a good business case for any particular company. Those are discussions we’re trying to have.”

Space access, mobility and logistics is possibly one of the least mature areas for the Space Force, said Bratton. It’s also the only area the service decided to fully rely on industry to bring the capabilities it is looking for in this mission area.

“It’s an area that is very immature for the Department of Defense and we’re really saying, ‘Commercial, lead us, we’re not sure what to make of this. We think there’s something here, but help us figure it out.’ So it may be an example of ‘We’re taking some risk here, but we really want not to have to figure this out on our own. We want to partner and leverage commercial,” said Bratton.

This strategy comes on the heels of the Defense Department’s commercial space integration technology strategy, which was released earlier this month. The Pentagon’s document lays out 13 mission areas and breaks down those mission areas into three categories, including government primary mission areas, hybrid mission areas and commercial mission areas. Bratton said that’s where the service’s eight mission areas came from – they went with the missions they were more willing to partner with the industry on.

The service worked closely with the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the strategies are complimentary rather than competing.

“I think they addressed a couple of broader topics. Within the Space Force, we’re very focused on delivery of capabilities to the Joint Force, on protection of capabilities during times of conflict so we can continue that delivery mechanism. I think, at the Secretary of Defense level, they’re focused on those same things, but there’s a different understanding of it in the obligation of the service to really do that. I think they’re both certainly strategic level documents, but I think they nest well,” said Bratton.

The post Space Force outlines areas for commercial integration first appeared on Federal News Network.

A potential transfer of all space units in the Air National Guard to the Space Force will have minimal impact on the 1,000 guardsmen performing space missions in seven states, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said today.

“There’s no intention to move anyone. There’s some concerns out there that I think are overblown. People will basically have stability if they transition,” Kendall told senators on Tuesday at a hearing on the service’s posture.

Last month, Air Force officials sent a legislative proposal to Congress to bypass existing law that requires them to obtain governors’ consent prior to making any changes to National Guard units and to transfer 14 units with space missions within the Air National Guard into the Space Force.

Since the inception of the Space Force in 2019, much debate has centered on what to do with the 1,000 Air National Guard professionals performing space missions.

The 2024 defense policy bill requires the Air Force to assess the feasibility of creating a separate National Guard component for the Space Force, moving National Guard space units with space missions to the Space Force or leaving things as they currently are.

While the study, which was due on March 1st, is still in its final draft, Air Force officials are already pursuing a provision in the 2025 defense policy bill to move all Guard space units to the Space Force.

“The missions that are currently being performed in the National Guard are critical to our success and I’ve been very clear about that in the past. The easiest way for me to manage it, though, is for those missions to be performed in a single component. There’s an added level of complexity if the Space Force is required to manage a second component, like a Space National Guard. And I’m trying to do my best to keep the administrative bureaucracy, the staffing levels of the Space Force as small as possible,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told lawmakers during the Senate Appropriations Committee’s hearing on April 9.

Kendall said they have already looked at the functions of those space units to determine whether they better fit into the Air Force or Space Force architecture.

“Most of them do fit within the Space Force. There are a couple that I think may be more appropriate in the Air Force, but they’re all valued and they’re all important. We want to have them continue to serve. We are looking at how to best make that happen,” said Kendall.

Air Force officials want to bring Air Force Guardsmen into the Space Force under the Space Force Personnel Management Act, which allows Guardians and Air Force reservists to serve part- or full-time.

The service is already working to bring about 1,000 Air Force reservists performing space missions into the Space Force under the new legislation.

“We are looking at how to best make that happen. [Gen. Chance Saltzman] and I are both very strongly of the opinion that the right way to do that, from the point of view of national capability and for the ability to manage the Space Force, is to bring those units into the Space Force ultimately under the Space Force Personnel Management Act,” said Kendall.

“We’re doing this now with some of the reserves that are going to be moving under the Space Force Personnel Management Act. We’re going to handle the Space Guard people the same way. So they would have stability and they will be able to continue to serve in the way that they currently would serve. There should not be a lot of concern about dramatic changes as far as any of them are concerned.”

The proposed legislation to transfer Air National Guardsmen has received pushback from state governors and advocate groups.

Last week, the National Governors Association called for immediate withdrawal of the proposed legislation.

“Governors on both sides of the aisle call for the immediate discontinuation of legislative proposals that endanger or deny the full and legitimate authority of governors to act in the capacity of commander-in-chief to their respective National Guard across states and territories,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said in a National Governors Association press release.

Kendall, however, said removing the requirement to obtain a governor’s consent prior to making changes to a National Guard unit will not set a blueprint for moving other missions out of the National Guard.

“This [issue] is an artifact of the creation of the Space Force. It’s sort of cleaning up the battlefield of the creation of the Space Force. It’s a unique situation. There is absolutely no intention to make any other changes, moving things out of the Guard,” said Kendal.

The post Air Force pushes to move Guard units to Space Force first appeared on Federal News Network.

A new strategy from the Defense Department outlines how the agency plans to sync up its interests with the commercial space companies, with which it works. The first of its kind 2024 Commercial Space Integration Strategy, looks to integrate commercial solutions into DoD’s national security space architecture. To learn more about it, Federal News Network’s Eric White spoke with one of the authors of the strategy, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. 

Interview Transcript: 

Eric White As do we. So why don’t we just kind of start it from the beginning and just lay out from the 40,000 foot view? Since we’re talking about space, what does this strategy set out to do and how did it come about.

John Plumb Yeah, absolutely. So Eric, we are at a time of really fast and critical change in the national security space environment. You can see this everywhere. You can see it in the way space is being used in the battle in Ukraine. You can see it in the way that the commercial space enterprise is really just accelerating. And you can watch launches on an almost, you know, weekly basis, if not faster, and you can see it in the way the governments around the world are really examining how they can use space for national security. And when the Department of Defense looks at that, we realize that a lot of that innovation and speed is in the U.S. commercial sector. It’s a big driver of the U.S. economy, frankly, at this point. And we want to harness that. You know, the Pentagon’s not always that great at doing things quickly or being super innovative quickly. And so if we can figure out a way to harness what the commercial companies are doing to be able to close their business case and use that for national security purposes, we absolutely have to do that. We have to get the best use of your taxpayer dollars and move as quickly as we could to keep up in this at this critical time.

Eric White Let’s get into the strategy itself. I imagine a lot of this is going to fall on you and your officer’s shoulders, but who’s going to be responsible for actually carrying out what this strategy calls for? And on that note, what does it call for in order to accomplish that?

John Plumb Yeah. So a few pieces there. So one, the way this works is the strategy is published basically is the secretary of defense providing direction to the entire department, not just the Space Force, not just my office for space policy, but the entire department on how to think about and approach commercial space. And I should just be clear here, that commercial sector we’re talking about is different than the defense industrial base, right? A lot of our listeners on Film News Network are going to be thinking about primes, which are part of the defense industrial base, commercial sector, or those companies that are selling things on the commercial market that we might be able to use as well. And what we’re looking at is setting out basically telling the department here are basically four priorities that you need to be following and adhering to in order to better integrate commercial space into our solutions. One, we’re going to work to ensure access to commercial solutions across the spectrum of conflict. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean, it doesn’t really do the Department of Defense that much good to buy as a service or a solution that only works in peacetime. It needs to be available in a crisis and frankly, needs to be available in a wartime conflict. And so if we’re going to enter into contracts or other mechanisms with commercial space companies to help the Department of Defense, we have to know that there’s going to be available not just in peacetime, but in crisis, in conflict. One way to help us do that is a second line of effort here, which is to ensure that we are integrating with these commercial companies and providers prior to a conflict, I would say a legacy way of thinking about this would say, well, maybe we’ll just buy some additional, satellite communications bandwidth that we would only use in a crisis. Well, that means that when the crisis comes, you don’t even know how to flex to use that bandwidth. The operators in the commercial side don’t know how to switch over to allow use that bandwidth. It’s not a great model for today’s environment. We want to do is bring operators and other commercial solutions in to our daily operations, work with them then, and even train with them so that they know what they might be needed of in in crisis or in conflict. Third, and this is on the Department of Defense. We talk a lot about protecting defend. And how are we going to make sure that, if we’re entering into relationships with commercial companies, that they can be de-risked, and we’ve got always, of course, in the Department of Defense the option to use military force, but that’s certainly not our primary means are going to be a primary line of effort for protecting defending commercial systems. We’ve broken that out into three basic things. One, you know, the entire U.S. government works on creating norms of responsible behavior in space to try to make space a stable and safe domain for anyone to operate in. Two as we find intelligence about threats to space systems, we need mechanisms to share that information, even if it’s classified with these commercial companies. And three, there are forms of financial protection available in the air domain and in the C domain. And the department is going to be exploring whether those types of things should also be applicable to the space. To me. And then the last piece that we’re doing to integrate commercial solutions is we will continue to look at ways to find innovative technology and invest in those tech. Allergies that might have the potential to support the joint force. And there’s a number of tools that the department has to do that.

