If you’re a military unit looking to develop your skills in space warfare, you can hire some crack squadrons based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to mount a campaign on your behalf. The target, though, won’t be your adversaries. It will be you. Some of these United States Space Force squadrons carry the title of aggressors, but they’re also professors. Through exercises and other means, they act as the adversary — the Red Team — to help Blue Team customers hone their skills in the space-enabled capabilities that are playing a growing role in modern warfare. The customers, both U.S. and international,…
Apogee
A new report covers topics familiar to anyone who studies global space policy, but the work is distinguished by its source and the sweep of its recommendations. “Securing Space: A Plan for U.S. Action” is the first report on space issued by the nonpartisan think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, founded in 1921 “to inform U.S. engagement with the world.” The report was produced by a task force that includes a former national security advisor, a former ambassador to NATO, a former congresswoman, a retired U.S. Space Force general and space experts from industry and academia. The report urges the…
U.S. military forces, including the Space Force, burnished their interoperability skills in June as Southern Star 2025, one of Latin America’s largest military exercises, got underway in Chile. Estrella Austral 2025, as it’s known in Latin America, kicked off May 24 with more than 2,700 participants conducting operations on terrain ranging from mountains to deserts and cities. The event is designed to test the readiness and adaptability of the allied partners and their ability to collaborate on operational and tactical levels. In addition to the United States, the exercise included several nations from Europe and South America. That test extends…
In 2012, Michael Kelly, a space scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, read an account of a 2002 battle in Afghanistan that claimed the lives of three United States Soldiers. Kelly learned that a U.S. Chinook helicopter on a mission to help pinned down Navy SEALs during Operation Anaconda did not receive messages warning it away from a snowy mountain peak held by the enemy. The Chinook, which carried 21 men, crash-landed under heavy fire. Three Soldiers died in the ensuing firefight. Kelly wondered: Why were the U.S. military’s satellite communications disrupted during the operation? Initially, the problems…
Sierra Space is using a payload the weight of a couple of beer kegs to demonstrate whether it can advance the idea of delivering military supplies through space. So far, tests have gone well enough that the U.S. Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) is spending nearly $1 million to continue it. The Colorado-based space infrastructure company will work to scale the 150-kilogram payload of its Ghost spacecraft up to 5 to 10 metric tons — closer to the weight of a business jet. The goal is to deliver cargo from space to any location on Earth in under 90 minutes,…
The U.S. Space Force is building on its success in rapid space deployment by cutting from two years to five months the time it takes to orbit a National Security Space Launch mission. A GPS III satellite to replace a failed component of this vital position, navigation and timing network lifted off in December 2024 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The teams behind the work pulled an existing satellite from storage, accelerated integration and launch vehicle readiness, and rapidly processed the payload for launch, according to a joint news release from the service’s Space Systems Command (SSC) and…
Space traffic experts suggest in a new report that world leaders safeguard the increasingly crowded confines of low Earth orbit by establishing a system similar to the aviation industry’s volume-based Class A, Class B and Class C approach. “The Airspace Class system aviation effectively manages traffic volume and complexity by establishing specific entry requirements for different airspace volumes,” said the October 2024 paper presented by Mitre, a federally funded technology research and development group. “Similarly, an orbital classification system can enhance space safety and sustainability by tailoring requirements to the unique characteristics and capabilities of objects operating at various altitudes.”…
Speaking at a conference in Florida, officials with the United States Space Force and the space defense industry spelled out in detail how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is tracking and targeting U.S. space assets, in part by using satellites that move across orbit in a manner described as “zigzagging.” “China doesn’t sit still. They’re all over the sky,” Clint Clark, of space awareness firm ExoAnalytic Solutions, told the Space Force Association’s Spacepower 2024 conference in Orlando. “In their strategy documents, they will tell you, whoever controls space controls the Earth.” Maneuverable Chinese satellites crisscross geosynchronous Earth orbit to keep…
Cold War tensions were high on May 23, 1967, when a colossal solar storm reportedly brought the United States and Soviet Union to the verge of nuclear war. The extreme solar flare, or burst of radiation in short wavelength, severely impaired communications near military bases in parts of the Arctic and North America, including at North American Air (now Aerospace) Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado. At roughly the same time, an extraordinary solar radio burst disrupted NORAD’s Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), the primary radar system used by Canada and the U.S. to scan Arctic skies for intercontinental ballistic…
TIROS-1, the world’s first weather satellite, operated for less than three months but inspired an Earth observation fleet that has expanded to more than 1,000 spacecraft in the seven decades that followed. TIROS-1 — for Television Infrared Observation Satellite — launched in April 1960 as the first in a five-year series of 10 TIROS satellites, each more advanced than the previous one. Sensors aboard some of today’s Earth-imaging satellites capture the entire surface of the globe every 24 hours, home in on troops conducting maneuvers and even measure the water content in soils. TIROS-1, developed early in the Space Age,…