Category: Science

HELSINKI — A Chinese satellite manufacturer and operator has conducted satellite-to-ground laser tests that will improve its ability to get remote sensing data to Earth.

Changguang Satellite Technology (CGST) carried out the test with its Jilin-1 MF02A04 remote sensing satellite and a vehicle-mounted laser communication ground station Oct. 5.

“The communication bandwidth of this satellite-to-ground laser image transmission test reached 10Gbps, which is more than 10 times the traditional microwave data transmission bandwidth,” Wang Xingxing, technical director of CGST laser communication ground station, said in a statement.

“In the future, Changguang Satellite plans to expand this bandwidth to 40Gbps ~100Gbps.” The new ground stations will be deployed in numerous locations across China to greatly improve the Jilin-1 remote sensing image data acquisition, the statement read.

CGST is based in Changchun, capital of northeastern Jilin province, for which the constellation is named. The firm is an offshoot from the state-owned Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics (CIOMP) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). 

Established in 2014, CGST has more than 100 satellites in orbit. A number of Jilin-1 Gaofen (“high resolution”) satellites return panchromatic images with a resolution of 0.75 meters.

The company announced last year that it intends to expand its Jilin-1 constellation from a planned 138 satellites to 300 satellites by 2025. The expansion of the Jilin-1 constellation follows concerns raised by China over the use of U.S. commercial satellite constellations in the Ukraine conflict, including communications via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites but also imagery from companies such as Maxar.

CGST conducted an earlier laser data transmission test in June this year in cooperation with CAS’s Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR). CGST began work on the test in March 2020, resulting in the high-bandwidth, miniaturized laser communications terminal.

Chinese state media touted the breakthrough with the vehicle-mounted ground station as China’s first successful test of a domestically developed, commercial satellite-based high-speed laser image transmission.

CGST has already begun adding laser terminals to some of its satellites launched this year. It is also working on inter-satellite links, which will help China get around a relative lack of global ground station access.

Satellite ground segment providers around the globe are looking at the viability of satellite-to-ground optical communications, noting both challenges and opportunities. 

A recent AFP report states that CGST sold, via intermediaries, two 75-centimeter-resolution satellites to Russia’s private paramilitary organization Wagner Group, according to a contract seen by the news agency.

“The satellite images were also used to assist Wagner’s operations in Africa and even its failed mutiny in June which has led now to the de-facto break up of the group followed by the death of Prigozhin and other key figures in an air crash in August, a European security source told AFP,” the report read.The U.S. earlier this year placed sanctions on Spacety, another CAS spinoff, for alleged supply of synthetic aperture radar imagery of locations in Ukraine to Wagner Group.

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A new study of the microbial ecosystem in sourdough finds that using different types of flour fosters distinct bacterial communities, and that these differences contribute to the variation of sourdough aromas and flavors.

“People bake sourdough all over the world, and our previous research shed light on the tremendous variation in the types of microbes found in sourdough starters, and how those microbes influence the aroma of sourdough and how quickly it rises,” says Erin McKenney, corresponding author of the study and an assistant professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University.

“Our new work focuses on the role that different types of flour play in shaping those microbial ecosystems. As it turns out, the flour bakers use to ‘feed’ their starters plays a significant role in determining which types of bacteria thrive. And that, in turn, strongly influences the aroma that these sourdoughs produce.

“In other words, our findings show that bakers can influence the aroma of their sourdough by using different flours, because those flours will foster different communities of bacteria.”

For the study, researchers developed a protocol designed to reproduce what bakers actually do in their kitchens. The researchers created four sourdough starters using 10 different flours, for a total of 40 starters. The researchers used five flours that included gluten: unbleached all-purpose flour, red turkey wheat, emmer, rye, and einkorn; and five gluten-free flours: teff, millet, sorghum, buckwheat, and amaranth. The 40 starters were kept in the same growing environment and were fed once a day for 14 days.

The researchers collected data from each starter daily. This included measuring pH and height, as well as recording the aromas produced by each starter. The researchers also took samples of the starters for DNA sequencing to determine the diversity and abundance of bacteria in each sample.

“We found that the starters started out being fairly similar to each other, but that changed substantially over time,” McKenney says. “Over the course of the 14 days, we found that each type of flour formed increasingly distinct microbial communities. Essentially, it appears that different types of bacteria are able to make the most of the nutritional compounds found in different types of flour.”

