A cubesat sent to blaze a trail for NASA’s next space station arrived in lunar orbit Nov. 13—the first cubesat known to ever have done so—after a voyage that proved tense at times. Meanwhile the small company that created the tiny spacecraft secured a new ...
The U.S. military can’t afford the new proliferated, multi-orbit satellite constellations it needs unless military contractors cut costs by an order of magnitude, the Space Force Chief said. “We must also slash costs,” Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, Space Force Chief of Space Operations, told ...
U.S. Space Command wants to start acquiring commercial satellite services and released the overview of a new strategy to do so. Plussing up the providers of space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance creates a “many” problem for any entity that wants to interfere with U.S. activities, ...
The Space Force’s goal of improving space domain awareness continues to advance along multiple avenues. New projects include ground-based radars to surveil high Earth orbits and data from a cubesat headed on a unique route around the moon. Northrop Grumman announced that it had received ...
Two satellites set forth to geosynchronous Earth orbit Jan. 21 to join a constellation of four others surveilling the high satellite belt. Collecting data for the National Space Defense Center and “other national users” will “enhance our ability to navigate freely and safely within the GEO ...
The Space Force’s top officer thinks the U.S. needs to be able to surveil cislunar space as soon as five years from now to defend U.S. interests on and around the moon. "As the nation goes further away, as the world goes further away, from ...
Proposals combining both basic and applied university research, with manufacturers looped in, could get technology to the Space Force faster. The theory is one that the Air Force Research Laboratory is testing in the pilot year of its Space University Research Initiative. The lab’s leaders ...
Within the next five to 10 years, Space Force Brig. Gen. John M. Olson envisions far more than just one mission from NASA to return humanity to the moon—he anticipates a “vibrant commercial focus” led by rapidly expanding space companies. And a key component of ...
The United States and its allies must partner more closely to ensure space domain awareness in an increasingly complex and important domain, military space leaders from around the world said during a panel discussion in Colorado Springs, Colo. Space leaders representing 23 nations, including the ...
War in space will take on aspects of the Cold War in the future, as space powers vie for supremacy but seek to avoid the kind of kinetic warfare that could wipe out satellite constellations and undermine global activity on Earth. Two officials with the ...
Through its first year of existence, the U.S. Space Force was focused on developing the overall structure by which the entirely new service would be organized. Now, as it heads into Year 2, the force will seek to “actually operationalize” that new structure, Col. Matthew ...
The Defense Department's Space Development Agency wants to blanket Earth with a constellation of low-cost, open-architecture data-relay and missile-tracking satellites whose sheer numbers, along with their 1,000-kilometer-high orbits, would theoretically thwart some modes of interference—but not all. With all going according to plan so far, ...