Eric White We’re speaking with Assistant secretary of defense for space policy, Doctor John Plumb. Lot to process there. But you made it a point to say this is not the defense industrial base. You know it. Nowhere else does the government rely more on getting or enacting its strategies and policies from commercial entities than in the space realm, what can you say about how important it has become and that it requires this sort of strategy laid out because of that reliance on the commercial sector?

John Plumb Well, I think he framed it quite well. I think if I were to just kind of flip what you said, we would be crazy not to be trying to do this right. We are very reliant on the commercial sector already, at least for launch. Now, of course, the department buys those launch services. But, you know, Space-x is a private company. There are commercial companies do commercial launches, for example, ULA, those commercial launches as well. And so if we are buying launches from commercial services, you can’t get to space without launch. So right away, you can see that we’re already kind of on the hook. But I think the really the reason that is so entwined is because the two things are happening at the same time, right? We’re stood up a space force. We stood up. Space command is a combatant command. We created my position. We’ve as assistant secretary of defense for space policy, and there’s an assistant secretary of the Air Force for space Acquisition. All four of these things were just created in the last few years under the realization that space is becoming more and more important to national security, its operational domain, just like any other domain like land, sea and air. These things are happening all at the same time that the commercial space sector is really becoming energized, space is becoming democratized. And so for decades, space was really just the purview of United States, Russia, China, and, you know, large nation states. And now that you have companies that can do these things, perhaps faster, definitely, sometimes cheaper, and maybe with more innovation, then it’d be crazy not to take advantage of it. And I think it’s the fact that these things are happening at the same time that makes that dependance so much stronger than it is in other domains.

Eric White Got it. And was there any consultation with, representatives in the commercial sector when coming up with a strategy or as you just mentioned, you know, a lot of those, a lot of those positions were just created over the last few years. So obviously you all have experience working with the commercial sector already. So did you just rely on your own knowledge that you’ve acquired so far?

John Plumb No, that would have been a terrible idea. Right? We have to do a lot of outreach and do a lot of tabletop and exercises with those partners that are going to be affected by the strategy. So that’s both the stakeholders across the Department of Defense, but also it’s the commercial sector. And I’m really proud of my team. They went out and held information sessions, the commercial sector. They held tabletop exercises, the commercial sector and tried to figure out what of those pieces of the commercial space sector would be interested in. Right. It’s in just a one way street. If we’re going to enter in these type of relationships, both sides need to have some gain there. So I think we did a really good job of level setting with, with many different companies of different sizes and really kind of been out there talking to people about it for over the past year while we’ve been writing this. You know, writing a big document like this for the first time is, is a lot of work, and you have to make sure it’s socialized both across and up and down your chain of command and others to make sure that everyone is on board. Because if folks aren’t on board, then, you know you can write a policy and they’ll just follow the thud. You got to get folks energized and understand that this is important and agree so that by the time the secretary signed that, they understand, this is this is the direction we’re headed. I think we’ve done that.

Eric White And let’s discuss on how this strategy fits overall into DoD national security goals, as we’ve already belabored the point of reliance on the commercial sector. You know, at the end of the day, they are a company, so they have to make money, you know, how do you make sure that you know, your goals don’t counteract with a commercial company that’s saying, you know, hey, we may have to sell to some near pure adversaries just to stay afloat.

John Plumb Okay, let me just break that into a couple a couple pieces. So first of all, we do have to have access to commercial companies if we’re entering these contracts. And we think the easiest way at the moment to do that, or the most sure way to do that is just to enter in a contract that both parties agree to. If the government’s a smart buyer, we can structure contracts in a way to make sure things will be available in crisis and conflict. And I will also say that it is a very routine for contracts to also be structured so that if a company is sold or goes out of business, the US national security piece is protected and the DoD continues to have access to that. There’s no case where that would be sold to, to a potential adversary, of course. But it might be sold to, a partner or allied country. And in those cases, when there’s a national security component, there are special, special boards set up to oversee the protection of that national security aspect. So there’s a lot of mechanisms already in place. And this is one of the things that was really interesting when we started this strategy. I don’t think there was a good baseline of knowledge, both in the department or in the commercial sector as. How these types of pieces work, and I think we’ve done a good job providing that type of information to anyone who wants it to show these. These pieces actually fit together pretty well. And a lot of these things are mechanisms that have been in place or have existed. And now we’re trying to say, well, we should do this at scale is we know these relationships. You know, the one thing I would say is we’ve made this strategy completely unclassified. And I think that’s important. We need to hold ourselves accountable to the strategy. And one way to do that is to make it unclassified to the Congress. And the commercial sector can also use it as a way of influencing and making sure we are keeping true to this. I think that’s a pretty important point, and I’m pretty proud of that as well. And I also say, you know, writing a strategy is hard. Implementing is harder. So we just all have to keep the pressure on and make sure that we’re moving in the right direction. I think the speed factor alone, especially in the face of kind of a rising China, is so important to the department that I think that this should be a thing that we start to incorporate more and more as we go about our budget builds in our daily work.

Eric White And I, you know, it is a strategy. And as things change, which they are evolving every day in the space realm, is there a constant update that is going to be needed? And are we going to see this, you know, a strategy every year, or are we going to see long term strategies put out similar to what we see? You know, based on, you know, national defense strategies and things like that?

John Plumb So first of all, every year, no, we would never get any work done if we had to keep writing the strategies every year. So no, and I think it should last longer than that. But I do think, you know, this is the first one of this kind, but I do believe that in 4 or 5 years it probably should be updated. That’s the natural order of things as people adjust and as the department takes stock and says, okay, how is this going? What needs to change? It would only make sense to write a new one or update the existing one. And that will actually be a measure of success. Eric. Because once you get to the point where these higher level documents are pressing down, getting feedback from the building and then evolving, you know that it’s baked into the way people are doing business. And I think that would be really, that would be a real measure of success.

The post Pentagon looks to standardize its relationship with space companies first appeared on Federal News Network.

“There are some things that we are doing. A lot of it is on the backs of young guardians that are Supra Coders, but we need to go beyond that,” Lt. Gen. Doug Shiess, commander of U.S. Space Forces-Space, said during the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Security Forum Wednesday.

The 18th and 19th space defense squadrons, for example, monitor the Space Surveillance Network, which tracks objects orbiting Earth. This involves analyzing vast amounts of data to predict potential collisions of objects in space, such as satellites or debris, and taking preventive actions to avoid accidents. The process still involves a significant amount of manual effort from the guardians.

“If we could have AI to be able to do that in a much faster perspective, we could have those guardians do other things,” Shiess said. “They are getting after that. They are getting tools to be able to do that. But we’ve got to get better at that. It’s something that we have to continue to prioritize and put to the top of the list.”

Brig. Gen. James Smith, assistant deputy chief of space operations for operations, cyber and nuclear, said that while a lot of conversation around AI has been about understanding adversarial behavior, the technology can also help the service improve operational readiness.

The service is currently building operational tests and training infrastructure, which will offer live, virtual, and constructive environments for guardians to train, test out capabilities and improve readiness. Now, the service is implementing tools to measure readiness.

“We’ve kicked off a pilot where there’s a team that has taken AI and machine learning to take all that data that comes in from a readiness aspect and identify trends. Where are your most significant deficiencies? What levers could you pull that would have the most impact on readiness? And then, hopefully, we can invest the next dollar against those levers,” said Smith.

“Our readiness has to be assessed in terms of the infrastructure that we rely on in order to execute our mission. There’s some great opportunity for AI, both automation in terms of reporting the status of our systems, as well as finding the trends.”

