Space Industry Market Analyst and Consultant: Analyzing the activities, business, and outcomes of the space sector (and more).
ICYMI: A media thread Post: Potential U.S. Space Force Changes The USSF, its mission, training, and technology will change whether the service is ready or not. Several years ago, I analyzed the missions the proposed United States Space Force (USSF) was supposed to inherit from the United States Air Force (USAF) and others. It was then, as it is now, primarily a military service that provides support to the combat services, such as the Army, Navy, and the USAF. At the time, this new(ish) organization, the Space Development Agency, was beginning to publish plans for a space architecture. I don’t believe I was the only person skeptical about yet ANOTHER organization that said it would change U.S. military space acquisitions AND bring about spacecraft that would fundamentally change how the USSF conducts space operations. But the agency is doing both, whether the USSF realizes it or not. More on that bit later. Space Service Similarities At the beginning of this month, I decided to provide an update to the charts and the observations about the service I made in that several-year-old article. And, frankly, I provided updated observations of the USSF in the analysis that followed that note. The upshot of the analysis is that the Space Force remains a support service. The architecture the SDA is implementing will only emphasize that support role in the short term. Again, more on that later. The USSF’s missions and assets make its support focus clear. In the context of the other types of space operators in civil and commercial sectors, the Space Force's services are not much different. Military space operations provide services similar to civil and commercial counterparts in many ways. In some ways, it provides a different type of service, such as missile warning or tracking in remote sensing. That makes sense, as those missions have few commercial applications. In other ways, U.S. military space lags, such as communications, particularly with LEO data networks or, possibly, in remote sensing regarding synthetic aperture radar constellations. What is not evident, based on my admittedly old knowledge, is that the U.S. military is currently relying on old systems, which means a lot more people, military, contractor, and civilian, are involved behind the scenes. These are ancient systems–ancient, as in relying on UNIX or an even more arcane operating system for spacecraft commands. Read it in full at: https://lnkd.in/eKhPVa6A 27/end
