From GSSAP to RG-XX, Space Force Bringing “Solution Diversity” to Space Domain Awareness

To better understand the space operational environment, the United States Space Force has traditionally relied on military-operated constellations like the Space Based Space Surveillance system (SBSS) and the Geosynchrnous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP), both of which provide space situational awareness (SSA) data that simply identifies and tracks man-made objects in orbit. But SSA is vital to a broader Space Force imperative known as space domain awareness (SDA), which goes another step further in not only identifying and tracking man-made objects in space, but understanding their intent and behavior, as well.

Now, the Space Force wants commercial space companies to provide their own SSA data to the SDA mission, through a new program, currently known as Geosynchronous Reconnaissance & Surveillance Constellation (or RG-XX). 

In this episode of "The Elara Edge," Col (Ret) Ken Bowling breaks down the opportunities and challenges of bringing SSA data to the SDA mission. A retired Colonel with the United States Air Force, Ken commanded units at both Group and Squadron levels, and brings with him over 25 years of satellite research and development experience, and space situational awareness expertise. 

"The Elara Edge" is hosted by Scott King and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. The full story can be found on Elara Nova's Insights page here. Music was produced by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio.

Transcript

Host: Scott King

SME: Col (Ret) Ken Bowling, Partner at Elara Nova

00:02 - 01:33

To better understand the space operational environment, the United States Space Force has traditionally relied on military-operated constellations like the Space Based Space Surveillance system (SBSS) and the Geosynchrnous Space Situational Awareness Program (or GSSAP), both of which provide space situational awareness data that simply identifies and tracks man-made objects in orbit. 

But space situational awareness data, also known as SSA, is vital to a broader Space Force imperative for space domain awareness, or SDA: which goes another step further in not only identifying and tracking man-made objects in space, but also understanding their intent and behavior, as well.

Now, the Space Force wants commercial space companies to provide their own SSA data to the SDA mission, through a new program, currently known as Geosynchronous Reconnaissance & Surveillance Constellation (or RG-XX). 

Welcome to The Elara Edge! Here to discuss these space domain awareness programs, and the opportunities and challenges of bringing commercial SSA data to the SDA mission, is Elara Nova partner Ken Bowling. A retired Colonel with the United States Air Force, Ken commanded units at both Group and Squadron levels, and brings with him over 25 years of satellite research and development experience, and space situational awareness expertise. 

Sir, welcome to the show!

01:34 - 01:35

Thank you. Glad to be here. 

01:35 - 01:45

We’re happy to have you. Now, Sir, let's begin with GSSAP. 

Can you introduce us to this Space Force program and its role as it relates to the space domain awareness mission?

01:46 - 03:24

Yeah, I'll do the best I can. Just keep in mind that everything that I say regarding GSSAP and any other space-based capabilities that may or may not be actively part of the Space Force inventory. My answers and comments today are based upon open source media, not anything that I may have picked up in my time on active duty while I was in the U.S. Air Force, serving in the space community.

So GSSAP has been around for a while. It's development effort - it was not well known, if known at all, as it was supposed to be. In 2014, roughly, when we were still the Air Force and Space Command was part of the Air Force, it was a capability at Geosynchronous orbit that provided space situational awareness through persistent and, relatively speaking, nearby, meaning it was actually in geosynchronous orbit with other geosynchronous objects such as communications satellites and other things, in such a way that it was able to survey and surveil geosynchronous orbit.

And in recent years it has served its purpose well, according to all sorts of published media on it. And they're even talking about today - openly - about a next generation RG-XX, follow on or whatever you want to call it. They haven’t given it a name yet, a formal name. And I think it even includes the potential to have commercial vendors provide some of that capability. At least they're not being excluded from the conversation.

03:25 - 03:42

Now, you mentioned that GSSAP wasn’t well known when it was first fielded by the government. But how has the operating environment in space changed over time, to the point where Space Force officials are not only publicly acknowledging GSSAP’s existence, but openly talking about fielding other space domain awareness programs, as well?

03:43 - 06:56

Yeah, it has and really, the world has changed. Not the least of which has been the threat over time, but also just the way the U.S. Space Force, since its activation as a new service for the Department of War, now, the mindset about space and space warfare and space operations has changed dramatically.