Avoiding “operational surprise” is part of Saltzman’s “Competitive Endurance” theory of space operations. The first step to building endurance in the domain is having “actionable” awareness, which will be powered by various capabilities, including artificial intelligence.

Saltzman said the service is focused on investing in domain awareness capabilities this year due to the growing complexity of the space environment.

“We see an incredibly sophisticated array of threats, from the traditional SATCOM and GPS jammers, to more destabilizing direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons across almost every orbital regime, to on-orbit grapplers, optical dazzlers, directed energy weapons, and increasing cyberattacks both to our ground stations and the satellites themselves,” Saltzman said.

The post Space Force ‘not doing enough’ to use AI capabilities first appeared on Federal News Network.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has a new director. He’s worked at Marshall in a variety of capacities for nearly 20 years, including as deputy director. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with the new head honcho, who also has experience in both engineering and operations: Joseph Pelfrey.

Interview Transcript:  

Tom Temin You must feel like you’ve got one of the best jobs in government, because I think a NASA space Flight center director is one of the best jobs in government.

Joseph Pelfrey I agree. I cannot think of a better place to be to work with this team and work in this community to do some amazing feats for humanity.

Tom Temin And each of the centers across the nation that NASA operates kind of has a flavor. You know, the famous ones where rockets take off and go to the moon and so forth. How would you describe the flavor, if you will, of Marshall?

Joseph Pelfrey For over six decades, Marshall Space Flight Center has been leading some of humanity’s greatest achievements in space. From the initial Apollo missions, some amazing scientific discoveries, to the advancements that we’re doing today in the Artemis campaign. Marshall’s legacy is built on a strong technical expertise propulsion systems, launch vehicle systems, integrating large space systems. But we also have a very robust science and technology portfolio supporting all of the various missions that NASA is engaged with. And we have a bright history of building things. And a lot of first, as we have done through our history, building the rockets has sent humans around the Earth for the first time, building the rockets that sent humans to lunar orbit for the first time. And then in November of 22, we launched the first space launch system to kick off the Artemis campaign. And so, we are proud of our long legacy of supporting the nation’s advancements and goals in space exploration.

Tom Temin And for NASA. Often, the missions and the operations are just one step ahead of the science. I remember the speech that John F Kennedy made at Rice University, and he referenced the fact that the moonshot would eventually be made of materials and alloys that haven’t even been invented yet. And in some ways, the science is just out of the oven and off it goes. A fair way to put it.

Joseph Pelfrey Absolutely. Part of our goal is to really advance not only the things we need for space exploration, but how it can benefit those here on Earth. And there’s many, many examples of how that has progressed. One of the key areas that we focus on at Marshall is the advanced manufacturing in materials science and research. What are those materials that we need to build the space structure, build the instruments to allow us to explore further. And that’s an area of expertise for Marshall Space Flight Center. And with the advent of 3D printing has brought a whole new discipline of manufacturing. And that’s one of our strengths. And we partner with a number of industries and other NASA centers to really push the boundaries of our knowledge in that area.

Tom Temin And as director, you know, you oversee a really big, complex physically, a lot of acreage. I’ve driven past it actually a couple of times in my career. And you also have a lot of people. There’s 7000, I think, employees there, contractors and government employees. What’s the first thing you check on when you get to your desk in the morning?

Joseph Pelfrey That’s a great question. I usually, look at the reports that come in from our security teams to make sure we didn’t have any issues overnight. Our facilities teams that make sure all of our buildings and infrastructure are working correctly. We often have reports from the missions and what went on overnight for any of our active images or are upcoming launches. Just last night we had our launch writing this review for the Commercial Crew. Crew eight launch. We’re getting ready for that upcoming flight to the International Space Station. And so, we had a late review last night and had some updates this morning. So, it’s usually a summary of just trying to look at the whole portfolio, look at our active missions and seeing what happened overnight. We have a great team. And you mentioned the large team. We have civil service and contractors here and in Huntsville, and I couldn’t be more proud of the team in the community that we have here and the leadership team that I get to work with every day here at Marshall to go lead these missions for the agency.

Tom Temin And you mentioned Huntsville. We should mention that it’s the largest city now in Alabama, I believe, but it’s not a big city. So as the Space Flight Center director, that’s kind of elevates you to a public persona in some ways in the Huntsville area.

Joseph Pelfrey It’s been interesting as I become director, to get to interface in the community. Our community has so much passion for what we do at NASA and at Marshall. It’s everywhere here. The people here are just ingrained in what we do in our missions and our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues are coming out to work every day to, help advance the nation’s goals in space exploration and the force, the partnerships that we need to go further out in deep space. There are 87. He’s here on Redstone Arsenal, where we share some of that acreage, and it is a great federal city of excellence. And we partner well with these other agencies and we’re able to share infrastructure needs. And it’s just a great community. It comes together to really support many aspects of what our nation is doing.

Tom Temin And some great barbecue. We’re speaking with Joseph Pelfrey. He’s director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and tell us a little bit about yourself. You came up through the ranks and you have had science, engineering, technology work that you did hands on. What’s your personal specialty?

Joseph Pelfrey So that’s a great question. I had a lot of great jobs through my career and a lot of great teams to work with a major in aerospace engineering and ended up moving into systems engineering pretty early in my career. I was always more of a big picture thinker, and so I like looking at the total systems, looking at how the individual pieces are going to interact together and ensuring they come together. And if you think about the International Space Station program was a systems engineering marvel, and that’s where I cut my teeth on that program, designing and integrating science experiments and science facilities that are still operating on the space station today. That was a tremendous experience to see that entire life cycle of a piece of space hardware from a napkin design through requirements to design to manufacturing to testing, and then to see it be operated by an astronaut in low-Earth orbit. It’s just a tremendous experience. And, it really has set me up. Well, for the other jobs that I’ve had, here on center. And, I could not have asked for a better way to start my career.

Tom Temin Yeah, that’s an important point. I think one of the themes of NASA is how do you project complexity so that it operates really far away? You know, they used to say about old planes, it’s 5000 bolts flying in close formation. You’ve got millions of parts flying in close formation really far away where you can’t just go up and kind of wrench them if you need to. And that informs a lot of the thinking about reliability and precision, doesn’t it?

Joseph Pelfrey It absolutely does. And our teams have to work well together. When you look at the International Space Station as an example or the Space Launch System that we’re developing today for the Artemis generation, both of those very complex vehicles have support from companies and individuals and organizations really across the world. And to bring those individuals together, those different sets of expertise to build these amazing machines, it takes a lot of communication, it takes a lot of dedication and a lot of hard work that people put in to ensure that what we’re building is going to operate as the mission needs are, but also operate safely to take care of our astronauts, to take care of people here on the ground and ensure that we can accomplish the mission fully. It is amazing engineering feats. You know, our team, just the dedication they have. It’s inspiring every day.

Tom Temin And you have inherited a set of missions and responsibilities, you know, at Marshall related to Artemis and some of those other programs. What effect can a director have then on the Space Flight Center when everything is kind of preordained in place, when you change hands?

Joseph Pelfrey Clearly, I’ve been involved as the deputy director before, in shaping and helping ensure that these, programs and projects stay on schedule and have the capabilities, the infrastructure they need to be successful. I see my job is somewhat of a blocking tackle and making sure that our program managers have the resources they need, that we develop the capabilities, the engineering disciplines, the professional disciplines that they need to go run these programs and projects. And then we are delivering hardware, within Marshall for these different missions. And so we have the responsibility to ensure that that hardware is meeting requirements, meeting the mission specifications, and then ultimately is ready to fly when we’re ready to do our certificate of flight readiness and ensure that, you know, it’s safe and the hardware is telling us it’s safe to fly. And so, I’m part of that entire process working with our leadership team, within our governance structure. It’s a great honor. It’s a big responsibility to do that. And I really appreciate the team that we have to go pull those things together.

Tom Temin And you get a chance to still wander into the lab or to the manufacturing facility once in a while, just to get your hands on or hands near. I should say they probably don’t want you to have your hands on anymore.