And when you have different bacterial communities thriving on different nutritional inputs, you get a wide variety of metabolic outputs. In other words, different bacteria produce different smells.

“For example, the bacterial community in amaranth sourdough produces an aroma that smells almost exactly like ham,” McKenney says. “I’ve never smelled a sourdough that had such a meaty aroma. Rye produces a fruity aroma, buckwheat has an earthy smell, and so on. There’s a tremendous amount of variation.”

There were also a couple surprises.

“One surprise was that rye flour fostered a much wider diversity of bacteria than any other type of flour,” McKenney says. “We found more than 30 types of bacteria in the rye starters at maturity. The next highest was buckwheat, which had 22 types of bacteria. All of the other flours had between three and 14.”

The researchers also found that seven of the 10 flours produced starters that included high levels of bacteria which produce acetic acid. Only starters made using teff, amaranth, and buckwheat were lacking the acetic acid bacteria.

“These acetic acid-producing bacteria made up between 12.6% and 45.8% of the bacteria in the starters from those seven flours,” McKenney says. “So it’s playing a significant role in those microbial ecosystems. This is surprising because we didn’t even know this type of bacteria was found in sourdough until 2020. Our previous work found that it was not uncommon, but to see it at such high levels, across so many types of flour, was definitely interesting.”

And while all of this is scientifically compelling, it also offers some practical insights for sourdough bakers.

“This study offers insights into how bakers can modify the flour they’re using in their starters to get the aromas and flavors they’re looking for,” McKenney says. “We also found that the starters took 10 days to become ‘functionally mature,’ or ready for baking. And that’s useful for bakers to know, too.”

The paper appears in the journal PeerJ. Coauthors are from NC State; the University of West Florida; The Exploris School; Moore Square Middle School; River Bend Middle School; and Ligon Middle School.

The research had support from the National Science Foundation.

Source: NC State

TAMPA, Fla. — SES has found its next CEO from outside the space sector with the appointment of Adel Al-Saleh, head of German telco Deutsche Telekom’s IT services subsidiary who will lead the multi-orbit operator from February.

Al-Saleh is replacing Guy Pinto, the operator’s former chief technology officer who stepped into the role just weeks after Steve Collar announced his surprise resignation in June. 

Pinto will remain a member of the Luxembourg-based company’s executive team until June 2024, when he will assume the position of strategic advisor to the CEO.

Milton Torres, who succeeded Pinto as chief technology officer on an interim basis, is staying in the role.

Al-Saleh has been CEO of Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems International since 2018, helping digitize communications infrastructure to transform the company into a more integrated IT services provider.

He has also spent nearly two decades in multiple senior leadership roles with IBM, culminating in 2006 as vice president and general manager of sales and industries for the IBM Northeast Europe Integrated Operating Team.

In 2007, he joined healthcare-focused IT firm IMS Health (now IQVIA) as president for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and was later named its president for the United States. 

In 2011, he was made CEO of Northgate Information Solutions to help reshape the human resources-focused IT provider’s strategy following its sale to private equity firm KKR.

A citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, Al-Saleh earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University, and he received his Master of Business Administration from Florida Atlantic University.

SES’s decision to appoint a CEO from outside the space industry follows Eutelsat’s move nearly two years ago to bring in Eva Berneke, formerly head of Danish IT and software company KMD, to lead the French satellite operator.

Both SES and Eutelsat are keen to integrate more of their space businesses with terrestrial telecoms infrastructure in a fast-evolving satellite communications market.

Karim Michel Sabbagh, who led SES from April 2014 to April 2018 when he was replaced by Collar, also joined the operator from outside the space sector, having most recently served as a senior partner for consultancy firm Booz Allen.

Al-Saleh’s appointment comes at an important juncture for SES, which is looking for ways to boost its fleet across geostationary and medium Earth orbit as around $3 billion is coming its way from successfully clearing C-band spectrum.

Pinto discussed how the operator could use this windfall in a recent Q&A with SpaceNews.

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The need for quick and “real-time” forecasting of tropical cyclones is more necessary than ever given the impact of climate change on rainfall amounts, say researchers.

Two climate scientists take this idea further by suggesting a storyline case study of Hurricane Ian in 2022 can be used as a blueprint for rapid operational climate change attribution statements about extreme storms. Their premise appears in a paper in the journal Environmental Research: Climate.