Over the years it was abundantly clear that there was very little space threat, other than the launching of a rocket and a satellite on board was a rough ride, and it was a tough environment to survive and then once you got on orbit, whatever orbit you were in, there were all sorts of things that you had to survive: temperature changes, radiation environments, maybe micrometeorite hits and so forth and so on. Things that were just part of the space environment, and a lot of weapons systems were built to just survive those environments. 

Almost no thinking was put into operationally - how do they survive an attack by an adversary. Not just non-kinetic attack, but potentially kinetic attack and we've seen that our eyes were opened in the late 90s when we saw the threat of direct-ascent, anti-satellite weapons, we call them direct ascent ASATs, both by Russia and China and even the United States shot down a failing satellite ourselves and so we've acknowledged for a long time that that threat is real. 

We’ve also acknowledged that just overcrowding has become a threat. But now we see, according to open sources, maneuvering satellites that are in and around other satellites deliberately, as one general stated it - General Guetlein - he referred to that looking a lot more like “space dogfighting” than just curiosity by one nation about what's going on and what you can do in space.

And so with those kinds of thoughts, we have seen a transition in open source conversation about a more warfighting posture for our space capabilities, where things like DOTMILPF and we can talk about what that may or may not mean for this discussion, along the lines of the kinds of things that the Army, the Navy and the Air Force think about when they think about designing weapons systems that they know are going to be engaged by hostile forces in their natural environment: at sea, below the sea, in the air, on the land, and now into space where we have to consider not just adversary effects from one domain, the ground, into the domain of space, but perhaps from space to space. 

Operational satellites attacking other operational satellites is really what we're talking about as a change. And clearly programs such as GSSAP and any follow-on that may happen, as well as in a low-Earth orbit version like SBSS and like capabilities, can play a role in that future warfare construct. 

06:57 - 07:15

And before we dive any deeper, I think it’s important to clarify the distinction between space situational awareness (SSA) and space domain awareness (SDA). It’s something we’ve covered on the show before, but can you reiterate for us the difference between SSA and SDA?

07:16 - 10:18

Sure. So space domain awareness is defined as the persistent fuzed understanding of space objects, behaviors and intent across all orbital regimes that enable warning - and here's a big word - attribution, defensive maneuver, targeting and assessment. So my way of thinking about it, as a guy who was grown up in the Air Force and spent the first half of his career in the airplane technology business, is the kill chain.

So SDA is not synonymous with, but it's overlaid against the concept of the kill chain and the kill chain in the Air Force is: find, fix, track, target, engage and assess. We call that F2T2EA. SDA is very much like that. It's pretty easy to, for example, attribute when a MiG is on your six or you're about to shoot down a MiG if you were an Air Force fighter pilot.

It's pretty easy to attribute that's a Russian tank, and I'm in my Army tank because we're fighting tank to tank. Space is a little more difficult, but really it's not conceptually any more difficult except for that seeing a little Russian flag on a satellite, or an American flag on a satellite, or seeing an Allied flag on a satellite. It's really kind of hard at the distances satellites operate at.

So assessing and attributing the threat is very, very important. You don't want to attack a friendly satellite because it's so far away you can't see its flag that is flying and if they simply don't fly a flag, then you'll never see one anyway. So there's a lot that goes into space domain awareness, especially when you're trying to attribute an attack and trace it back to: where did it come from? And that has a lot to do with space situational awareness and there's the link. 

SSA intends to know where that object came from the day it was launched, and never lose track of it. Maintaining track custody for the life of that object is critically important and that's the linkage between SSA and space domain awareness. Now there's overlap there as well, but especially in the kill chain where you have to engage and assess.

And how do you close the fire control loop, knowing that I have to pull a trigger some time or another, and I need to know that I got it in my sights and that can be aiming, if you will, can be part of SSA if you will. And then after you do it, we would call that bomb damage assessment in the Air Force.

But that's the assess part after a kill chain action occurs. How did we do? Do we need to shoot again? Were we successful? How successful were we?  So those are the linkages. But again SDA is much more than the SSA mission and it's much more akin to the kill chain mission.

