X-37B Space Plane Eclipses Its Record for Longest Flight
By Amanda Miller
A Space Force X-37B reusable space plane surpassed 780 days in space July 7, eclipsing its prior endurance record.
The Space Force’s Space Delta 9 operates the uncrewed, Boeing-built X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), which belongs to the 3rd Space Experimentation Squadron. Space Force officials did not immediately respond to queries.
The Space Force has never disclosed how many X-37B Orbital Test Vehicles it owns and does not publicize the classified program’s mission itineraries. However, Boeing Space announced the new record on social media.
The Space Force says the uncrewed X-37B is a testbed for technologies associated with reusable space vehicles and largely classified space experiments. The spacecraft is 29 feet long, one-quarter the length of the Space Shuttle. Taking off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla., the first three OTV missions landed at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. The past two returned at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., close to the Cape Canaveral launch site.
X-37B missions have grown progressively longer over time. OTV-1 lasted 224 days in 2010. OTV-5 set the prior record of 780 days, remaining in space from September 2017 to October 2019.
OTV-6 launched from Cape Canaveral on May 17, 2020. Two publicly revealed payloads included the Air Force Academy’s FalconSAT-8, which the X-37B deployed into orbit with five experiments and technology demonstrations aboard; and the Naval Research Laboratory’s experimental Photovoltaic Radio-frequency Antenna Module, intended to convert solar energy into RF microwave energy.
Secrecy surrounding the X-37B fueled suspicions in China and Russia that the X-37B is “secretly an offensive weapon,” according to a report by the Secure World Foundation updated in May 2022. That report called such fears unfounded, noting that observed from the ground, the X-37B appears to be “exactly what the Space Force claims it is.”
The U.S. government will start missions on a new uncrewed space plane, Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser, in 2023. NASA has contracted flights on Dream Chaser to resupply the International Space Station.
‘Eye-Watering’ Intel From Space
By Amanda Miller
Space Force operators and intelligence specialists will work side by side in the future to deliver the full “TPED” intelligence cycle—“tasking, processing, exploitation, and dissemination”—said Space Force Lt. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting.
Whiting commands the Space Force’s Space Operations Command, or SpOC. In the July 7 episode of the Aerospace Corp’s Space Policy Show, Whiting said intelligence is one of SpOC’s four “core competencies,” alongside cyber, operations, and combat support. Intelligence is an area where he said the service has made the most progress so far.
SpOC’s Space Delta 7—organizationally similar to an Air Force wing—sends intelligence detachments to other deltas around the service. This helps tailor intelligence assets to the given mission, delivering intel “right into their ops floor,” Whiting said. “So if you are at Space Delta 4”—the missile warning delta at Buckley Space Force Base, Colo.—“all of that intel is about missile warning, missile defense, and the threats to those systems.”
The Space Force will add three more intelligence squadrons “over the next couple years,” enabling the command to carry out the full “TPED” cycle, “all focused on space,” Whiting said.
Now that there is a Space Force, intelligence Guardians can be space specialists “instead of bouncing in and out and going and doing other things.” Space operators and cyber specialists will “grow up together” with their counterparts who specialize in intelligence, Whiting noted.
“In fact, we talk about a left-seat, right-seat model, where—when our space operators or cyber operators are ‘executing mission’—there’s an intel operator sitting right next to them bringing them that intel that they need,” Whiting said. “And they’re going to figure out new ways of operating that I think are going to be eye-watering as we move forward.”
The Space Force in June stood up a second intelligence-focused delta, Space Delta 18, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, to operate the new National Space Intelligence Center. Its 1st Space Analysis Squadron and 2nd Space Analysis Squadron date back to 2008, originally the Space Analysis Squadron and Counterspace Analysis Squadron of the Air Force’s Space and Missiles Analysis Group.
In an interview with AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in May, Whiting said governments such as China’s and Russia’s can attack satellites in orbit, but that cyberattacks offer a “lower bar to entry” to lesser powers, such as Iran or North Korea. Space systems’ cyber vulnerabilities represent the “soft underbelly” of the U.S. satellite infrastructure, he said.
“So everything we do has to be relative to the threat,” Whiting said July 7. “In fact, the threat is the reason we have a U.S. Space Force.”
Whiting: USSF Plans to Add 3 New Intelligence Squadrons
The Space Force plans to add three new intelligence squadrons in the next two years, doubling the number of squadrons in Space Delta 7, said Lt. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting, commander of the service’s Space Operations Command.
In an online discussion hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Whiting described the advances the Space Force has made in intelligence since becoming an independent military service. The Space Operations Command sits “at the nexus” of the Space Force and the newly re-created U.S. Space Command, Whiting explained. Known as “SpOC,” the command possesses “all the operational capability in the Space Force.”
SpOC leads missions “like space domain awareness, electromagnetic warfare, missile warning, operational-level command and control, defensive cyber capabilities, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, satellite communications, precision, navigation and timing, and orbital warfare,” he said. Adding more intelligence activities would contribute to the command’s priority of being “ISR-led and cyber secure.”