Coauthors Kevin A. Reed, a professor and associate dean of research in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, and Michael F. Wehner of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, note that tropical cyclones such as Hurricane Ian are devastating events worldwide, endangering lives and causing damage costing billions of dollars to repair. Therefore, the public, media, and governmental leaders affected by such extreme storms turn to scientists to understand more about the weather event and how climate change may have affected it.

In the paper, the authors point out that previously it has taken months or even years after extreme storms for scientific studies to supply results on how such storms were impacted by climate change. Their work shifts this paradigm by providing a tropical cyclone rainfall rapid attribution methodology designed for use by operational climate change attribution centers.

Hurricane Ian made landfall in Florida on September 22, 2022. While the storm was still over Florida, Reed and Wehner used social media to alert the public that climate change increased Ian’s total rainfall by at least 10%. They also further informed the public and officials of this phenomenon, along with the media, via their quick scientific work during and in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

Their initial statement was a deliberately conservative lower bound given the brief period of time available for analysis. Subsequent analysis supports the published “best estimate” of the precipitation increase due to human induced climate of 18%.

Using a previously developed and tested hindcast attribution methodology in near real-time, the researchers demonstrated that Ian storyline rapid assessments of tropical cyclones can be completed during extreme storms. The authors state that “such rapid assessment offers scientists a useful tool in answering questions about the climate change effect on individual extreme weather events as they unfold.”

“Hurricane Ian was an ideal candidate for this type of imposed global warming framework as we were able to complete our simulations and analysis of it because its path was fairly predictable,” Reed explains. “This is not always the case as simulated paths of certain storms, such as Superstorm Sandy, are extremely sensitive to weather perturbations. But regardless, we need more attribution statements on how extreme storms are being affected by climate change and provide them to the public quickly.”

The authors further point out that storyline attribution methods can be useful when traditional event attribution methods are not tractable. This is particularly the case in developing nations where the high-quality, long-time weather observations necessary for traditional climate change attribution may not be available but weather forecasts demonstrate adequate skill. This capability can then inform decision makers in future loss and damage negotiations.

The research leading to this paper had support in part from the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science and from the Stony Brook Foundation’s Minghua Zhang Early Career Faculty Innovation Fund.

High-performance computing support was provided by the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Work at Berkeley Lab was supported by the director, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the US Department of Energy under the Regional and Global Model Analysis (RGMA) program.

Source: Stony Brook University

At the rally in support of Israel that took place on Boston Common on Monday, I saw a man in an orange T-shirt with the words “Jews don’t deport Jews” on it. It appeared to be a vintage protest T-shirt from the time that many Israelis—and in particular many in the religious Zionist community—opposed the evacuation of Jewish settlements in the Gaza strip in 2005.

I overheard him telling someone that the evacuation of Gush Katif—a section of Israeli settlements in southern Gaza that were evacuated in 2005—led directly to this moment. Putting aside the accuracy of that assessment, it seems likely that many in the community will be drawing similar conclusions.

After the Oslo Accords in 1993, the disengagement from Gaza was the main event that led to the alienation of many religious Zionists from the government and provided an impetus for new theologies that helped to produce the extreme fringes of the religious right. Though I hope it will not be the case, it seems possible that this moment will further empower the sometimes violent extremism of those fringe movements.

At the same time, there are religious Zionist groups who are holding on to the more compassionate teachings of leaders like the late Rabbi Yehuda Amital. In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Rabbi Amital gave a remarkable speech in which he urged the religious Zionist community to engage in internal introspection about the causes for the war rather than rushing to point the finger of blame elsewhere. He also wrote about the religious meaning of the war and the State of Israel, while taking care to avoid the kind of dogmatic messianism of those who claim to know the precise ways of God’s working in the world.

I think this kind of ethos still motivates many in the religious Zionist community today. I can’t say they are the most vocal or numerous segment of the community, but they exist and have an important voice.

WASHINGTON — The launch of NASA’s Psyche mission represents the beginning of the agency’s use of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, which the agency will rely upon for some of its biggest science and exploration missions this decade.

A Falcon Heavy is scheduled to lift off Oct. 13 at 10:19 a.m. Eastern carrying the Pscyhe mission to the metallic asteroid of the same name. NASA elected not to attempt a launch Oct. 12 because of poor weather expected at launch, with a 40% chance of favorable weather for this instantaneous launch window.