10:19 - 10:28

And so how are these changes in the operational environment in space - affecting how the Space Force and its commercial partners think about developing and manufacturing their satellites?

10:29 - 14:02

The commercial space industry is still fairly much a benign space environment focused activity. So much so, they fully expect their satellites to die on orbit and re-entry in some short amount of time. And they actually have a business model set up on that predicted outcome for their satellites that they will succumb to the environmental effects, particularly radiation on the hardware, because radiation is really, really tough on electronics in orbit. And we've known that for decades, and they rely on that, and they rely on it for a good reason. 

One, it's way cheaper to use parts that are not built for space, but built for inside the atmosphere and under the protection of the magnetosphere of the Earth’s ball. And when they fail, they see that as an opportunity to upgrade the next replacement satellite with new technology, not just replace the satellite, but update and refresh the technology in the satellite.

Instead of having to deal with parts that have gone obsolete, they just replaced the part with a new part, at least for the life of several generations and then when that part becomes obsolete, they're not worried about it. They just replace it. So that's a very benign mindset. That's like changing a tire. When my tire wears out, I'll just put on a new tire on my vehicle that does not scale into military operations.

No more than a tire on my car scales into the treads on a tank, or on an MRAP combat vehicle. They're totally different kinds of tires. Ones at best, run flat. The other ones can take an RPG round and still keep going and those are very different drive mechanisms: military versus my tire on my car.

And so it's more parallel for the commercial world to think like a car tire than to think of it as a tank track or an MRAP tire. Now, militarily, we're not much further along today than the car tire. We don't have, other than to know and perhaps attribute an attack to an adversary because we had custody of that object until it attacked us.

We have very little defensive mechanisms. We don't have any armor. We're working, and I know we are, because it's happening all over the DoD on cyber defense capabilities so that our satellites cannot be attacked through cyber means. But I would not claim that they are fully cyber-hardened in every aspect, because what is? 

Electromagnetic attack is another form of attack that we see in the battlefield. We see it with GPS, usually from the ground to ground-based receivers. So the satellites are working fine, but receivers can't receive a signal because there's a local jammer jamming the receiver, overpowering it. Well, theoretically, a satellite could be on-orbit and do RF jamming so that that satellite couldn't receive commands from the ground, just like the GPS receiver in my vehicle couldn't receive the signal from space. It works in both directions. 

And then kinetic attack, however crazy that seems because especially at low-Earth orbit, we've seen a kinetic attack. We've seen anti-satellite weapons destroy satellites. We've even seen satellites collide with one another inadvertently and the debris field just trashes an awful lot of the orbit and at GEO it may even be worse, or even more troubling, because we have a lot of very strategic assets out of geosynchronous orbit.

14:03 - 14:10

Now, as the Space Force considers how to best protect and defend their assets on-orbit. What requirements that they need to be thinking about?

14:11 - 16:51

Requirements for military capabilities are almost always classified because they're based upon threats and threats are almost always classified because they're based on intelligence. And intelligence is classified because of how they discover intelligence. So it's hard for me to speak about what requirements are out there today. But if the conversation in open source is to be taken, just as it’s stated, a lot of people are beginning to think about: how do we change requirements?

And I can't tell you specifics. I can give you some ideas, like, ‘Would we ever lower the bandwidth of a satellite that we want to launch?’ And it's very expensive to lower like a communications satellite - will we want to lower the bandwidth it’s capable of so that we could put some heavy armor. Just think of something is as benign as a Kevlar vest. I'm not talking about tank armor. I'm talking about just something that would absorb a BB, but a BB moving at seven kilometers a second. And that's what people don't really understand, is that a satellite in low-Earth orbit is traveling at about seven kilometers every second. You don't have to shoot it. It'll just crash into it.

But if you have something coming at a crossing trajectory, it can easily be traveling at anywhere from a few kilometers a second to many. And we don't put any shielding on those. So are there requirements to protect them from a BB? Even a paint flake from some former mission where the paint came off of a rocket body and it's still drifting in some decaying orbit, but still, there in low-Earth orbit. But you might run into it or it might run into you.

It happens to the space station all the time. And so some of the things that they think about on the space station are probably informing requirements about kinetic things, and also things like lasers. 

