Future Space Domain Awareness Needs for National Security Space

Commentary by Lt. Gen. (Ret.) John Shaw andSean Kirkpatrick

Published October 31, 2024

This series-featuring scholars from the Aerospace Security Project, non-resident experts, and the broader space community-explores key space trends, challenges, and policy issues that will confront the next administration as well as offers recommendations for how to navigate them.

The rapid growth in the number, sizes, maneuverability, capability, and orbital diversity of objects in the Earth-Moon system will demand much more capable space domain awareness (SDA) in the years ahead. Of focused concern for the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Intelligence Community will be the growing number of potential threats, both overt and covert, in the domain.

• The current U.S. and allied SDA capability lags where it needs to keep up with the rapidly changing SDA environment. Meanwhile, China is swiftly growing its own SDA capabilities, which sets it up to have information superiority in space.
• The U.S. Space Force, U.S. Space Command, and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), in particular, need to transition from the traditional practice of cataloging relatively constant-energy objects in traditional orbits to the ability to dynamically characterize and track frequently maneuvering objects, as well as unknown objects within congested environments, in nontraditional orbital regimes. This latter approach more closely mirrors war-fighting approaches in other domains.
• The Department of Commerce (DOC) needs to swiftly mature its space traffic management capabilities to "offload" the traditional cataloging responsibility from the DOD to allow it to accelerate its focus on SDA against threats.

The emerging space threat is no longer emerging. It is here. China and Russia have weapons in space, some aimed not only at deterring U.S. military advantages but also crippling the U.S., and Western, way of life and associated economies. The proliferation of space technologies, accompanied by the lowering of the cost of space access, has driven a significant explosion in the satellite population. This expansion gives rise not only to a space traffic management problem but also to adversaries wishing to hide weapons and other associated capabilities within that population. It's a similar tactic to terrorists hiding weapons caches in civilian populations. To understand what's at risk both from a traffic management perspective and a threat perspective, including what could be hiding, the United States needs an improved and exquisite SDA. Not to mention that all space exploration within the Earth-Moon system and beyond requires SDA.

The current DOD SDA architecture and doctrine (including the Space Force's long-delayed Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis System, or ATLAS) still relies too heavily on traditional cataloging orbit propagation techniques and antiquated data integration and fusion methods. This approach was sufficient in earlier times when the domain was largely benign and sparsely populated with mostly large nation-state satellites operating positionally and predictably; it will not meet the space war-fighting needs of the future. The rapid proliferation of active satellites (commercial, academic and scientific, and nation-state), their decrease in relative size, the complexity of capabilities, and the growing autonomy and maneuverability of many of them, especially in nontraditional orbital regimes, all present new and significant SDA challenges.

More aggressive and sophisticated ways and means to improve SDA should include full-spectrum pursuit across multiple dimensions within a broader SDA framework:

• Characterization Phenomenology: From passive illumination to active illumination, as well as tracking of emissions (ranging from radio frequency to infrared) and dynamic signatures.
• Sensor Location: Increased reliance on space-based sensors across the dimension of phenomenologies (the relative value of terrestrial sensors will decrease over time as more activity moves further up into the Earth-Moon system).
• Temporal Scale: Shift from traditional, deliberate propagative approaches to dynamic characterization, tracking, and real-time feedback "fire control" methodologies.
• Data Fusion: Simultaneous integration and exploitation of all data sources-from traditional to allied to commercial (the current architecture still struggles to fully utilize all available data).

Such an aggressive approach across all of these dimensions will also need to leverage cutting-edge predictive analytics, machine learning, and other forms of artificial intelligence to process the massive and diverse forms of information at the speed of war.

One decelerant to change facing the DOD has been the delayed transition of the DOC to space traffic management responsibilities. The DOC needs the appropriate funding (insufficient to date), capabilities, and workforce to achieve this transition.

The DOD, led by the U.S. Space Force and the U.S. Space Command, and in partnership with the NRO, should take several initiatives to aid in this transition:

1. Prioritize the development and fielding of dynamic "fire control"-like tracking and characterization approaches.
2. Pursue demonstrations of technologies on orbit to conduct the full range of phenomenologies for SDA (including active illumination) as well as exquisite characterization of resident objects.
3. Enable and leverage commercial capabilities; integrate all available data streams within its war-fighting constructs; and focus on data integrity, validation, and diversification.
4. Reform data-sharing policies to integrate allies and partners with the next administration, leading the change and leveraging the data-sharing constructs to solidify partnerships much like the model used with the Government Communications Headquarters during World War II.

Without these efforts and commitments, the United States will lag behind China as China builds and maintains information superiority in the space domain and continues to demonstrate an ability to use it effectively in its space operations.

Lt. Gen. John Shaw (Retd.) is the deputy commander of the U.S. Space Command. Sean Kirkpatrick is the former deputy director of intelligence and Director of National Intelligence representative to the U.S. Space Command.

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