The launch will be the eighth flight of the Falcon Heavy but the first devoted to NASA. Previous launches, after the demonstration launch of the rocket in February 2018, were for commercial and U.S. military customers.

At a pre-launch briefing Oct. 11, Julianna Scheiman, director of civil satellite missions at SpaceX, noted the launch will be the first company mission to fly under the NASA Launch Service Program’s Category 3, used for high-value missions that seek to minimize launch risk. That requires several successful launches and extensive agency reviews. “That means Falcon Heavy has been through the wringer,” she said.

NASA has, in recent years, increasingly turned to Falcon Heavy for major missions. The rocket is under contract to launch the GOES-U weather satellite and Europa Clipper planetary science mission in 2024. That will be followed by the first two modules of the lunar Gateway, the HALO module and Power and Propulsion Element, launching together. Falcon Heavy will also launch the Roman Space Telescope observatory in 2026.

Falcon Heavy has, in some cases, been the only option for NASA with the impending retirement of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 and delays with that company’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn.

The agency sought and received some accommodations from SpaceX regarding this launch. After the company postponed a Falcon 9 launch of Starlink satellites from neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station late Oct. 8 because of weather, SpaceX said it would prioritize the Falcon Heavy launch, postponing the Starlink launch until after Psyche lifts off.

That was done at the request of NASA. “We have requested certain setbacks and SpaceX has accommodated our request,” said Tim Dunn, senior launch director for NASA’s Launch Services Program (LSP). “We did ask them to stand down on that Starlink [launch] earlier this week.”

That postponement, he said, ensures that engineers have enough time to evaluate data from a previous launch before approving the Falcon Heavy launch. They were busy reviewing from another Falcon 9 Starlink launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base that took place early Oct. 9. The Florida Starlink launch has been rescheduled for the evening of Oct. 13, assuming the Psyche launch takes place as scheduled.

As with Falcon 9, NASA has accepted some degree of reusability with the Falcon Heavy. The two side boosters will be making their fourth launch on Psyche, having previously been used for two Space Force missions and the launch of the Jupiter 3 commercial communications satellite. The same side boosters will be used on the Falcon Heavy launch of Europa Clipper in a year, which will be their sixth flight.

“That’s the family of flights, as you can tell, that we’re comfortable with today, but we’re always continually looking at data and trying to push that forward,” Dunn said.

While SpaceX also regularly reuses payload fairings, that is not the case for Psyche. “We weren’t ready for reused fairings on Psyche,” he said, which extends to other NASA missions launching on Falcon. “We have begun the dialogue and we are working with SpaceX, and I do see LSP and NASA reusing fairings in the future.” He suggested that NASA would be ready to reuse fairings on its launches by late 2024 or early 2025.

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WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force awarded a $1.45 million contract to Riverside Research to develop software that automates the analysis of data on space objects.  

The one-year contract announced last week is for the development of a software tool to help Space Force units characterize and detect objects in the more congested low Earth orbits, said Lt. Matthew O’Rourk, program manager for the DEEP-SDA project, short for Data Exploitation and Enhanced Processing for Space Domain Awareness.

This project is not about collecting more data, but analyzing the data that already exists and is not being put to use, O’Rourk told SpaceNews.

 “We’re looking to leverage data that’s being generated by assets that are already on orbit and are currently not being utilized,” he said. 

The nonprofit firm Riverside Research — with partners COMSPOC, Spire Global and SciTec Inc. — will develop an algorithm to automate current manual data exploitation techniques and produce more actionable intelligence, O’Rourk said.

For example, data collected by existing star trackers on commercial and government satellites gets discarded because it can’t be analyzed in a timely manner. 

A prototype version of the software will be tested by analysts from the specialized Space Force unit that works with commercial space data — known as the Joint Task Force-Space Defense Commercial Operations Cell or JCO.

O’Rourk said the project started about a year ago as the Space Systems Command’s space sensing office identified a need for technologies to fill gaps in space domain awareness of low Earth orbit. 

At the end of the project, Riverside Research will deliver a data analytics app that will be made available to all DoD and military users via the Space Force’s Unified Data Library, a marketplace for data and software. 

O’Rourk said the new tool should help make greater use of data hosted on the UDL. He said users of space data have expressed a need for analytics aids so they can take advantage of that data. 

“Our space domain awareness tool is an immediate solution to fill some of the gaps,” he said. The project also will support the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Spacewatch program.