So what would we do about those? What kind of sunglasses do you put on your optics so it doesn't get burned by a laser? What kind of filters do you put on your antenna? Your apertures? So they're not overwhelmed by an RF energy source? What kind of filtering do you do? How do you shield front-end electronics, whether they're optical electronics or their radio frequency electronics, what kind of protections would you put on those? Is a question that I'm sure they're all asking as a requirements thought process. 

And there are other potential vectors of threats - I've already mentioned kinetic. But I'm sure they're going through those and if I would be doing it, I'm sure they wouldn't be doing it. I just don't know what the threats are today - that's classified.

16:52 - 17:03

Now, RG-XX is the first Space Force program to require its satellites to have a capacity for refueling. How might the ability to refuel change the calculus for maintaining a space domain awareness constellation of satellites on-orbit?

17:04 - 19:02

Almost all satellites carry fuel on board to adjust their orbits to fine tune the orbit. And then if and as those orbits shift and degrade, and all of them do, regardless of whether it's geosynchronous, middle Earth orbit or low Earth orbit, they all shift. There are some maneuvering capabilities to readjust those orbits. 

Well, what about fueling them for more than just to avoid a collision? How about to avoid an adversary? So some of those things ought to be thought about. And then maybe do you refuel them? There's a lot of talk about on-orbit maintenance, on-orbit resupplying with fuel.

I mean, if we're worried about one satellite attacking another satellite as an adversary, what about a friendly satellite refueling another satellite, or maybe replacing a battery? Not that you could do major maintenance. It's really kind of hard to do anything. But if satellites were designed to be refueled and there was a satellite designed to fuel and they had a standard, a common interface standard, think a KC-135 or a KC-10 or any of the refueling aircraft and all of the recipients of that fuel, they have a common standard about how do they refuel with a refueling probe? For example, and then how about on-orbit battery changes? 

Those are probably the two that I would say. I don't think we would change a primary payload like an optical system or a communications system. You'd probably just launch another satellite or have a spare. But that's another thing to think about is how resilient are you on the ground and how rapidly can you get from, ‘Hey, I need to replace or replenish a constellation or at least one satellite I get from there to on the pad and on-orbit. How fast can I do that? How many spares do I need to have in the pipeline on the ground, ready to go? Because I'm worried that I have to replenish GPS, or I have to replenish some other major constellation element that provides critical capability to the warfighter. 

19:03 - 19:20

And with respect to replenishing a capability or maintaining mission assurance, what are the implications for the Space Force’s acquisition professionals who are responsible for fielding the weapons systems that go on-orbit? What are some of the unique challenges and considerations they need to be thinking about?

19:21 - 22:54

For weapon system acquirers. There are many that have been trained to do it. Optimize for different things. Always: cost, schedule and performance are part of the acquisition consideration. Those are the three pillars. Risk is often added as well. For space systems because they have been so expensive over the years as technology went from very nascent to now much more well understood. 

The optimization historically has been on: we're spending so much money we have to make it last for a long time. We got to get the bang for the buck, and if we're in for $1 billion for a constellation, what difference does it make that we're going to go for $1.2 billion? But we're going to get five more years out of it.

So they were optimized as all systems are, but they're so expensive. It was like they're too big to fail. But as you go along, it's taken so long for us to get this through all the proof that it's going to work. We realize along the way that some of the technology we're already putting in there is already becoming obsolete.

So even during the manufacturing, even late in the design phase, they realized we need to change out a part, not because it was bad, but because we're going to have to make 5 or 10 more of these satellites, and that part is no longer going to be available, particularly electronics, particularly circuit chips and other critical components that are very near and dear to computer technologies.

And as we know, Moore's Law says they change every couple of years. Everything is refreshed. So that's been a challenge. We optimized space systems for long life, and at some level we traded off cost to make sure that performance, that long life performance was guaranteed. So that's been the historic path. Tomorrow's path is - it's a spectrum.

It's not this or that. It's somewhere along the spectrum. We've been over here on mission assurance that satellite cannot fail for 10-15 years. And the Army looks at things differently. And I'm not saying we should be like the Army, but again, on the spectrum, some things are going to get blown up, some things are going to get broken.

