If space war were to happen US wants to be ready, documents show
US DoD's space guardians are on the lookout for ways to monitor and “effectively address threats” in the ever-more-crowded space surrounding our home planet.
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US Department of Defense’s (DoD) space guardians are on the lookout for ways to monitor and “effectively address threats” in the ever-more-crowded space surrounding our home planet.
The Space Security and Defense Program (SSDP), a joint program between the DoD and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), just submitted a request for information (RFI) for Space Domain Awareness (SDA) capabilities at scale.
What that means is that the US agency responsible for threat assessment in space has started to look for contractors who could provide the military and intelligence apparatus with effective ways to monitor man-made objects in orbit. This would be a very useful tool in case you need to differentiate friend from foe.
“SSDP/SDA seeks both proven and innovative SDA concepts for use between 2030 and 2040 focusing on (in priority order): support to fires, surveillance (of man-made objects), intelligence and reconnaissance, and environmental monitoring,” reads the SSDPs RFI.
The top priority RFI indicates for the SDA concept is “support to fires,” another military term used to describe how assets can help hit enemy targets more effectively.
According to the document, an analysis of SDA’s support to fires capability should clearly say how quickly the US could provide “target handoff,” meaning how quickly the system would identify target and relay the data to other branches of the military equipped with actual firepower.
Washington also determines what type of data about space objects is crucial to identifying targets during an engagement, or, in other words, how the military can distinguish between ally and enemy and how to mark its own craft to avoid friendly fire.
Finally, the SDA capability needs to allow SSDP to be aware of how many targets it can engage simultaneously, signaling that the system would be used to decide where to focus firepower.
Interestingly enough, the concepts should cover virtually all orbits that humans use for satellites. That includes Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), which spans up to 2,000 km from Earth; Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO), up to 20,000 km; and Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO), up to 36,000km.
SSDP even wants the system to cover atypical orbits such as Exgeosynchronous (xGEO) and Highly Elliptical (HEO), which, in theory, would leave no blind spots against an adversary’s satellite.
The US military and intelligence service requested that proposed concepts would include Command, control, and communications (C3) for current and future sensor networks; data processing, fusion, and dissemination with low data latency for space threat detection and warning of ground-to-space and space-to-ground threats; and sensors.
All of this is supposed to allow the US to track and monitor objects in space, allowing Washington to distinguish what types of craft are whizzing around our planet and, most importantly, which country they belong to. Additionally, the SDA would allow planners to develop tactics and determine the intent of space-bound objects.
The US DoD wants the system to provide threat warning and assessment capabilities, which would allow it to "predict and differentiate between potential or actual attacks, space weather, environmental effects, and space system anomalies.”