Joseph Pelfrey Yeah. I don’t get to do as much fun stuff anymore. But one of the things that we started when I came up here is we started what we call field trips. And so, once a month, we pick a different area of the lab and the directors, we go down and we just go visit the team and go see what’s going on and get a brief and get to see hardware and see testing, see what’s going on in the facilities. I wish I could do more than that, but we take a focused field trip. Yeah, we spend some time with our teams just really seeing the progress that they’re making on the hardware and seeing some of the amazing expertise that we have on the center. I’ll tell a funny story of myself. I went down, I was going to just surprise one of the teams and go visit and drop in and say hi and, well, my badge wouldn’t let me in the building. So, one of my first acts as the center director was to request that I get access to all of our buildings, so I can do that now.

Tom Temin That’s good. Two questions to wrap up. As a child, were you one of those Erector Set and Tinker toy kinds of kids?

Joseph Pelfrey Absolutely. I was always enthralled with how things worked in engineering and flight, and I grew up in the shuttle generation. I recorded every shuttle launch, would get home from school and study it, and watch it over and over again. So, I wore the tape out and, just from a very early age, I knew I wanted to be a part of what NASA was doing. And it’s just really a dream job to be in this place now.

Tom Temin Yeah. Wearing the tape out does date you a little bit. And finally, do you notice the outbreak of more bow ties as you go around the campus?

Joseph Pelfrey I’m trying to start a trend here as we move. If I look down the pictures of all the passenger directors, there hasn’t been a bow tie, any of those formal pictures. So, I’m going to change that trend.

Tom Temin All right. We’re going to post it at Federal News Network. Joseph Pelfrey is director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Thanks so much for joining me.

Joseph Pelfrey Thanks for having us. And thanks for helping tell our story.

The post Experienced hand takes helm at big NASA center, meet Joseph Pelfrey first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office have been jointly managing an effort to deliver space-based Ground Moving Target Indicators — sensors that can track and monitor moving objects of interest on the ground in near-real time.

Frank Calvelli, Air Force space acquisition chief, said the project is expected to complete its Milestone B review by the end of March, allowing the program to begin engineering and manufacturing development.

“NRO is in great shape to do that program, I’m expecting that milestone to go very smooth,” Calvelli said during the NSSA Defense and Intelligence Space conference Tuesday. “What I need for that program is for Congress to pass a budget because it’s a new start. If we don’t get the budget passed, we are stuck in a [continuing resolution]. We can’t do much with that program this year.”

The House passed another stopgap bill Thursday, which will keep some of the government agencies open through March 8 and the rest of the federal government through March 22.

Some lawmakers have floated the idea of funding the government through a year-long continuing resolution, which will leave the federal government operating at the 2023 budget levels and prevent some new programs from starting.

“A [continuing resolution] for the year cripples our ability to implement what we want as the Department of the Air Force in terms of our vision for operational imperatives, and it’s just horrible, quite honestly. It’s crippling our ability to compete,” Calvelli said.

Under a year-long continuing resolution, the Air Force would lose up to $1.4 billion in research, test, development and evaluation dollars. The Space Force, however, would face the largest funding gap, losing nearly $2.6 billion in research dollars, or 10% of its entire budget.

According to fiscal 2024 budget documents, the Air Force plans to transition part of its ground-moving target indicator mission from its current platform, the aging E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System aircraft, which is set to retire at the end of this year, with GMTI capability.

The Space Force is asking for $243 million in fiscal 2024 to research and develop satellites capable of tracking moving targets on the ground. The service estimates it will need more than $1.2 billion through fiscal 2028 to fund the program.

After years of debate, defense officials decided to task the Space Force with developing requirements and supervising the acquisition process. At the same time, the National Reconnaissance Office is in charge of procuring sensor payloads.

Details about the new classified sensors are limited, but similar GMTI systems have been based on radar use of a pulsing technique and Doppler shift analysis to detect and track moving targets on the ground.

Calvelli also said his focus in the coming year will be on classification reduction.

“It is something that hinders our ability to actually integrate space in with other domains and space just within the space programs to really enable a warfighter to go do their job. I will tell you that it’s easier said than done,” Calvelli said. “My vision is to bring the majority of space programs out of the [special access programs] down to [top secret] level.”

The post Space ground tracking program to reach key milestone first appeared on Federal News Network.

But Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the chief of the National Guard Bureau, is currently working with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman to explore potential options for the future of the Air National Guard service members supporting space missions.

The 2024 defense bill requires the Pentagon to conduct a study on the feasibility and advisability of transferring all Air National Guard space functions to the Space Force.  The study must explore three options —  maintaining the current model under the Air National Guard; transferring all the National Guard space functions to the Space Force; or standing up a new National Guard component of the Space Force. The study is due by March 1.

The study will inform the next round of discussions in Congress on whether a separate Space National Guard is the best way to support the Space Force.

“For me personally, I’ve been very clear in my congressional testimony when asked for my best military advice. I believe the establishment of the Space National Guard is the best use of our folks that have been doing this mission in many cases for over 25 years. But as we look at where we are, no decisions have been made,” Hokanson said during a press briefing at the Pentagon on Thursday.

The White House and much of the Senate are not sold on the idea of a separate Space Guard, and Congress is waiting to see what Air Force, Space Force and National Guard leaders propose. The Biden administration and lawmakers say the move will create unnecessary bureaucracy and add millions of dollars in cost.

But supporters of creating a separate Space Guard argue that creating a Space Guard won’t be as expensive, with some advocates saying that the price tag would only be $250,000, which would cover the cost of changing name tapes on uniforms, signage and unit flags.

Several lawmakers are making another push to establish a Space Guard. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and a bipartisan group of 11 senators reintroduced the Space National Guard Establishment Act of 2024 on Jan. 31. Rubio and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced the bill in 2022 and 2023, but Feinstein’s passing last year required a reintroduction of the legislation again this year.  The 2022 bill was referred to the Armed Services Committee but never reached the Senate floor for a vote.

“Creating a Space National Guard would boost military readiness and efficiency. It would also ensure that the Space Force retains needed talent,” Rubio said in a press release.

The National Guard space units have been performing missions ranging from strategic missile warning to nuclear detection to space domain awareness to command and control and electromagnetic warfare. The units are already doing the work for the Space Force, Hokanson stressed during a congressional hearing last year. A separate Space Guard would allow the space professionals in the Air National Guard to better support the Space Force.

“I think there’s 12 senators that support that, which is the most that have supported previously,” Hokanson said. “My ultimate desire is to make sure that no matter what decision is made, that the mission that the Air National Guard folks are doing in space has got to continue. Space is a very contested domain.”

The post Future of Space National Guard remains uncertain first appeared on Federal News Network.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, deputy chief of space operations for operations, cyber, and nuclear, said on Jan. 5 that the document will focus on how the industry can fill capability gaps that Air Force and Space Force systems don’t meet. It will also provide details on where the service wants to see new technologies.

“We are days away, hopefully, from signing a commercial strategy,” Burt said at an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

The other part of the strategy will address how the Space Force can buy something as a service rather than purchasing a new space capability.

“Working with the commercial [sector] to build a satellite, or a rocket, or a ‘thing’ is how we’ve historically worked. How do we start to think about buying things as a service?” Burt said. “I don’t have to own the satellite. I don’t have to own those things. I just write a contract and buy a certain level of service from you. I think what we’re trying to also make sure we capture in the strategy is how do we get after buying some of these capabilities, particularly something like SATCOM as a commodity, rather than, ‘I’ve got to own and operate the entire satellite.'”

The strategy has been a year in the making, and the initial version went to Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman for approval last September. Upon reviewing the draft, Saltzman sent the strategy back, requesting a more comprehensive roadmap for the industry on how it can work with the Space Force.

Last year, the Space Force established a Commercial Space Office to foster partnerships with the booming space industry and better leverage commercial space capabilities to improve the DoD’s space architecture.

Burt said that the move will help the Space Force invest in space infrastructure and bolster the space defense industrial base.

“Every domain has an industrial base that supports them. The space domain has not necessarily had a very large base in the past because, again, the cost of entry, and typically, it was primarily the government running those capabilities,” she said.

“Now that you see entrepreneurs and commercial vendors going into the domain and more nations are also spacefaring nations, you’re starting to see that industrial base start to build. So in our interests, I believe we should allow the work in every domain in every gap that we have because the more we build from an industrial base, again, it goes back to that competitive endurance. I have more resilience because I have an ability to fill a gap if it’s taken out in combat,” she said.

