In many ways, the Space Force has led the way in the Pentagon’s push for deeper partnerships with commercial industry. The Space Force has inked contracts with emerging space companies—non-traditional primes, in military contracting parlance—to buy services, manufacture satellites and payloads, and launch rockets. Commercial companies now or will soon provide the US military with not just communications and launch services, as they have for decades, but overhead imagery, navigation, refueling, weather data, and surveillance of other satellites in space, among other things.
“I say often that I think US commercial space industry is a massive advantage for us in the United States,” Whiting said. “Just look at the investment levels, the innovation, the speed at which they’re delivering capability, and we absolutely have to be able to leverage that capability.”
Whiting said Space Command and the Space Force could also use commercial satellites as targets to test the military’s ability to continuously track an object through a “high delta-V” maneuver—a large impulse making a significant change to its orbit. Such maneuvers could be used by an adversary’s satellite to escape detection or set up for an attack on a US satellite.
“Since Russia invaded Ukraine, there’s been some persistent satellite communications jamming, GPS jamming, and frequently these companies are the first to detect that, and so they inform us of that,” Whiting said. “Now, the question of, do these companies need indemnification, or some other contractual mechanism that helps them with the risk level they’re assuming, that is something that the Office of Secretary of War for Space Policy has identified as a national level issue to be worked.”