And two things are true about that mindset: And think even the Air Force is like this: aircraft have to land and get repaired, and they're built to have redundancy for battle damage. All of those elements of everything else they can land and pull into a hangar and be repaired. A tank can be brought back and repaired. An aircraft can go into a depot and be repaired, and a ship can go into a drydock or into a port and be repaired. A submarine, same for it. 

Satellites don't land and they don't come back for repairs. And I think it is damaged and it breaks the mission. They're just no more than orbiting rocks. They might as well be a meteor. So the idea about surviving is often tied to: you don't get a second chance, not even one. Unlike almost all other military combat capabilities.

Where you do get a second chance to at least fix them. You know, if they are destroyed? Well, that's one thing. But if they're just broke and they can't do the mission, you abort the mission or you come back after the mission, you fix it and you go back out the next day ready to fight. Can't do that with satellites.

22:55 - 23:06

Now, RG-XX is widely-understood to be a commercially driven solution to space domain awareness. But what are the advantages or disadvantages to leveraging commercial capabilities in this way?

23:07 - 27:50

Commercial space situational awareness capabilities could contribute a lot in some ways and in other ways they don't help much at all. In the ‘help a lot.’ There was a time when there was an open source discussion about commercially launched satellites. It would be in their best interest to take with them localized space situational awareness.

For example, a commercial satellite having 3 or 4 cameras that had short range but high field of view awareness of what's going on around them and remember commercial entities have to cover insurance and there were a lot of those insurance companies that were interested in knowing whether or not the failure was the manufacturer or whether it was hit by a meteorite or whatever, because there were certain things that were included in those policies, and there were things that weren't included in those policies.

And then there were other people that just wanted to know, is my capability being messed up by somebody else, or do I have some kind of intermittent failure? And so there was a lot of talk about, for example, for a communications satellite, was there another satellite in its field of view to a downlink station so that it was not able to communicate properly because something was blocking its line of sight. And so knowing that that might or may not be happening was of interest in conversation some number of years ago. I think that still is a valid point. 

Just like cars today, if you drive a modern car today, you have cameras all over it that can see what's around you. You do it so you can change lanes. You can do it so you don't change lanes. You can see when you back up and you can see it even when you're driving forward. And there are people who mount cameras in their car in case some driver in front of them is doing something chaotic, they can record that for insurance purposes.

So if it applies on the ground in the automotive industry today, you might make that same claim applies to commercial assets on-orbit today. So that's my linkage there. I think if it applies in vehicles, it applies in airplanes. If it applies in those places, why wouldn't you? If it protects you or provides you some information that is very low cost for the benefit, you may reap from it. A bit of an insurance policy, and if you can provide that data to the warfighter on-demand or at request, then the warfighter may find some very important benefit to that same information that would be equivalent to the Department of Transportation collecting the camera imagery of every car.

Now, there's a lot more cars than there are satellites, but boy, if they had it, they would be able to keep traffic a lot more regulated than we might imagine. Well, with much fewer assets on-orbit still having more SSA would provide a lot of benefit in a lot of ways to include just basic space traffic accidents, but other things as well, particularly threats and risks that exist on orbit. So the commercial side has that. 

Now, a dedicated commercial space situational awareness asset. Now they have to make a business case. They have to make a business case that building something, which starts with coming up with a design, getting an investor to fund the design to the fruition of production and then launching on-orbit and on-orbit our operations for who knows how long, years perhaps.

What's the return on investment to that capital or commercial company? That's a serious consideration. If the government sees that in their business case as more affordable or affordable enough to have it, plus dedicated assets, then I think there's a lot of people who would agree with that. But the price tag is really going to be the deciding factor.

How much does it cost to fund both a dedicated military version of space situational awareness in any orbit regime, and buying imagery or buying the service from a commercial provider of space situational awareness data simultaneously, or instead of. And what are the operational risks? And of course, a lot of people worry, ‘Well, if I don't have control of it, it doesn't feel like it's part of the military.’

And that's been a concern about all kinds of military capability provided by commercial. Notice we don't have commercial aircraft carriers. We don't have commercial bombers, we don't have commercial tankers. People talk about tankers, but they don't have commercial tankers for civilian airlines. You know, how far do you go with commercialization of military essential technology? That is a current and will be an ongoing debate for years to come.