Protecting commercial satellites in conflict

Space Force officials continue to have conversations with the industry about how to defend commercial capabilities in space should a conflict ensue.

Burt said that some companies might want to align themselves with the department to protect their assets, given their large DoD customer base. At the same time, some companies want to stay neutral without taking sides in a conflict since they might have customers on both sides.

“Those are all conversations that we’ve had in those war games,” Burt said.

And given the proliferation of commercial technologies in space, all those caveats will need to be addressed during contract negotiation.

“I think now as we continue to move forward, and as we’ve seen commercial capabilities used in the Ukraine conflict, and what has happened, there’s been a significant growth in the use,” Burt said. “How do you write contracts that say, ‘Hey, if I have capability onboard your satellite, or I’m going to buy a service , how do I write that contractually in a way that there’s a certain standard of you’re going to ensure me delivery? And then if I need to defend you – or there becomes an issue where I need to defend you – are you willing to work with that?”

At the same time, DoD will have to determine its own ability to defend commercial capabilities and where exactly they fall on the department’s ‘critical asset’ list.

“As we move forward for the future, where do those commercial capabilities fall on their critical asset list? And where did they fall then on the defended asset list, based on what capacity we have to defend? So those will all be considerations as we move forward in the future,” Burt said.

The post Space Force ‘days away’ from releasing its commercial strategy first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Only 10 days remain in 2023, at which time hundreds of federal correctional officers will lose pay incentives. Those officers at Federal Correctional Institution Thomson are about to lose 25% retention-based pay bonuses. The incentive cut will take effect in the new year, and it comes after staffing levels improved at the federal prison in Illinois. But the American Federation of Government Employees is urging the Bureau of Prisons to reverse its decision and continue to offer the incentive. If not, the union said it will lead to worsening staff attrition and workplace conditions.
  (Union warns of massive vacancies at federal prison if employee pay is cut - American Federation of Government Employees)
• Lawmakers are pushing the Central Intelligence Agency, and other members of the intelligence community, to recruit for specific skill sets. Congress is telling spy agencies to hire more analysts with financial intelligence and emerging technology expertise. The provision in the fiscal 2024 intelligence authorization act directs the intelligence community to come up with a plan for increasing that expertise by Jan. 1, 2025. The National Security Agency and other IC agencies are eyeing big recruiting targets in the coming years, as they look to hire the next generation of intelligence officers.
  (Congress wants spy agencies to hire more experts in financial intelligence, emerging technology - Federal News Network)
• Four years after being established, Commander of U.S. Space Command Gen. James Dickinson declared that SPACECOM has reached its full operational capability. Dickinson said the command now meets all the criteria to execute its mission and deliver capabilities required to counter threats in and from space. The criteria for being fully operational include having a skilled workforce to support the mission, building out the infrastructure and being able to set the conditions for the future fight. Since 2019, SPACECOM has been providing combatant commanders with a wide range of space capabilities needed to support their operations, including satellite communications, weather monitoring and missile warning.
  (SPACECOM reaches full operational capability - U.S. Space Command)
• A certain group of House and Senate lawmakers is pushing back on higher prices at the Post Office. USPS package prices are going up across the U.S. in January. But lawmakers said the price hikes are disproportionately higher for Alaska, Hawaii and U.S. territories than the lower 48 states. Sens. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) were the lead authors of a letter, along with eight House members, calling on the Postal Service’s regulator to reject the rate hike. Lawmakers said USPS is looking to set prices for Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, and USPS Ground Advantage far higher than the rate of inflation.
  (Alaska delegation calls on Postal Regulatory Commission to reject unjust postal rate increase for Alaskans. - Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska))
• Veterans are a growing target for fraudsters, so the White House is assembling a team to deal with it. The Biden administration held its first meeting of its Veteran Scam and Fraud Evasion Task Force. It includes leaders from the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, and the IRS. The task force is working on a fraud prevention toolkit and a one-stop shop for veterans to seek help. The Federal Trade Commission received 163,000 fraud reports from veterans between 2015 and 2019.
  (White House Hosts Inaugural Veteran Scam and Fraud Evasion Task Force Meeting to Discuss Protecting Veterans and Service Members from Fraud - White House)
• Martin O’Malley has been officially sworn in as commissioner of the Social Security Administration. The former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor will be the first permanent leader of the agency in two-and-a-half years. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) conducted the swearing-in ceremony for O’Malley on Wednesday. The official move follows the Senate confirmation of O'Malley to the position on Monday, in a vote of 50-11. O'Malley's term as commissioner will expire in January 2025.
  (Martin J. O’Malley sworn in as commissioner of SSA - Social Security Administration)
• The Biden Administration is pressing ahead with new rules to require project labor agreements (PLA) on large federal construction contracts. The Office of Management and Budget issued guidance this week telling agencies those agreements are now mostly mandatory for contracts worth $35 million or more. A final rule amending the Federal Acquisition Regulation is scheduled for publication later this week. The White House argues the new rules will bring “stability” to construction projects. Some contractors argue the changes will drive up construction costs and discourage firms from bidding on federal projects. The new rules do allow federal contracting officers to waive the PLA requirement under some circumstances.
  (Memo for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies - OMB)
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is seeking feedback on its major technology security initiative. CISA this week issued a request for information on its “secure-by-design” white paper. The agency wants comments on how tech manufacturers can incorporate security early in the software development cycle, as well as the financial costs of adopting secure-by-design principles. The RFI also seeks feedback on barriers to eliminating recurring software bugs and how security can become a bigger focus in computer science education. The deadline to comment is February 20, 2024.
  (CISA issues request for information on secure by design software white paper - CISA)
• A new tool will allow Air Force leaders to move away from Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoints when making investment decisions. The Air Force is launching the first iteration of a decision advantage tool that will change the way financial decisions are made within the service. The tool will help senior leaders to understand the direct costs of a particular decision and the impact that decision could have on an entire program. If senior leaders decide to add an aircraft, the new platform will highlight both the price tag of the plane and what it would mean for aircraft availability or personnel. The first version of the tool is scheduled to come out next month.
  (New platform will allow Air Force leaders to make better investment decisions - Federal News Network)

The post Years flying at warp speed lands SPACECOM as fully operational on fourth anniversary first appeared on Federal News Network.

