By Emelie Rutherford
The Air Force plans by spring of 2009 to launch the developmental Space Based Space Surveillance System (SBSS), one of five planned kickoffs of major new operational space capabilities over the next two years, according to the head of Space and Missile Systems Command at Air Force Space Command.
“We’re going to see a massive increase in terms of military operational space capability over the next 18, 24 months,” Lt. Gen. Michael Hamel told reporters last week.
Hamel said his command is looking at optical sensors that can be flown on satellite systems to help track smaller objects in space, as part of its focus on space situational awareness. A near-term effort to tackle that is SBSS, which is planned for a first launch by the spring of 2009, he said March 12 at a Defense Writers Group breakfast.
“This for the first time will really give us a very agile ability to both search large volumes of space as well as to be able to rapidly be able to detect and track objects,” Hamel said about the SBSS. Those objects are “such things as [when] a new satellite’s being placed in orbit, we would be able actually observe the reflected light from the satellite, the rocket body, as it travels from lower orbit to a higher orbit.”
The SBSS is intended to replace the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) Space Based Visible Sensor. A team of Boeing [BA] and Ball Aerospace [BLL] is building the SBSS Block 10 system under the direction of Northrop Grumman [NOC]. (Defense Daily, Sept. 20, 2006).
The Air Force has had a “tough decade” with troubled space programs, Hamel acknowledged. Efforts have gone so far over budget that they triggered so-called Nunn-McCurdy reviews involving Congress and the Pentagon, and there had been a series of launch failures in the late 1990s.
Now, though, Hamel said, “We really believe that we are getting our programs back on track and that frankly the sharpest focus we’ve got to have now is delivering many near- term capabilities.”
In addition to the SBSS, within the next 18 to 24 months there will be four other first-time launches and deployments of major new operational capabilities in space, he said.
Those four efforts are: the whole constellation of the Wideband Global SATCOM system; the Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite communications system; the Space-Based Infrared System’s geo-stationary sensor portion; and the Global Positioning System IIF satellite–all of which are behind schedule.
Still, Hamel struck an optimistic tone on the pending launches and deployments, pointing to the need for the technologies.
For example, The GPS IIF satellite–a planned upgrade of the GPS navigation system–“is going to bring some very substantial new capabilities to both civil users as well as the warfighters,” he said.
“So our lock focus over the next 18 to 24 months is to successfully complete those developments and to successfully launch and to actually get all those systems into operation,” he said.