27:51 - 28:01

And to go one step further, can you elaborate on the differences between how a commercial company - compared to the Space Force - and how they would use space situational awareness data?

28:02 - 30:36

Exactly. In fact, the Air Force doesn't care at all about liabilities associated with who does what to whom.

Now, I will say this. The Air Force is a good steward of space, perhaps the number one steward of space, in that they care a lot about not being the cause of any destructive activity on-orbit. In fact, a lot of the money we’ve spent over the decades was not only - do we not want to fail because we lose the mission, because failure in space leaves a lot of risk for everybody, the entire ecosystem of space, particularly in individual orbital regimes.

So to be clear, the Air Force is probably concerned about liability not because of insurance purposes, but because they have to operate in that domain and it's a little bit like polluting your own well where you drink water from. You don't want to do that. That's my analogy of the Air Force. They don't want to pollute their own well, where they get their drinking water. In meaning they are very careful about the space environment.

That said, the behavior of adversaries or other space-faring activities is not really the primary concern of the Space Force, although they spend a lot of money and effort. And what I mean by that: they buy ground based radars and ground-based electro-optical systems, space-based sensors, to make sure that, like ships traveling the seas, we don't want collisions.

We spend a lot of money at sea to ensure lines of communication on sea lanes are open and safe, with the Navy and the Coast Guard, and we do kind of the same role in the Air Force or Space Force. Excuse me. To make sure that the lines of communication and the space lanes of operation, we’ll call those orbits, are available and safe, and the electromagnetic spectrum is protected so that somebody is not inadvertently jamming somebody else in space, we spent a lot of money on those things. 

But in terms of liability, whether or not a communications satellite that is a commercial company that makes money selling bandwidth to like television or radio and if they were being deliberately attacked, that would matter to the Air Force, because that's an attack. If it's some kind of accident or some kind of failure that doesn't threaten freedom of operations in space. But affects the efficiency and efficacy of the business, they kind of don't care. But if it has to do with operations in space or an attack on a U.S. or Allied commercial capability by an adversary, they would care a lot about that.

30:37 - 30:48

You also spoke of the space domain awareness mission’s inherent relationship with the kill chain. What are some concerns or challenges that might need to be overcome to incorporate commercial capabilities to this mission, effectively?

30:49 - 34:01

So let's just make an assumption that the sensor technologies are available and maybe they're fielded. So let’s say they’re on-orbit. The next question is: ‘How do you utilize those sources of information, those sensor sources in space domain awareness? How do you fuze that data? How do you agree that it's valid?’ 

And I'll just set aside cyber for a second. Just that is a whole very other discussion. But assuming you know that the data comes from a reliable source that's done their bidding to be a cyber secure source: ‘How do you know that it's military quality? How do you validate it? When it's delivered commercially, you can't dictate to them to go through a certain developmental testing and evaluation process that a military generated satellite had to go through, or an operational testing evaluation set of wickets that a military satellite has to go through. 

There are operational acceptance things where the warfighter uses military equipment, and then they go, ‘Okay, it's capable and accepted as a military warfighting capability, and we will now write it into our O-plans as an available capability that a Combatant Commander can count upon.

As he writes his O-plan, as we are supporting him for his warfighting mission in some AOR. Well, how do you do that with commercial technology? So I'm trying to think of an analogy like, theoretically, logistics can be provided for commercially and things like we outsource trucking companies to move cargo, we outsource aircraft companies to move cargo, or we outsource even ships, not military ships, to move supplies to islands like Guam or whatever. 

Logistics is a common user of commercial capability across that spectrum of war communications. We have outsourced some communications capabilities to the terrestrial-based communications providers. But outsourcing space situational awareness, if you're going to use it in space domain awareness and the kill chain, and there's going to have to be some serious policy decisions that are going to have to be made about: How do we utilize those commercial capabilities in the kill chain?

I can even see for the intelligence community, broadly speaking, that imagery or other information from commercial assets could be used in intelligence, especially phase zero or prior to phase zero, if you will, prior to hostilities beginning - to do like intelligence preparation of the battlespace, just having awareness prior to the warfight. But once things have gone from phase zero and you're moving forward in the fight, that's going to be the big question: is can we use commercial sources then or not?

