The potential benefits of human crews aboard U.S. Space Force missions rates consideration in a new think tank report on dynamic space operations, described as methods of increasing versatility, adaptability and maneuverability in the realm. “Just as human astronauts were essential to the repair of and upgrades to the Hubble Space Telescope and the rescue of several other satellites, Guardians in space may be essential for future Space Force missions,” retired Space Force Col. Charles Galbreath wrote in a November 2025 report for the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. The paper is titled “A Broader Look at Dynamic Space Operations:…
Apogee
A successful second launch, accompanied by its first recovery of a reusable booster, moves the Blue Origin New Glenn rocket forward on its path toward National Security Space Launch (NSSL) certification. The November 2025 launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida deployed payloads for NASA that will help prepare the agency for Mars exploration and carried out testing of telemetry for Viasat, the satellite broadband company based in Carlsbad, California. Blue Origin, owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and based in the Seattle area, joined SpaceX as launch companies that have landed a reusable booster on an ocean platform.…
Inthe mid-20th century, the world’s superpowers raced to the moon. In the 21st, they’re racing for control of the orbital algorithms that may determine who wins — or survives — the wars of the future. From Beijing to Washington to Moscow, artificial intelligence (AI) is propelling military power on orbit. The United States still commands the largest constellation of military satellites, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is moving “breathtakingly fast,” according to U.S. Space Command chief Gen. Stephen N. Whiting. Beijing’s new Three-Body Computing Constellation, a network of supercomputing satellites, will process data on orbit using AI models —…
Nearly 50 years before chess champion Garry Kasparov battled IBM’s Deep Blue computer in the ballyhooed man-versus-machine contest of 1996, a British cryptographer and mathematician named Alan Turing was imagining the building blocks of what is now known as artificial intelligence (AI). As early as the 1940s, he predicted that machines one day would play a mean game of chess. Turing was a World War II code breaker at the famed Government Code and Cypher School at the Bletchley Park house in Buckinghamshire, England. It was the center of Allied code breaking during World War II and a place where…
Satellites send back information of one kind or another to Earth. They can do their jobs better when they operate independently, free from terrestrial tethers that restrict performance, keeping course and conducting vital tracking and analysis on their own. Key to accomplishing this is the autonomy afforded by artificial intelligence and machine learning, or AI/ML — the same technology sweeping through everyday life on Earth. Nowhere does AI promise greater transformation than in space defense, where it can inform and speed the decision-making, first moves and reactions that spell the difference in conflict. “There is no doubt that artificial intelligence…
In Washington, where bureaucratic gravity can freeze programs before they get off the ground, the Department of War (DOW) has launched one of the fastest-moving initiatives in recent history. In late 2024, amid global anxiety over advances in artificial intelligence (AI), the Pentagon dismantled its year-old Task Force Lima — the team charged with studying generative AI across the military — and replaced it with something far more ambitious and operational: the Artificial Intelligence Rapid Capabilities Cell (AI RCC). Backed by $100 million in early funding and driven by a partnership between the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO)…
Imagine satellites that can watch, interpret and respond in real time. Firefighters get immediate notification as wildfires ignite along a remote woodland border. Engineers in a bustling city are warned to redirect traffic as a violent summer storm approaches. A ship is alerted as ice drifts into shipping lanes. Seconds and minutes can be critical for response times, but for decades such events slipped by unseen, buried in mountains of archived satellite data and discovered too late to make a difference. Today, society stands at the threshold of a radical transformation: an era of artificial intelligence (AI) where satellites aren’t…
Concepts that once conjured up images of sci-fi fantasy — killer robots, autonomous drones and self-correcting satellites — now are within the reach of military commanders. Machines can be trained to process information at speeds far beyond human capacity, creating a thorny ethical debate: If artificial intelligence (AI) can assess threats and predict human behavior quicker than people, when — if ever — should machines be allowed to make lethal, split-second decisions? Already, over Ukraine, semiautonomous, AI-powered drones are acquiring targets without the help of their human pilots. In the early days of the war, dozens of Ukrainian and Russian…
Militaries spend billions of dollars on satellites to relay sensitive information and provide real-time battlefield data, so it’s imperative to avoid breakdowns and expensive rescues of wayward orbiting objects. That’s why a growing field of engineers, robotics experts and mathematicians are developing AI algorithms to perform what is known as predictive maintenance. Using tested models that have proven successful with aircraft, experts are using AI to predict a satellite’s performance, temperature spikes and future power failures so that one day maintenance can occur before breakdowns, keeping battlefield awareness and communications intact. The goal is to usher in an era of…
With the war in Ukraine pushing Poland to accelerate its space defense program, the NATO nation has orbited its first three military satellites. The spacecraft were launched in November 2025 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Poland plans to send up three more military satellites in 2026 to boost a fleet that will produce intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data for analysis by the military’s new Geospatial Intelligence and Satellite Services Agency, Defense News reported. The satellites were developed by a partnership between Iceye of Finland, a major European satellite manufacturer, and a private…