• A senior leader at the Genderal Services Administration is returning to the private sector. Sonny Hashmi, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at GSA, is leaving after three years. Hashmi’s last day will be December 29. FAS Deputy Commissioner Tom Howder will serve as acting commissioner until a new one is named. Hashmi will be heading back to the private sector, but it is unclear where he will land. In an email to staff, obtained by Federal News Network, Hashmi said that the timing is right to make the move as FAS made significant progress with several initiatives over the last several years.
  (GSA's Hashmi leaving at end of the month - Federal News Network)
• Feds teleworking overseas got a pay raise. Now the State Department is honoring an employee who made it happen. Domestic Employees Teleworking Overseas (DETOs) missed out on locality pay, but saw a pay boost to correct for that in the National Defense Authorization Act. Most DETOs are the spouses of military and Foreign Service officers. Michelle Neyland, a congressional adviser for the department’s Bureau of International Affairs, won this year’s Eleanor Dodson Tragen Award for her work bringing this pay issue to Congress. “Everybody who I introduced this pay inequity to across State Department, as soon as they learned more about it, immediately said, ‘Well, how can we fix that?'" she said.
  (Feds teleworking overseas got a pay raise. State Dept. honors an employee who made it happen - Federal News Network)
• The Air Force has disciplined 15 people for a massive leak of classified information by a member of the Massachusetts National Guard. Airman Jack Teixeira is already in custody awaiting trial for sharing secrets in online chat forums. But Air Force officials said more than a dozen other personnel – from staff sergeants to a colonel – failed to deal with suspicious behavior leading up to those illegal disclosures. An IG investigation also found members of Teixeira’s unit had wide latitude to access and print classified documents without any oversight.
  (Air Force disciplines 15 as IG finds security failures led to massive classified documents leak - Associated Press)
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is rolling out a new cybersecurity tool for agencies. CISA today unveiled new security standards for Gmail and other Google Workspace products. The idea is to prevent security incidents by using common configurations across widely used services. CISA has already published configurations for Microsoft 365 products. “With the addition of these baselines, we cover the vast majority of business collaboration suite of software as a service offerings that everyone uses and relies on to conduct their work every single day,” said Chad Poland, director of cyber shared services at CISA.
  (CISA releases new tools to help agencies secure Gmail, other Google applications - Federal News Network)
• Federal agencies saw real progress in fiscal 2023 in their goal to achieve zero emissions by 2030. The White House said agencies ordered over 54,000 zero-emission vehicles and began installing more than 26,000 charging ports last year. The 26,000 ports will add to the 7,000 already in use across government. With agreements in 16 states for federal facilities to use clean energy, the Energy Department began implementing a new clean electricity grid on 700,000 acres of agency land. The administration also said federal buildings have already cut emissions by more than 7% since 2020 and, as of 2022, have achieved a 39% overall reduction from 2008 levels.
  (Council on Environmental Quality updates progress on sustainability - White House)
• The Department of Health and Human Services is responding to an increase in cyber attacks targeting hospitals and healthcare systems. Under a new cybersecurity strategy, HHS will establish voluntary cybersecurity performance goals for the healthcare sector. The agency will also consider how to incorporate those goals into existing regulations and programs that will help inform the creation of enforceable cybersecurity standards. The agency also plans to work with Congress to increase funding to help hospitals adopt stronger cybersecurity measures.
  (Healthcare sector cybersecurity strategy - HHS)
• A thriving lunar economy might be landing over the next decade. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has a new study and is seeking input from 14 companies on what investments would be needed to have a booming economy on the Moon. Over the next seven months, DARPA and selected companies will work together to design new integrated system-level solutions, including communications, navigation and timing. The agency said the program will change how the civil space community thinks about commercial activity on and around the Moon.
  (DARPA selects 14 companies to study infrastructure needed for thriving lunar economy - DARPA)
• Agency chief data officers are getting more personnel to tackle their work. That is one of the takeaways from a survey led by a governmentwide council of federal CDOs. More than a quarter of respondents said their agency in 2023 had a central data team with up to five full-time employees. Less than a third of respondents said they had that kind of staffing in 2022. A majority of agency CDOs who took the survey said they have been in government for 10 years or longer.
  (2023 CDO Council survey results - CDO Council )
• The Small Business Administration is changing the way it decides which businesses qualify as small. SBA is proposing a new size standard methodology that plans to make two major changes. The first is using a disparity ratio between small business contract obligations and industry receipts to calculate the size standard. The second change would use data from the federal procurement data system to determine percentage industry factors as part of the size evaluations. SBA said these changes will refine and improve its analysis of federal contracting data used in the evaluation of industry size standards. Comments on the proposed changes are due by February 9.
  (SBA proposes new small business size standards - SBA)

The post DARPA kicks off its 10-year plan to create a ‘thriving lunar economy’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

As if pandemic, threats of nuclear war, and a lack of Tesla charging stations aren’t enough to worry about, there is always the possibility that an asteroid could hit the earth and wipe-out all of us. A team at NASA discovered a way to alter the path of an asteroid, should one come too close and they garnered the distinction of being finalists in this year’s Service to America Medals program, also known as the Sammies. For the details, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with two members of NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office: Program Manager Brian Key and Mission Manager Scott Bellamy.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin All right. You launched a rocket that crashed into an asteroid. And I guess my first question is this rocket was able to change somewhat the trajectory of that asteroid. I want to understand what the math calculus was. I mean, generally, how did you figure this out? Because an asteroid is very big. A rocket is very small. You could launch something as big as the asteroid. That’s not possible. But if you shot a marble at it, it wouldn’t make any difference. What was the process to figure out how you could do this? Scott.   

Scott Bellamy I think the easiest way to, you know, start that answer that question is realize that it’s not just Brian and I. There’s an entire team behind us. Here we sit and management position. But, you know, supporting this entire effort is a large group of scientists, engineers working at the Applied Physics Laboratory to help answer that.   

Tom Temin But tell us what the team did.   

Scott Bellamy So if you look at it like you’re playing billiards in space, you’re playing pool, galactic pool. So this is not dissimilar from how you described this scenario with the smaller spacecraft hitting the larger asteroid. But when you take the smaller spacecraft and you look at how fast is it flying, what is its mass relative to the object that its impacting, you determine how much kinetic energy has to be imparted from one body to the other to effect a change in its orbit. And so the scientists that have been working on the design of the mission came up with the parameters that needed to be adjusted in order to achieve the result of altering the orbit of the Dimorphos.   

Tom Temin All right. And what happened when you launched it? It hit the asteroid.   

Scott Bellamy Most definitely. That is actually the point of highest tension in this entire event is what happens when it hit the asteroid. It hit the asteroid. It’s, you know, a very high velocity. And the smaller asteroid Dimorphos is that we ended up with a lot of spacecraft confetti. We had a spacecraft that’s just a little over 1200 pounds in mass, you know, slightly larger than, you know, your typical refrigerator. And it hit at, you know, over 13,000, almost 13,500 miles per hour. So, you know, it was not just a glancing blow. It was a very precisely targeted impact with a certain spot on the surface of Dimorphos to achieve that perfect little amount of English on the spacecraft’s trajectory and bound to, you know, get that all to sink right into the core pocket the way they planned it.   

Tom Temin The speed is a big factor in this, almost like a hypersonic missile. It’s the impact of the wait times, the speed that is the power. It doesn’t even have to have an explosive.   

Scott Bellamy That’s the energy mass times velocity. You’re calculating the kinetic energy of the impact. And so with a known kinetic energy impacting an object that is traveling in its orbit at its certain velocity, you know, you take the velocity and you break it down into what you’re facing head on. And then  you know, what the mass is roughly that’s coming at you and you sized the spacecraft large enough to hopefully surpass what’s needed to change it, because you can get hit by a Volkswagen out on the interstate. And if you’re driving a huge SUV, it’s still going to affect your trajectory down the road.   

Tom Temin Yeah, it can flip you over if the angle is right, I guess.   

Scott Bellamy Yeah, that’s true.   

Tom Temin And Brian, you’re the program manager. How did you convince NASA? And I guess ultimately Congress, I mean, it sounds like a little bit science fiction. You know, you’ve seen cartoons of rockets landing in the moon’s eyeball, this kind of thing. How did you convince them that this was a worthwhile experiment?   

Brian Key It didn’t take much convincing. These ideas have been out there for quite a while. And the Science Mission Directorate at headquarters stood up a planetary defense office within the Planetary Science Office. And it was the planetary defense office that basically brought forward the idea. Once they selected the mission, we took over management of it. So it was Planetary Defense Office that actually brought it forward and said, Yeah, this is a good thing for us to try and do. And they went to APL and got a proposal of what it would take. Then they turned it over to us to implement it.   

Tom Temin The rocket itself was it just a rocket in the weight of its self? Was there. Was there lead weights in the front or anything to get it to that proper mass that you calculated it required?   

Scott Bellamy Well, first, let’s think about like this. It’s not the entire rocket. It’s just the spacecraft that the rocket is launching. So now everything on the spacecraft, the essential things to be able to fly it, you have to be able to have the items that control the trajectory of the spacecraft, point the solar arrays, solar arrays themselves, the optical instrument that has to be there to do the targeting. So the spacecraft in and of itself was literally what it needed to fit inside of the launch vehicle. The other fairing at the top, the enclosure and have enough mass to affect change. Now its weights are sometimes added to any spacecraft to get the balance where you want it to. But no, it wasn’t like a race car that’s carrying an extra 1500 pound of weight just to get to the mass where they want it. In this case, in most cases, it’s like, you know, if you have space left to play with, you prefer to put something usable in there for mission accomplished. But other than just dead weight.   

Tom Temin And it’s been, you know, a couple of eons, I guess, since an asteroid has hit the earth, 60, 65 million years, maybe a long time. Does NASA generally watch asteroids? And what is anyone’s best guess of the chances of being hit any time soon by another asteroid big enough to do damage to humanity? I guess we get hit by little meteorites all the time.   

