Image

Two Atlas V boosters with a person between them.

Atlas V boosters, made by the United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, at
Cape Canaveral, which will launch future government missions. Credit...Christopher Payne for The New
York Times

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Space Force leaders readily describe their guardians as working toward a state of combat readiness,
even as they hope an era of actual conflict never arrives. In October, I went to the Pentagon to meet
with Gen. Chance Saltzman, the chief of space operations and the Space Force’s highest-ranking officer.
Saltzman remarked that several decades back, when he began working with satellites in the Air Force,
the notion that there could be combat losses in space was not part of the conversation. But “those are
discussions now,” he told me, “because both the Chinese and the Russians have demonstrated
operational capabilities that truly placed those assets at risk.” In 2007, China’s decision to test an ASAT
weapon to destroy one of its own satellites sent shock waves through the U.S. military and created a
vast field of debris. A similar Russian tactic, in 2021, generated more than 1,500 fragments and led
Secretary of State Antony Blinken to describe the act as “recklessly conducted.” The Space Force’s own
squadrons, Saltzman told me, were still tracking pieces of junk that date to the 2007 explosion. “You
know, the other domains kind of clean themselves up after war,” Saltzman said. “You shoot an airplane
down, it falls out of the sky. Ships sink out of the sea lanes. Even on land, you bring the bulldozers in and
you move things around. But space doesn’t heal itself.”

Debris has led military strategists to ponder a related issue: In space, it’s difficult to get out of the way of
conflict. Right now, Saltzman noted, if you pull up real-time data to see where flights are around the
world, the airspace over Ukraine is empty. “You will see a void,” he said. “Commercial air traffic does not
want to fly over Ukraine.” The same thing happens in shipping lanes, like the Strait of Hormuz, when the
Middle East is in turmoil, as it is now. “So in other domains, refugees, displaced persons, people get out
of the way of conflict. Commercial entities move out of the way and avoid conflict.” In space, orbital
mechanics take over; machines keep going around and around, following the laws of gravity. NASA
satellites may not be able to steer away from a potential combat zone. And commercial entities can’t
move — or won’t know where or when to move. “And then potentially every satellite becomes more
debris,” Saltzman remarked. “Every peaceful satellite could become a weapon accidentally.”

I asked Saltzman what he and his colleagues had learned from observing the war in Ukraine. With a
caveat that the fighting is hardly over — “it could still be a catastrophe on a grand scale,” he said — he
pointed to several crucial events. The first was how one of Russia’s earliest endeavors was to deny
Ukrainian troops access to a satellite communications system they relied upon, known as Viasat, which
is stationed in the distant geosynchronous orbital belt. “And they did it with a cyberattack against the
ground infrastructure,” he said. “So you attack the ground network to achieve the space effect you
want.” This wasn’t a surprise to him, he said, yet it was a reminder of the potential power of
cyberwarfare and how battles to dominate space could still be terrestrial.

Another crucial point came after that attack — Ukraine’s decision to go to a commercial vendor, SpaceX,
and use its Starlink system for combat communications. Here the lesson was twofold. First, that what
Saltzman called “commercial augmentation” could prove vital in a crisis. As important, he added,
Starlink — a configuration of hundreds of “proliferated” small satellites flying in low Earth orbit — has
proved hard to bring down. “The Russians are trying to interrupt it,” he said, “and they’re not having
very good success.” And the takeaway is that proliferated systems of many small machines in low orbit
can be more technologically resilient to hacking and disruption than a few big machines in higher orbits.
This seems to fit into Saltzman’s goal of maintaining strength during combat while achieving a larger
objective of avoiding conflict altogether. “If I have two or three satellite communications doing nuclear
command and control, maybe those are targets,” he explained. “But if I take nuclear command and
control and spread it across 400 satellites that are zipping over the horizon [every] 15 minutes, there’s a
targeting problem. How many satellites do I have to shoot down now to take out the U.S. nuclear
command and control?”

Image

An Atlas V rocket.

An overarching priority of the Space Force is to have an awareness of every object — natural and man-
made — in Earth’s orbit.Credit...Christopher Payne for The New York Times

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If the answer was 400, it would make things difficult for the enemy. And while small satellites in a large
configuration could potentially be a more expensive investment than two or three megasatellites, the
shift could be worthwhile. If an adversary believes that it cannot achieve a military objective, Saltzman
remarked, it will hesitate to cross “a threshold of violence.” No conflicts. No debris. No crisis.

Over the course of several days in Los Angeles at Space Systems Command — a Space Force division that
plans and acquires technology — I met with about a dozen colonels who detailed their ideas for the next
decade. Some discussions addressed the Space Force’s goal of being able to launch satellites within, say,
24 hours in urgent situations. I learned the force is working on developing machines that can be refueled
in orbit, as well as satellites that can repair other satellites. Because rockets and orbital objects travel so
fast — the International Space Station circles Earth every 90 minutes — some tacticians are pondering
being able to deliver, via launches into space, a high-value package, such as a rare medication or a vital
part for an F-35 fighter jet, halfway across the world in as little as 30 minutes.

Other projects are less speculative. There are deep concerns within the military about China and Russia’s
hypersonic glide weapons, which may be able to avoid defense systems through bursts of speed and
pretzeled flight paths. In response, the force is trying to implement a new system of detection in the
next several years at low and middle Earth orbits. It took ample funds to build and launch the old
systems, Col. Heather Bogstie, who helps oversee the program, told me. “But with the speed our
adversaries are fielding these hypersonic glide vehicles, we don’t have the luxury of time anymore.”

Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on keeping the orbital realm
peaceful and sustainable, told me that the U.S. military has faced perennial challenges in reducing costs
and delivery times for new space-based projects — and that the Space Force has yet to prove it can buck
that trend. Still, the force is trying to nurture America’s domestic rocket industry — acting as a facilitator
for national-security launches while stoking the growth and bringing down the expense of fledgling
commercial enterprises. The Department of Defense sometimes requires big rockets to take heavy
satellites farther into space — that is, into the MEO or GEO layers — making for significant technical
challenges for new companies. Col. Douglas Pentacost, the deputy director of launch enterprise at Space
Systems Command, also told me that because some launches carry “very precious,” “supersecret”
instruments, they cannot fail under any circumstances.

For now, SpaceX has demonstrated the capabilities and safety record to carry these payloads. But
Pentacost told me: “We can’t rely on one company to always be there for us. That’s basically taking us
back to the 1980s, when we were relying on the space shuttle. And then when the space shuttle had its
unfortunate accident, we had no way into space for several years.” In an effort to diversify risks,
Pentacost’s team is working with the United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and
Boeing. Commercial companies — Firefly, Rocket Lab and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, for instance — are in
the mix, too. The goal would be a range of reliable and cheaper launch companies to choose from by the
late 2020s. Pentacost said he would soon like to be able to get any payload into orbit at any time.

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