34:02 - 34:15

And, earlier this year Space Systems Command held an industry day that had over 150 companies expressing interest in RG-XX. 

What’s your reaction to that level of interest from industry for a program like this?

34:16 - 37:25

I'm not surprised that a lot of industry is very interested in this concept of providing whether it's at Geo, because remember, GSSAP is Geo, but it's not the only place where we need SSA. I'm not surprised that there were a number of companies that wanted to provide from space domain awareness to SSA at Geo and everything in between, even from the ground.

I'm not surprised at all and I'm really glad to hear it. The real question is industry days are often set up so that they get great feedback from industry about approaches, trade-offs, requirements. Even their questions can inform thinking about doctrine because they're really first-order questions. We're talking about the most important thing to understand is not that you want SSA, but what requirement, what military mission, what doctrinal requirement are you trying to satisfy with this?

For people who think GSSAP, they may think, ‘Oh, something that flies around in Geo and looks at stuff. Okay, well that's cool, but how does it do that? Why does it do it that way? What is it satisfying and could it be done another way? And the answer to that often is found in the creative thinking of industry.

So the reason why we have industry days are to fetch those ideas from the experts or the engineer. The government doesn't know the answers, but the engineers and the technologists within industry are where the questions come and there's a lot of long standing large primes that have ideas. 

But there's also a lot of innovative small businesses, startups with great ideas who think about technology very differently than we have historically because they didn't know what historically was: what we call “nontraditional space providers,” where traditional said ‘Get a government contract and then you can develop a commercial capability because you're anchored with money from the government, and now you can afford to spin off the commercial capability.’

These guys never did business with the government. They're only thinking commercial and so why wouldn't General Purdy go out and ask them about their ideas? Of course he would, and we are all counting on great ideas coming from industry for whatever this next version is, I don't call it the GSSAP follow-on, I just call it a space domain awareness tool.

That's after what we have on orbit and available today, and RG-XX could wind up being something very different, or several things that are very different than what GSSAP is, which is why I hesitate to even put any hard linkage to GSSAP though GSSAP and SBSS were two of the - I wouldn't say the earliest - but to really operationalize space situational awareness from on-orbit capabilities.

And there have been other things that were experiments. There are things that were experiments that they tried out operationally. There have been things to do this even before those two programs, but really, they were the two bigs that started out early.

37:26 - 37:43

And Sir, you mentioned Major General Stephen Purdy, who as the Space Force’s top acquisition official, indicated he wants to take a multi-vendor approach to RG-XX.

Can you speak to the advantages both for the commercial sector but also for the Space Force, by taking a multi-vendor approach? 

37:44 - 39:48

It's very, very dangerous, in my opinion. And I say dangerous, not in the danger, like life and death danger, but certainly in terms of taxpayer responsibility to become solely dependent by the federal government and the Department of War on a single vendor for any critical technology and almost anything that goes on-orbit, we're not going to spend that kind of money for things that are not critical.

So if you have one supplier of the capability, chances are the risk is you're dependent on that supplier forever and their success and failures always result in a greater or lesser degree of risk for you, potentially budgetary and predictable budgets moving forward. If you have multiple vendors, you get more than one choice and you get a little bit, hopefully of inherent competition.

And as we've heard, and sometimes it's been proven not always proven, that competition drives better price solutions or cost solutions. But what you also get, and this is the part that I am a greatest fan of, is you get solution-diversity and the reason why I like solution-diversity, meaning I solve the problem through the following thousand things.

You solve the problem through your thousand things and we have capabilities that meet the requirement, but we solve the problems differently for an adversary. Those two different solutions provide a more complex calculus for how to defeat those different diverse solutions. 

So one solution might be to jam something like this and the other solution might be to jam something the same way, but it doesn't work on solution B, it only works on solution A. So you've complicated the adversary's problem-solving scenario, and thus driven up the cost to him to have to have a more advanced offensive capability, because you have inherently put in defense by diversity of design.

39:49 - 40:02

General Purdy also shared that this RG-XX program would be unclassified, in that it will be open and available to Allies and partners through the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Sales program. 