DARPA’s program, called Space-domain Wide Area Tracking and Characterization, is pursuing technologies for persistent tracking of all objects in low Earth orbit so that when an anomalous action occurs, operators can be notified in a timely fashion.

The data will come from existing sensors on both commercial and government satellites with the goal of creating a “single operational picture” of low Earth orbit.

SpEC Consortium

The DEEP-SDA project was managed by the Space Enterprise Consortium (SpEC), an organization under Space Systems Command that works with commercial firms and startups. SpEC awards contracts known as Other Transaction Authority, or OTAs, which move faster than traditional government contracts. 

“We decided to take the SpEC route so we could partner with non-traditional firms,” said O’Rourk.

The SpEC charges membership fees to participating companies and only the members of the consortium are allowed to compete for projects. The SpEC facilitates the bidding process but the contract winners are selected by the Space Systems Command. 

The SpEC is run by NSTXL, short for National Security Technology Accelerator. The company’s founder and CEO Tim Greeff said SpEC currently has more than 600 members, about 70% of which are non-traditional contractors that mostly do commercial work. 

Under SpEC OTA contracts, traditional defense contractors are incentivized to partner with commercial firms or to co-invest in projects.

The DEEP-SDA solicitation was issued in May 2023. Greeff said 10 out of 13 submissions were from small non-traditional contractors. About 63 companies were part of the 13 teams that bid for this project, Greeff told SpaceNews.

He explained that there are three types of companies that qualify as non-traditional contractors: Small businesses that are exempt from the Defense Department’s cost-accounting requirements; those that perform contracts only under commercial procedures; and those that only work under firm-fixed-price contracts.

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Initial studies of the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu sample collected in space and recently brought back to Earth show evidence of water and high-carbon content.

Together, they could indicate the building blocks of life on Earth may be found in the rock.

NASA announced the finding October 11 from its Johnson Space Center in Houston, where scientists showed off the asteroid material for the first time since it landed in the Utah desert on September 24. The finding was part of a preliminary assessment of the OSIRIS-REx science team.

“As we peer into the ancient secrets preserved within the dust and rocks of asteroid Bennu, we are unlocking a time capsule that offers us profound insights into the origins of our solar system,” says Dante Lauretta, professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona and OSIRIS-REx principal investigator.

“The bounty of carbon-rich material and the abundant presence of water-bearing clay minerals are just the tip of the cosmic iceberg. These discoveries, made possible through years of dedicated collaboration and cutting-edge science, propel us on a journey to understand not only our celestial neighborhood but also the potential for life’s beginnings. With each revelation from Bennu, we draw closer to unraveling the mysteries of our cosmic heritage.”

“The sample has made it back to Earth, but there is still so much science to come—science like we’ve never seen before.”

One of the core questions driving the mission is understanding the origin of Earth as a habitable planet, Lauretta says, and the current understanding of what makes a world habitable is abundant liquid water on the surface, such as the Earth’s oceans and freshwater supplies.

“When Earth formed, especially after the giant impact that spun off the moon, the water and carbon were lost from our planet, so we’re looking to figure out, ‘How did we get that material back?’” Lauretta says. “Our leading hypothesis is that asteroids rich in carbon and water came in later and delivered the essential building blocks of life, made the Earth a habitable world, and the rest is history.”

Although more work is needed to understand the nature of the carbon compounds found, the initial discovery bodes well for future analyses of the asteroid Bennu sample. The secrets held within the rocks and dust from the asteroid will be studied for decades to come, offering insights into how our solar system was formed, how the precursor materials to life may have been seeded on Earth, and what precautions need to be taken to avoid asteroid collisions with our home planet.

“The OSIRIS-REx sample is the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever delivered to Earth and will help scientists investigate the origins of life on our own planet for generations to come,” says Bill Nelson, NASA Administrator.

“Almost everything we do at NASA seeks to answer questions about who we are and where we come from. NASA missions like OSIRIS-REx will improve our understanding of asteroids that could threaten Earth while giving us a glimpse into what lies beyond. The sample has made it back to Earth, but there is still so much science to come—science like we’ve never seen before.”

The goal of the OSIRIS-REx sample collection was 60 grams of asteroid material. Curation experts at NASA Johnson, working in new clean rooms built especially for the mission, have spent 10 days so far carefully disassembling the sample return hardware to obtain a glimpse at the bulk sample within.

