At the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Co. leaders pointed to mechanisms for building additional resilience and capability in space – with opportunity for new commercial approaches taking center stage.
A dialogue moderated by Bloomberg’s Loren Grush took place against the backdrop of an increasingly hostile posture in space from both Russia and China.
Both Air Force Lt. General Jeff Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Space Force Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, pointed to the shifting threat environment, highlighting China’s unique space doctrine.
“China absolutely intends to be a broad-based, fully capable space power, both economically and militarily,” Kruse said. “And we see that in the amount of research and development that they are doing, we see that in the increase of launch capabilities.”
Kruse also pointed to Chinese evolution of directed energy weapons, electronic warfare, and anti-satellite capabilities as proof of increased military space presence. And in light of increased adversary activity and escalation in the space domain, Whiting pointed to resilience as critical for future capability in space.
“We’re seeing a whole host of our constellations now heading in a direction of being more disaggregated, more distributed, having built-in defensive capabilities against these threats,” Whiting said. “But resilience is not going to get us there solely by itself.”
Kruse pointed to the role of partnerships in enabling space capability, including formal and informal partnerships between governments, between government and industry, between industry players, and informal relationships between nations. “The only way we’re going to be able to be as effective as we need to be in space is through these partnerships.”
Reacting to the Aspen dialogue, commercial providers like Intelsat are actively working to provide the Space Force with new capability by taking a more integrated approach to partnerships.
“Everyone sees the threat environment moving, and for us, it’s a question of what we can do to be the best possible partner to our government customers in the U.S. and globally,” said Dave Broadbent, President of Intelsat Government Solutions. “Beyond engineering the necessary resilience in our systems, we recognize the need for more integrated industry collaboration, which is why we’re actively working to forge partnerships across the ecosystem – bringing capability to the customer with more speed and agility.”
Intelsat recently announced partnerships with space analytics startup Aalyria and satellite technology upstart hiSky, with an eye toward advancing capability provided to the U.S. government via commercial partnerships.