Why is that significant?

40:03 - 43:32

Classification decisions is strictly within the military's and the executive branch's domain. So that's not my expertise to make classification decisions. 

But we have lots of cases where we share technology, even classified technology, with our Allies and we have Allies that span the spectrum of some cases we share some of the most sensitive classified information with them. And in other cases, it's military technology. And it's not even classified. But we still care about it because it's important. You might even call it controlled unclassified information, but it's very important either way. Wherever we are on the spectrum - it matters.

I can easily conceive of providing space domain awareness capability, such as even GSSAP today, and other ones like ground-based radars that we have today. I could easily see providing that to Allies. I'm not saying we're doing it, but I could certainly see us doing it. 

It would make sense in some scenarios if the risks, and I'm not in a position to make the risk decision. But if the risks, according to those who advise the Secretaries of the military’s departments and the Secretary of Defense, or Secretary of War, I should say, and even the president and National Command Authority up to them, any number of technologies that are sensitive have been and are being provided to Allies.

This is no different. Now how do you sell it? Especially first off, do you restrict it? Like so, if it's commercial capability, how do you restrict it if you don't want it sold to just anybody? And we have procedures for that. Like you can't sell an F-16 regardless of how much you want to to any old country in the world, because it's an American product and you can only sell it when you get the approval of the government to sell it.

Same would be true of this, even if it was commercial technology. We have rules called ITAR, International Traffic and Arms Regulation, but FMS use cases are adjudicated not necessarily under ITAR, but they have some similar similarities where they grade the country, the ally that we are looking at selling the technology to and then how do we insert elements of that we want to protect and how do we protect those elements by still broadly providing that technology to them.

So when you add commercial into there, it's even more interesting because now that commercial, it might be something the adversary wants to buy a piece of because he's an ally or he's not an adversary at moment A but moment B he is, but he's become dependent on it.

So why would he stick a stick in his own eye if he's going to be using it? Why would you put salt in your own wound if it's going to hurt but you don't want it to hurt? And so when the commercial guy comes in and the world can buy it and they find it valuable, as long as they're buying and they're not going to poke a hole in it if it hurts them because they need it to.

So they don't buy military capability, but they often buy commercial capability for military purposes. And if we're buying it and they're buying it, why would they ruin it and or spoil it? And if they become dependent on it, it's kind of like GPS has a lot of foreign allies, and even adversaries utilize GPS. If you're in combat and you become dependent on using the U.S. capability, the global utility of GPS, why would you jam it if you need it? As an example, and now translate that to commercial, why would you disrupt the commercial capability that you're paying for if you need it?

43:33 - 43:46

So to summarize: how do you think this transitional moment from military-operated GSSAP to commercially-driven RG-XX reflects how the Space Force is re-thinking its approach to space domain awareness?

43:47 - 44:37

So I don't know the details of RG-XX, except for to say, what I've seen in open source. But I believe two things are true about how Space Force is evolving. 

One, they're serious about a warfighter mindset, and they know that the capabilities that a system like GSSAP, including GSSAP today provides is critical to those warfighting capabilities that the Space Force knows they need moving forward.

Secondly, they are going into this with their eyes wide open, with the notion that it is possible and even reasonable, if not preferable, for some commercial capability to be included in that mix. Whether it's 100%, 50% or 2%, somewhere in some, none, or all. They're looking for commercial solutions to help them in that pursuit. 

44:37 - 44:47

Then as a closing question here, what opportunities exist for Elara Nova to contribute to complex conversations and military programs, like we discussed today?

44:48 - 45:44 

So Elara Nova is loaded with a lot of space domain talent. We have a large array of space professionals in this company, and that's just the senior leaders. The partners Elara Nova has well over 90 partners, many of whom, if not most, have either space domain backgrounds in some form from rocket launch to command and control to payload development, to full-blown satellite development and operations and sustainment of space capabilities that Elara Nova can provide expertise across the entire spectrum of space domain from inception to operations and even disposal. And so if I were looking for expertise, I would choose Elara Nova as an expertise provider any time.

45:45 - 46:23

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. As a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space and aeronautical domains, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in national security.

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. This episode was edited and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.