The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
U.S. aims to counter space-based threats
New Pentagon program will put smaller, cheaper satellites into orbit.
WASHINGTON — Hours after the news broke Wednesday the United States had picked up worrisome intelligence about Russia’s capacity to strike U.S. satellites, the Pentagon sent a missile-tracking system into orbit, part of a vast new effort to bolster the military’s growing presence in space.
The timing was coincidental. But it underscored how concerns about advances in Russian and Chinese capabilities in space have led the United States to embrace innovative ways of protecting vital communications, surveillance and GPS systems on the battlefield of the future.
The system put into orbit Wednesday was a prototype developed to test a new plan, named Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, that aims to blanket low-Earth orbit with hundreds of smaller, cheaper satellites. The approach is like a version of the Starlink internet communications system Elon Musk’s SpaceX already has in orbit, with more than 5,000 satellites. (The Pentagon prototype Wednesday was launched on a Space X rocket.)
The idea is that even if enemies of the United States could knock out some of its satellites — or even more than a dozen of them — the system could keep operating by shifting to other units in the orbiting web.
“For a long time, you could count our space constellations by the handful — satellites the size of school buses that took decades to buy and build, years to launch,” Kathleen Hicks, the deputy defense secretary, said last month at U.S. Space Command, which is responsible for coordinating the Pentagon’s military operations in space.
But now, she said, the United States is shifting to “proliferated constellations of smaller, resilient, lower-cost satellites” that can “launch almost weekly.”
Officials in Washington have increasingly realized in recent years that one of the first moves the United States would likely face in any major war with China or Russia would be an attempt to disable U.S. telecommunications, geolocation and surveillance systems in space.
That is what the new intelligence suggests Russia may be planning with its new space-based weapon, the subject of a briefing from senior national security officials to congressional leaders Thursday. Asked about the intelligence at the White House, John Kirby, the spokesperson for the National Security Council, told reporters, “I can confirm that it is related to an anti-satellite capability that Russia is developing,” but he added the Russian technology had yet to be deployed.
Right now, most U.S. military satellite systems are extremely vulnerable to such an attack because they are very small in number and very large in size. When first built, they were considered unlikely targets for any U.S. enemy, except during a nuclear war.
The constant surveillance of the world they provide has become one of the U.S.’s most important military advantages. The Pentagon can not only track major missile threats; it also can use its system to communicate among the branches of the military and send targeting information to its own weapons, while providing instant information about enemy troop or equipment movements.
The war in Ukraine has shown how vital these tools are. Relying in part on U.S. satellite imagery provided by private companies, Ukraine has been able to track Russian movements more closely than technology would have allowed in any previous war and maintain its communications systems despite Russian efforts to jam them.
Commercial satellites are also a critical part of the U.S. economy, providing everything from GPS to the communications systems used by thousands of companies from banks to gas stations.
$14 billion push
The Pentagon’s Space Development Agency is budgeting nearly $14 billion in the coming five years to build out the new system, budget documents show, though delays by Congress in approving a 2024 budget could slow the timeline, Pentagon officials said. The agency is in charge of buying the new satellites and paying for the launches to get them into low-Earth orbit for missile warning and tracking and further research, prototypes and deployment of new spacebased weapons.
Right now, the Pentagon, like NASA, is relying heavily on Musk and SpaceX to put these new satellites in space. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off Wednesday evening from Cape Canaveral in Florida that carried the two prototype Pentagon satellites that will be tested over the next two years.
New satellites
The satellites launched Wednesday — they are called Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensors (HBTSS) — are intended to help detect missiles that might be launched by China, Russia or some other nation, giving the United States a better chance to intercept and destroy them sooner.
“These HBTSS satellites are an essential step forward in our efforts to stay ahead of our adversaries,” Lt. Gen. Heath Collins of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency said in a statement before the launch.
1,000 satellites by end of decade
Todd Harrison, an aerospace engineer and space security scholar at American Enterprise Institute, said by the end of the decade, the Pentagon will likely have 1,000 new satellites in lowEarth orbit, which is less than 1,200 miles from the surface.
Chief Master Sgt. Ron Lerch, an intelligence analyst with the U.S. Space Force, said China is on its way to building its own constellation of as many as 13,000 satellites for communications and military needs. That is in addition to other advanced tools such as synthetic-aperture radar, which can use radio waves to track military movements even at night and beneath cloud cover.
“Where China is going now, they completely dwarf the Russians in terms of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance” from space, he said during a Space Force conference in Florida last month.