Retired Lt. Gen. John E. Shaw is often cited as the Pentagon’s pioneer of dynamic space operations, which involve maneuvering satellites in and between orbits and refueling them to better operate in contested areas.
Now he wants the military to become more dynamic in monitoring and tracking objects and threats in orbit, as part of a broader change and improvement in space surveillance, he said on August 26.
“We’re still using the old method of tracking orbits and space debris and cataloging everything,” Shaw, the former deputy commander of U.S. Space Command, said during a SpaceNews webinar. “And we haven’t really gotten to the next level of dynamically tracking hard-to-detect and hard-to-track targets in non-standard orbits. We just haven’t gotten there yet, but we need to get there.”
The Space Force, Space Command and other Pentagon leaders have been talking about improving space surveillance for years, Shaw noted – from expanding surveillance range to the ability to detect the intentions behind movements.
“And yet the capabilities provided to Space Command today are not significantly different from those that existed five, six or seven years ago,” Shaw said.
It is a skill that Shaw compared to “looking under the lamppost for our keys.”
The former Space Force general isn’t the only one calling for improved SDA, as space area awareness is called. Earlier this year, Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said the force needs to invest in “actionable space area awareness” that gives decision makers more context and understanding of what’s happening in the area.
And in June, Col. Bryon McClain, program manager for SDA and combat power, said his office wanted to be open to new ideas and technologies from industry for the mission. A request for information from the office also hinted at the idea of satellites that could be refueled and move to get closer to other objects in orbit – similar to the dynamic operations Shaw envisioned.
The key question, said Brian Weeden of the Aerospace Corporation during the SpaceNews event, is: “How do we move beyond just tracking things in space?”
In particular, the Pentagon needs to develop a “holistic understanding of the space environment, capabilities and threats,” Weeden said, and not just limit itself to cataloging and tracking objects in orbit.
But this endeavor is partly complicated by the fact that just trying to catalog and track everything is no small feat—and it’s getting even harder as more satellites are launched each year.
“We have not yet solved the fundamental problem of orbital tracking in catalog maintenance. There are still major challenges,” Weeden said.
Space Delta 2 is the Space Force organization responsible for this problem, which must keep track of over 45,000 objects in orbit. The plan is to eventually transfer much of this “traffic management” responsibility to the Commerce Department, so the Space Force can focus on the kind of domain awareness that Shaw, Saltzman and others want. That process has faced delays, but Commerce Department officials told SpaceNews last month that they were close to moving the new system into beta testing.