Whiting said intelligence is the area in which the Space Force has made the most progress since its creation in December 2019. “When we stood up the Space Force, we went all around the U.S. Air Force to find all the places that intelligence was being done, either for space or from space, and we brought all of that in, in partnership with the Air Force, and it all transferred over to the Space Force,” Whiting said. The result was Space Delta 7, the command’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance delta, which has detachments that embed within each of the command’s other numbered deltas.
“So if you’re the Delta 4 commander at Buckley [Space Force Base] outside of Denver and you have the global missile warning responsibility, your S-2 function—your intel function—is actually a detachment of that Delta 7. And that major who runs that detachment? … They take their day-to-day direction from Delta 4,” Whiting said.
He said the plan to add three more intelligence squadrons is “all fully funded—all the billets are already in place.” The new squadrons will include a threat-analysis squadron, a targeting squadron, and a PED squadron, short for processing, exploitation, and dissemination.
“So we are really getting after the intel requirements that our space warfighters need, and those intel Guardians are just leading the way for us, and we’re very, very proud of what they’ve done.”
Saltzman Picked to Succeed Raymond as CSO
By Amanda Miller
President Joe Biden has nominated Space Force Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman to be the Space Force’s next Chief of Space Operations. Saltzman currently serves as the deputy CSO for operations, intelligence, sustainment, cyber, and nuclear.
The Pentagon announced Saltzman’s nomination July 28. Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, the first person to serve in Space Force, is retiring.
Saltzman holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Boston University and a master of strategic management from George Washington University, D.C., according to his official bio. He went from Air Force Space Command in 2016 to the Pentagon, where he served as director of future operations at Headquarters Air Force. After that, he was director of current operations.
A year as deputy commander of U.S. Air Forces Central preceded his return to D.C., where he took up his current post in August 2020. In that same month he transferred into the Space Force and received his third star.
Speaking with AFA president retired Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright at the AFA Warfare Symposium in March, Saltzman said he wasn’t confident in today’s “space status quo” in the event of a “high-end fight” with China’s military “if all sides of a fight are using space the way they currently do now.”
“I don’t like our advantages there—the complexity of synchronizing in the Indo-Pacific, the distances we have to cover,” Saltzman said. China is “going to have targeting capability. They’ve got advanced weapons. … I don’t like to win 51 to 50. That’s not the way I want to go to war with these guys.”
This shift from the “benign space environment” the U.S. military enjoyed in the past means it now will “operate against a thinking adversary that is committed to denying us those space capabilities,” Saltzman stated.
Instead, he said that presenting “a formidable force” to deny any benefits of an attack in space could be “one of the cornerstones of deterrence,” along with being able to “impose costs” on an adversary as punishment for “aggressive behavior in space.”
A strategy for doing so, he said, requires not just new equipment for a more resilient space architecture but also training and investing “to make sure that our operators, whether they’re providing ISR, SATCOM, missile warning, electronic warfare, any of those capabilities” are “the best trained in the world.”
Smaller Sats, More Orbits Can Boost Resilience
By Abraham Mahshie
The Department of the Air Force’s new space acquisition chief said he will seek to expand the types of orbits used by the Space Force’s future satellite constellations in the interest of improving their resilience. At the same time, he would aim to acquire smaller satellites that can be produced more quickly.
Frank Calvelli worked for 30 years at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), including eight years as its principal deputy director, before his confirmation to the long-vacant DAF position of assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration in April.
“You get the sense that we really, really need to do something with our architecture,” Calvelli said at a media roundtable discussion June 28.
“I think the day without space is a horrible day for the nation, right?” he said, reflecting on the threats posed by Russia and China in space. “The nation depends on space,” he said.
A week prior, the new space acquisition chief spoke at an AFA Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies webinar, describing how he would apply his NRO experiences to program management to the Space Force.
At the Pentagon, Calvelli commended the work of the Space Development Agency for proposing its constellation of proliferated low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites for added resiliency.
“For too long, the DOD side of the house has just predominantly worried about [geosynchronous] orbits … I think you’ve got to shake things up,” he said. “From a resiliency perspective, I think we get it by proliferating the architecture more.”
“I think orbit diversification, getting into LEO, getting into [medium-Earth orbit], getting into elliptical orbits, like a polar orbit or a halo orbit—even trying some crazy things on other orbits that are available—I think is really going to add a lot of resiliency,” according to Calvelli.
Achieving space architecture resiliency will also require faster production of satellites. Calvelli believes that can be done by producing smaller satellites.
“We want to build as fast as we can and launch them as fast as we can,” he said in response to a question from Air Force Magazine. “To go a little bit faster, you got to build a smaller-sized spacecraft.”
Calvelli learned at the NRO that building large systems takes years, from sourcing the materials to developing the physics and constructing the system. In turn, those large systems are designed to last more than five years.
Small spacecraft can be constructed faster and used for shorter periods of time.
“You could actually just do a two-year design life or a three-year design life and use more readily available components,” he said. “Launch has gotten so inexpensive that it’s cheaper to replenish than it is to keep building.”