Brian Key The last asteroid to hit was not 65 million years ago. We’ve had fairly good sized asteroids hit the earth more recent than that. Just not in the United States. I think the last one was over in Russia. We do have a sister mission that is in development right now that will put basically a camera up in orbit around the earth that will basically monitor the sky and collect data to determine where these asteroids are, what their trajectories are, whether they’re a danger to earth or not. That particular mission, I think, scheduled to launch in 2027. It’s called Neo Surveyor.   

Tom Temin Sure. And a couple of final questions. The asteroid that you did, this proof of concept on that you could change. What was its mass? And so what is the greatest mass that you think that a launch could actually affect?   

Scott Bellamy So the Didymos system is the target here for this test. Didymos is a binary asteroid. It has the larger primary and the smaller secondary moonlight that was targeted. This gave us an opportunity to actually be able to observe the change that we were hoping for. So the smaller asteroid is named Dimorphos. it has a mean diameter of 160 meters. And we don’t necessarily have a good mass estimate for either the primary or the secondary. I can pull something out to share with you, but it’s still just an estimate. The largest factor here was is that it’s in a stable orbit around its parent. It’s typically measured at a average plus or minus some seconds of 11.9 hours. And we know how big it is. So we can estimate the mass of it and use that information compared to the orbital dynamics between the two to understand how large the change might be. Now, usually, I mean, you were asking about how heavy one of these is. We usually talk about them in terms of how big they are in the mean diameter. Yeah, there’s some interesting data out there, you know, of asteroids that are roughly four meters and there could be 500 million of them out there that, you know, teasers in their orbits, those that are around 25 meters, you know, 5 million. But then you get up to the dinosaur killers, which are 10,000 meters roughly, and they think that they’re roughly only four of those hanging around out there in space. These are the ones that we have to worry about. They have orbits that cross Earth’s orbit periodically, or they can pose a potential earth crossing hazard. Now, there are a large number of asteroids out in the two belts, the one between Earth and Mars and the one further out past Pluto, there’s just, you know, LA 405 at 5o’clock rush hour that kind of looks like that.   

Tom Temin But you were able to change the trajectory of something that was 160 meters across. Could you change the trajectory of something that’s 10,000 meters across?   

Scott Bellamy My answer is yes. The answer depends on, what’s more important in this scenario is when you find it and how big it is and how soon it’s going to get here. So if you detect it early enough, you have time to put together the mission, get it built, get it launched to travel there. If you find it too late, yeah, you’re already behind playing catch up to generate the largest benefit from a mission like Dart. You want to find the asteroid when it’s as far away as possible? Sure. And be able to get to it as soon as possible. The further away the asteroid is, the smaller the change in its trajectory you have to make because a half degree change in its trajectory when it’s five years out will result in a really large missed distance once it finally gets to Earth.   

Tom Temin Is there the danger that it could accidentally be knocked into a better chance of hitting the earth?   

Scott Bellamy That’s a difficult question to answer, and I don’t even know if I want to try.     

The post This NASA team’s work means the whole world can sleep a little better first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Space Force is working on a new digital modeling strategy, the latest effort by the service to improve how it uses technology and work towards becoming more digital.

The Space Force is leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to help its Guardians work smarter and more efficiently. This upcoming digital modeling strategy is one piece of the service’s efforts to improve how it uses technology. Lisa Costa, the Space Force’s chief technology and innovation officer, said that the Space Force is working with others to develop standards and is also working on standards for digital twins.

“You would think with the use of digital twins by very large sectors of different industries that there would be commercial standards out there, but there’s not,” Costa said on Wednesday at an event at The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “They’re very bespoke, so we’re working toward at least an open standard where we can start to move models from concept. For example, from the Space Warfighter Analysis Center (SWAC), which does mission design, moving that over to our acquisition elements that do costing and analyses of alternatives and then moving that into our operational environment.”

This would help get feedback which could then be tweaked and put into the pipeline for training and testing.

The Space Force sees itself as the first digital service. To accomplish this vision, several things need to happen. Costa said the service is working on removing the tech debt it inherited from the Air Force and other military services and on modernizing its capabilities. She said that it is hard to build advanced technology like AI modeling or digital twins with old architecture. As a result, the foundation must be fixed, Guardians should be upskilled and the Space Force should utilize its Supra Coders, according to Costa.

“Supra Coders are critically important to the Space Force,” Costa said. “They are not just coders; I can buy coders. They are Guardians first, they have been trained usually in at least one operational area and they’re an expert in the operational area, but many of them have been cross trained in a number of different operational areas.”

Supra Coders are self-selected and go through several months of training and internships.

“Supra Coders are experts in space, they are experts in space operations and they are able to put hands on and make changes with other operators in a multidisciplinary team and make changes in real time and that’s really the critical differentiator for Supra Coders,” she said. “So, making a digital service is all about being fast. And having an organizational structure that allows innovation at the edge, bring that innovation into the enterprise, and then push out more capability to do that.”

The Space Force is utilizing a combination of bespoke and commercial technology. According to Costa, it is not changing the base code for its bespoke systems, but it can change and tweak the low-cost commercial systems and have them work with the bespoke systems.

“We are focused on ensuring that the right changes can be made in the right time to get actionable effects to the joint services,” Costa said.

The service is using modern, commercial coding languages and processes. For example, it has DevSecOps and a continuous improvement continuous delivery pipeline. Costa said that this enables the Space Force to bring in commercially trained talent.

“They just bring that capability right into the service, but then train our people in commercial ways,” she said. “So if they do leave the service, if they’re in military uniform, their skills transfer automatically. So I think this is really a great approach for us because it fundamentally reduces cost. We don’t have a bespoke software factory where we’re using some code base or agile process that others are not using.”

Another important element is recruitment. The Space Force is using models and simulation to help see what the force needs to look like in 20 years. She said as the service develops new systems and is developing the models, it also needs to look at the force structure needed to operate it. Furthermore, Space Force invests in its personnel and wants to keep them attached to the mission.

“Contributing to the mission is always a really important part of retention in the military,” Costa said. “I am not too worried about Guardians who will go into industry because they will then know what the Space Force needs and they will be able to develop products at the end of the day that we will be able to buy and that will satisfy our needs better.”

Data is critical to the Space Force. The Unified Data Library, which is where everything is in space and it has different classification levels. The service recently created 176 new requirements for its enhanced unified data library. Costa said it will use AI to cleanse data and she wants Guardians to be able to put data into the library themselves instead of having to go through a contractor. Costa also wants to reduce system backlogs.

“Those requirements are very focused on how you bring in data, process that data and then determine what information is required by an individual organization and what we need to send on that comms pipe,” Costa said.

Costa said that the goal is to make data discoverable at the most tactical edge and to not inundate Guardians and commanders with too much data.

The Space Force also wants to use data and AI for satellites, but there are several things it must consider.  For example, when should satellites automatically detect threats? And when should an operator be involved, and how involved should they be? However, there are several associated risks. Specifically, having a satellite maneuver based on what it perceives as a threat when in reality it was not a threat. Officials also need to consider how other nations are using technology.

“China is developing capabilities to determine in real time using AI whether something is a threat or not a threat to a satellite,” Costa said. “But it could be your own satellite, and so that’s a risk as well.”

Lastly, orbital debris, or space junk, is also a problem.

“You want to make sure that you’re not creating debris, and that’s absolutely critical for ensuring that space is usable for everyone” she said.

However, one way to mitigate some of these risks is to have a human in the loop, according to Costa. She said another way is to rank AIs based on the data its been trained on and how long its been trained and used to determine the trust level for the AI and how to leverage it.

She also pointed to the responsible use of AI as an important priority.

“The real key is who will implement reliable, secure and trustworthy AI,” Costa said. “We do have a program and there was an executive order that was put out last Monday articulating the need for responsible AI across the United States. So, we have a number of teams working in responsible AI areas. The key will be to understand when those limits are off, what could potentially happen and how our adversaries might use that.”

The post Space Force to create new digital modeling strategy first appeared on Federal News Network.

Everywhere you look in the world, you see the use of missiles in military operations. Some by good guys, some of it from bad guys. That is why defending against missiles is a chief mission for the Army. For the United States, missile defense and freedom to operate in space go hand-in-hand. At this week’s Association of the U.S. Army conference (AUSA) in Washington, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin got an in-person, one-on-one update from the Commander of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler.

