HOT TOPIC: U.S. ARMY NEEDS SATELLITES
"Every soldier is space enabled" is one of the taglines in this newly released Army video that highlights why the Army cares about space.
This is a message the Army will be pushing this week. About 2,220 active-duty soldiers,  reservists and civilians make up the "space forces" under the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. Soldiers communicate, navigate, target, find the enemy, predict the weather and protect forces in the field "based on combat and support assets available from space," said Army spokeswoman Lira Frye.
Space forces are assigned to five key missions: intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; missile warning; environmental monitoring; satellite communications; and positioning, navigation and timing, or PNT.
Frye said Army leaders decided this was a good time to highlight space because activities are growing and the Army wants to attract more officers to the space career field known as Functional Area 40, or FA40. | | CYBER
SPACE A PRIORITY FOR AIR FORCE CHIEF DATA OFFICER
 The Air Force's newly appointed chief data officer, Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, recently spoke with SpaceNews about her role in connecting different parts of the Air Force and bringing them into a "multi-domain" world.
Space plays a key role, she said. "How do we ensure that space data can link to air data and cyberspace data?" she asked. "We're having that conversation/" Space is one area where we have "huge opportunities for data analytics, "Crider said. Her office is now working closely with Air Force Space Command on
"what's the nature of the data architecture that would best support our ability to learn as much as we can about all the data we're bringing down from space." | | SATCOM
INDUSTRY MARKETS HIGH-CAPACITY SATELLITES FOR MILITARY UAVs
Intelsat and other sat ellite operators see unmanned aircraft as a critical target market for their new high-capacity spacecraft that push more data at faster speeds than the legacy wide beam kind. Vast amounts of bandwidth are available for live high-definition video streaming but the issue is how to get it into military UAVs that have older antennas and terminals. Satellite providers say all it takes are software upgrades but modifications of military equipment seldom are as simple as they seem.
In a test this summer, a Reaper military aircraft took off from a test facility in North Dakota on a 1,075 nautical mile trip. Its mission was to show whether it could travel seamlessly across spot beams on a satellite without losing contact.
The industry has loads of bandwidth available for these types of missions. It remains to be seen whether DoD will take advantage of it. | |
SN INTERVIEW
'BANNER YEAR' FOR SPACEX: President Gwynne Shotwell talks about the company's bullish outlook — including significant growth in its military business — with SpaceNews' Caleb Henry. Some highlights: SpaceX is now on track to more than double its personal best for launches conducted in a single year, wants to further accelerate its launch pace in 2018 by perhaps 10 or more missions. "We'll fly more next year than this year, knock on wood, and I think we will probably level out at about that rate, 30 to 40 per year." With 16 launches completed and three to four remaining by year's end, SpaceX is tracking to perform around 20 launches this year.
OPINION & ANALYSIS
AIR FORCE LAUNCH STRATEGY CRITICIZED: Industry analyst and consultant Loren Thompson blasts the Air Force's launch modernization plan in a new piece in Forbes.com. He points out that while the head of U.S. Strategic Command said earlier this month that he will no longer support the development of exquisite, billion-dollar satellites — satellites he described as "big, fat, juicy targets," the Air Force agency charged with developing military space systems is moving ahead with a "launch service agreement" that requires prospective launch providers to spend big bucks developing a new heavy-lift rocket so they can loft exquisite, billion-dollar satellites into orbit. What's wrong with this picture? One part of the Air Force's space community doesn't seem to know what the other part is doing.
SPACE, CYBER WEAPONS' IMPACT ON NUCLEAR DETERRENCE: Former undersecretary of defense for policy James Miller and analyst Richard Fontaine iof the Center for a New American Security noted in a DefenseOne oped that advances in cyber weapons and counter-space capabilities are "creating new pressures on concepts of nuclear deterrence as traditionally construed. As a result, there is a "real and growing possibility of rapid and unintended escalation of any U.S.-Russia crisis or conflict." The result is an incentive to use non-kinetic cyber or space attacks to degrade the other side's military. This puts the onus on the attacked side to dare escalate with "kinetic" lethal attacks. They raise an interesting question: Would the United States or Russia respond with, say, missile strikes or a bombing campaign in response to some fried computers or dead robots in outer space? | | | | |
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