When the science canister lid was first opened, scientists discovered bonus asteroid material covering the outside of the collector head, canister lid, and base. There was so much extra material it slowed down the careful process of collecting and containing the primary sample.

“Our labs were ready for whatever Bennu had in store for us,” says Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA Johnson. “We’ve had scientists and engineers working side-by-side for years to develop specialized gloveboxes and tools to keep the asteroid material pristine and to curate the samples so researchers now and decades from now can study this precious gift from the cosmos.”

Within the first two weeks, scientists performed “quick-look” analyses of that initial material, collecting images from a scanning electron microscope, infrared measurements, X-ray diffraction, and chemical element analysis. X-ray computed tomography was also used to produce a 3D computer model of one of the particles, highlighting its diverse interior. This early glimpse provided the evidence of abundant carbon and water in the sample.

For the next two years, the mission’s science team will continue characterizing the samples and conducting the analysis needed to meet the mission’s science goals. NASA will preserve at least 70% of the sample at Johnson for further research by scientists worldwide, including future generations of scientists.

As part of OSIRIS-REx’s science program, a cohort of more than 200 scientists around the world will explore the regolith’s properties, including researchers from many US institutions, NASA partners at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, and other scientists from around the world.

Additional samples will also be loaned later this fall to the Smithsonian Institution, Space Center Houston, and the University of Arizona’s Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum.

Source: University of Arizona

When queried about the progress of the U.S. Space Force’s commercial space strategy, Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top commander, did not mince words. Speaking at the recent AMOS space domain awareness conference in Hawaii, Saltzman characterized the latest draft of this highly anticipated strategy as rich in style but wanting in substance.

Intended to shed light on the Space Force’s approach to identifying activities suitable for commercial satellite services, the document, according to Saltzman, is replete with “aspirational platitudes” rather than concrete definitions and guidelines.

Saltzman underscored that while inspirational rhetoric about partnering and collaborating has its place, the strategy needs to offer practical, actionable guidance.

This perspective from Saltzman is hardly surprising. For years, industry leaders have lamented that interactions with government buyers tend to be pep talks rather than discussions about practical measures or solutions for how commercial services could help fill gaps in military space capabilities.

The Space Force, like the broader U.S. military, heavily relies on commercial entities for a diverse array of services during both peacetime and wartime. The new strategy is expected to provide specific guidance on utilizing emerging space industry services, including rapid-revisit satellite imaging and low-Earth orbit satellite communications, many of which have only recently become available.

Expressing dissatisfaction with the initial draft, Saltzman sent it back for revisions, emphasizing the necessity for the strategy to offer clarity to Space Force buyers and the industry.

The strategy should define, for example, which satellite services fall under the “inherently governmental” category and which can be outsourced. Without a comprehensive plan delineating this distinction, the procurement of commercial services could become “messy,” he said, and marked by ad hoc projects.

Chamber of Commerce concerns

The remote sensing sector is a segment of the space industry that has been particularly frustrated by the slow embrace of commercial services. Acknowledging these concerns, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence solicited industry feedback in August regarding the challenges companies face attempting to provide products and services to intelligence and defense agencies.

On Sept. 22, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s response was made public. The Chamber’s letter to the ODNI was forthright, stating, “Despite repeated recognition by senior leaders within the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense of the value provided by the U.S. space industry in terms of remote sensing data and analytical services for national security, disaster response, diplomatic missions, and legislative directives, the government has been slow to establish programs, mechanisms, and processes to leverage this existing capability.”

The disconnect between high-level rhetoric supporting commercial services and the tangible obstacles companies face has been studied and documented extensively, according to the Chamber, making it imperative to transition from analysis to action.

Among the areas needing reform are frequent delays in issuing guidance, setting requirements, releasing requests for proposals, and transitioning mature capabilities from study and pilot programs to operational support contracts. The letter emphasized that procurement inefficiencies create uncertainty in a market heavily reliant on private funding and hinder field operators from receiving the support they require.

Strategy ‘by year’s end’

Saltzman acknowledged that the Space Force has yet to address many of the industry’s pressing questions, and the forthcoming commercial space strategy should provide some of those answers.

“We don’t even have a clear definition of what a commercial service is,” he remarked, adding that until this foundation is laid, the document remains more aspirational than actionable.

He refrained from setting hard deadlines for the completion and publication of the strategy.

“I certainly hope to have something released to the community by year’s end.”

This article originally appeared in the ‘On National Security’ commentary feature in the October 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.

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