Interview Transcript:  

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler One of my responsibilities, I have the 100th GMD Brigade, which our soldiers that are stationed in Colorado Springs, as well as Alaska, California and Fort Drum, New York. And those soldiers provide 24-7 365 protected North America against intercontinental ballistic missile attacks from North Korea and from Iran. What’s interesting about that formation, it’s a multi compo organization, so it is both active duty as well as Colorado and Alaska National Guard. And they do a fantastic job in keeping readiness, staying vigilant and responding to any kind of North Korea tests that might take place and staying vigilant on consoles. 24-7.

Tom Temin Yeah, that’s my question to as Iran, you know, unfortunately in North Korea, unfortunately and Lord knows who else, China, they’re always developing new capabilities and testing new types of missiles. What is the mechanism by which you can stay on top of what their offensive capabilities are? So the defensive capabilities here can keep up?

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Sure. Yeah. We stay very, very closely tied with the Missile Defense Agency. So as we see what the threat is doing out there and what our adversaries are doing with respect to their advances in offensive missile capabilities. The Missile Defense Agency is responsive to meeting those new requirements. And then they worked very they worked very closely with my operators. I mean, literally, we sit side by side with the engineers as we’re going through the different development, software development, etc., to make sure that the Missile Defense Agency doesn’t develop something then that the operators aren’t totally familiar with. And then that’s on the software side. And then Missile Defense Agency right now is going through the development of the next generation interceptor, which again, they involve our operators in as they go through developing the NGI.

Tom Temin Right and the interceptor program. Can that handle say, I mean, what’s the posture towards hypersonics, which are even developmental by the other nations, but that seems to be where people are headed.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Yes. So, again, MDA is working super hard on, first off, being able to detect hypersonics. If you can’t see it, you can’t shoot it. And so working with the HBTSS, the hypersonic ballistic, basically our space based layer that we have to be able to track hypersonics, then that will feed into the interceptor capabilities that we will that they will continue to work on developing and our operators will be the ones that employ it.

Tom Temin Yeah, it’s like the difference between a knuckleball and a hundred mile an hour fastball. Some better say they never see it go by, so you got to see it before you can swing at it.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Right? Right.

Tom Temin And you’re tied in closely with the space operation, the space apparatus for the military. How does that work?

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Yes. So I’m the Army service component command to General Jim Dickinson, the SpaceCom commander. We’ve been doing that since really since the advent of Space Command in 2019. And in that role I have for Space Brigade, we provide forces to space command and we work very closely with the Space Force as well as with the Navy and the Marine Corps in providing different service space capabilities to space command for operational employment. We use them in exercises. I have a little bit of convergence of space and missile defense. If I jump out of my space, the missile Defense Command commander responsibility into my joint functional component command for integrated missile defense, there’s also work that we’re doing IMD armed with Space Command, as you might be aware of in the latest unified command plan, it took the missile defense responsibility out from underneath strategic Command and its placed trans regional missile defense capability, mission responsibilities underneath U.S. Space Command, trans regional.

Tom Temin Coming from outside of the United States, basically, or.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Going from one AOR to another. Got it. And so it used to be global missile defense, which was not a very accurate description really, of what the mission said and what we were facing. It was trans regional missile defense. And in this made a lot of sense because General Dickinson in Space Command has responsibility, the global sensor manager. Well, many of our sensors that we have that we use for missile defense, they also are able to do space domain awareness. And so instead of arbitrating between STRATCOM and Space Command about use of these sensors, putting them all up underneath one combat command solves a unit of effort year command and makes me responsive then to just one combat command. Not that we ever had fistfights or anything between the two combat commanders, but it just makes it easier for us to put it up underneath one commander.

Tom Temin And the new term now is missile defeat as opposed to just missile defense. What is the difference in how do you envision that?

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Yeah, so how I envision a missile defeat is if you picture the traditional missile defense, where it’s active defense, where you see the Patriot and you see that or EGIS BMD ships that are doing that active defense piece, and there’s also some passive defense early warning that’s part of the traditional integrated air missile defense and even attack ops that’s traditional integrated air and missile defense. But then you take a look at what we’re doing for left of launch capabilities. So before that missile gets off, gets off the rails, gets off the tail, gets out of a silo that left of launch capability so we could deny and disrupt those capabilities before they launch altogether becomes a missile defeat. And what we’re trying to do is, is we’ve been working and through a couple of different exercises, establishing a missile to feed effects coordinator. So somebody who’s responsible for taking that that whole vision that I just told you about and an exercise in that. And so in a previous exercise with Space Command, we’ve been rolling out this missile defeat effects coordinator concept in and frankly, you know, test driving it a little bit.

Tom Temin Yeah. So to kill a missile that would ordinarily come within the airspace say and you have to defend against it to defeat it on the ground or originate that’s not really missile defense command. That would be somebody else that would shoot something at it.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Right in the missile defeat effects coordinator. That’s the one who identifies the threat and is able to then influence maybe another COCOM to say, hey, here’s where your targeting should be after. Maybe there’s not kinetic effects that we can apply to that solution.

Tom Temin Yeah. So that that’s where you get back to the need for the space view, because that’s where the original knowledge of such a launch would originate in the first place.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Likely, right?

Tom Temin I guess there are maybe people on the ground in some of the areas, but I mean something.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Yeah. And some of the geographical embankments we have that they have the intel and they they’re well aware of what the adversary missile order battle is. But again, a missile defeat effects coordinator can help work that really holistically across combat commands again, because it’s a Trans regional missile threat.

Tom Temin Yeah. So there’s really an update in doctrine and an update in command structure for you in recent times. What does that have? What’s the effect of that on workforce and what you need for talent?

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Yeah, so as we’re as we’re practicing these exercises this notion it’s it it’s really been it’s a good challenge because it’s a new approach. And as my IMD staff has been working with the Space.com staff, traditionally Space.com staff, you know, they really focus on, you know, space and on orbit and in the space capabilities. Well, now we’ve brought missile defense, Trans regional missile defense requirement into them. So it’s been a good opportunity for us to exercise and integrate with our staff in that new mission set for Space Command.

Tom Temin Yeah. And the concept of the Army astronaut, that has emerged, too, and that’s not a two words that you often hear conflated. But now, now it’s a thing.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Yeah, it sure is. We couldn’t be prouder of Frank Rubio, Lieutenant Colonel Promotable. Frank Rubio, one of my Army astronauts who just returned from the International Space Station. And, you know, he’s been in the news here quite a bit lately. He set the record for an American astronaut in space, 371 days.

Tom Temin That’s more than a year.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Ago. That’s more than he has. He spent more than a year in space and he returned safe and sound. I had a chance to chat with him and catch up with him this past weekend and ask him how he’s doing as recovering. Get used to gravity again.

Tom Temin And how’s this bone density?

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler His bone density is it’s getting there. You know, as you would expect, NASA runs an incredible number of tests on him. And he didn’t call himself the lab rat, but he’s kind of he’s a very good test case for NASA right now. But so as they do the testing on him and then rehabbing him to get him, you know, back to where he needs to be, you know, in the Earth’s environment. He’s in great spirits. He’s glad to be home. He missed a couple of key family events in that unexpected year. You know, that additional time.

Tom Temin The additional time was because of the failure of a launch to get to the space station.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler What happened was they had what they assumed was micrometeorites had damaged the cooling system on the recovery on the return vehicle. So NASA’s had to send out, Russia, sent up a replacement vehicle, but it took them six months to stay on station before he and his other his Russian crewmates could return. And so but like a good soldier, he soldiered on. You know, he was extended a lot of soldiers. He had extended on deployments. Frank was just a different type of extension on his deployment in a different domain.

Tom Temin Got it.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler Super proud of him.

Tom Temin And you had three Army astronauts graduated from.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler From West Point. Yeah. So Drew Morgan, he’s the commander right now Kwajalein Atoll really at all. So I’m the senior commander responsible for KWAJ, which is out there in the South Pacific, does a lot of our strategic missions with space fence out there, does sports, all the testing for Reagan test site, for intercontinental ballistic missile tests and other missile defense tests that we do there. Drew has taken over command of that just this past summer. And then Ann McClain, who is in NASA right now. She just competed in the brigade command assessment program. She wants to go on and become an army brigade commander.

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