Space Force and rise of military space

Colorado boasts one of the second-largest space economies among U.S. states, trailing only California.

About 81% of the state’s private-sector space industry workforce, or more than 24,860 people, is in the nine-county Denver metro area, as are two-thirds of the state’s aerospace companies. That includes prime contractors such as Lockheed Martin Space, Ball Aerospace, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, United Launch Alliance and younger, smaller companies such as Deep Space Systems, PlanetIQ, Ispace and others.

The nation’s military space programs have had a vocal booster in the White House since 2016. President Trump pushed the 2019 creation of the Space Force as a separate branch of the military from the U.S. Air Force.

It’s an idea tossed around for years as a way to help focus the military’s space policy makers on the needs of a fully developed U.S. presence in space. It also reflects the reality that Russia and China show signs they’re planning for a future in which they could militarily contest the U.S.’s historic dominance in orbit.

The heightened militarization of space will continue in the next administration, said Todd Harrison, director of aerospace programs at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“That’s really a choice other nations made for us,” he said. “Russia and China made space a war-fighting domain, and that’s not going to change under a Biden administration.”

Multibillion-dollar space projects connected to national security, like the Next-Gen OPIR missile-launch detection satellites, the new generation of GPS satellites being built by Jefferson County-based Lockheed Martin Space (NYSE: LMT) and the GPS ground control system being developed from Aurora by Raytheon Technologies (NYSE: RTX), are too far along and too necessary to see significant changes, Harrison said.

Something a change in administrations could alter is the military’s willingness to try new, low-cost satellites in low-Earth orbits for crucial military data and communications networks.

The technology has matured in the years since Biden was vice president, but it’s still not completely proven and there remains some hesitance about it within the military.

The Space Development Agency, a new procurement organization, started in the Pentagon in March 2019 to push innovative approaches to space technology and buying with more speed and agility than the Air Force’s traditional procurement process. The SDA is planned to become part of Space Force next year.

Its early focus has been on testing low-Earth-orbit satellites that could be used as a data and communications network that would eventually grow to be hundreds of small satellites.

If the Pentagon reverts back to old thinking under a Biden administration, that could stifle the push to develop small-satellite constellations, Harrison said. That would curtail efforts for which several local companies have been hired.

Blue Canyon Technologies, a Boulder-based small satellite manufacturer, is building satellites for the Blackjack program to test some of these technologies, starting with launches as soon as next year, in a program in which the SDA is a partner with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force.

And Lockheed Martin Space and Denver-based York Satellite Systems won contracts worth a combined $281.5 million from the SDA in October through which the two companies will build a total of 20 small satellites to start establishing the backbone of an in-orbit small satellite data network the military envisions.

It’s not likely that the military would look to cut the existing contracts, but the companies that hold them should be ready to justify the program’s existence to a new administration in case future growth of the work is called into question, Harrison said.

Moon phases

The growing military role in space has prompted large prime contractors to add hundreds of new jobs locally, even as the Covid-19 pandemic crimps other industries.

Similar growth has been happening among the larger companies’ suppliers, too.

“Aerospace has been a real bright spot in the economy, and that’s regardless of company size,” said Vicky Lea, director of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp.’s aerospace and aviation industry programs.

The change in administration isn’t likely to reverse that, and there’s hope parts of space that haven’t grown as fast may be helped by the new administration’s focus, Lea said.

She pointed to the Biden transition team that includes two former NASA chief scientists. One of them is Waleed Abdalati, director of the Cooperative Institute of Research in Environmental Sciences, a joint organization of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and University of Colorado Boulder.

The Trump administration typically proposed budgets cutting the Earth science program at NASA and NOAA. The climate-change agenda of the Biden administration and the Democratic Party platform suggests a renewed emphasis on gathering Earth information from orbit to fill large gaps in the measurement of emissions.

There’s a lot of potential local involvement between the companies that make Earth observation satellites and instruments here, and people who conduct climate research at the federal labs and universities in the area.

“From a Colorado perspective, it would be great to revisit that focus,” Lea said. “Hopefully, that doesn’t come with a reduction in human space flight.”

How much NASA’s budget will be able to increase in one area without cutting elsewhere may well depend more on which political party controls the U.S. Senate than the White House, said Casey Dreier, senior space policy advisor for The Planetary Society, which advocates for space exploration of the solar system.

Members of the Senate GOP have indicated that deficit reduction will be a priority, which could mean pressure to cut federal government spending, and that wouldn’t bode well for the space agency.

“It’s hard for NASA to buck that trend if it’s not a priority of the administration and the agency isn’t the golden child the way NASA was under the Trump and Pence administration,” Dreier said.

Already the Senate appropriations committee proposes trimming $1.75 billion from the Trump administration’s proposed NASA budget, which sought $25.2 billion, or 12% more than the current year’s budget. The House budget for NASA being considered is even smaller than the Senate’s.

What neither side of Congress seems willing to do is fully fund the human landing-craft project what would carry astronauts to moon’s surface from the waiting Orion capsule.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine sought three times more for the lander than the Senate appears willing to spend, saying that budgeting less than what he asked for would mean the lander — a necessary piece of hardware for the Artemis program — wouldn’t be ready for a 2024 lunar return.

A 2024 moon landing would occur before the Gateway would be ready, which had prompted questions about how committed the space agency will continue to be to the Gateway.

Slowing down the first lunar landing mission could revive the Gateway’s relevance and help ensure its long-term survival, Dreier said. International space agency partners are involved in Gateway’s development, he said, and a Biden White House is likely to be more enthusiastic about multinational projects in space than the current administration.

That bodes well for companies involved in developing the Gateway.

But NASA’s lunar lander program, which pits teams of companies in a competition to develop landers that the Artemis program would buy rides on, may not go ahead as planned, he said.

Lockheed Martin Space is a partner on a team led by Blue Origin designing one proposed lander. Maxar and Louisville-based Sierra Nevada Corp. Space Systems are partners on another lander team that’s led by Dynetics.

A SpaceX lander rounds out the proposals from which NASA is expected to select favorites to fund next year.

Some House Democrats, including Kendra Horn, of Oklahoma, chairwoman of the House space subcommittee, have misgivings about using commercial partnerships instead of traditional NASA procurement of a lander the space agency would own.

Horn told industry publication Space News that she expected the idea to be revisited if Biden won the presidency and when talks on the fiscal 2021 budget restart.

Perlmutter doesn’t expect the lander discussion to substantially change NASA’s partnership approach, but even if it did, the overall direction of the Artemis program will remain.

A bipartisan group in Congress sees value in returning to the moon soon, Perlmutter said.

“We’ve seen that it’s possible,” he said. “There may be some slippage, but not much.”

In less doubt is NASA’s embrace of hiring commercial space companies to fly regular cargo and crew flights to the International Space Station.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX completed the first routine crew replacement flight on Nov. 15 under NASA’s commercial crew program, which is a rare initiative started during President Barack Obama’s administration that also was championed by the Trump administration.

The commercial crew and cargo programs to ferry people and supplies to the ISS are slated to expand and include Colorado companies.

The Boeing Starliner capsule also is contracted to fly crew to the ISS. Starliner, which awaits its second uncrewed test flight after software glitches marred its first, uses an Atlas V rocket made by Centennial-based United Launch Alliance as its launch vehicle.

The Dream Chaser autonomous space plane, built in Louisville by Sierra Nevada Corp. Space Systems, is scheduled to start flying cargo to ISS in 2022 and will use ULA’s new Vulcan rocket.

The concept of NASA partnering with private-sector companies to create routine access to low-Earth orbits has spanned three presidential administrations, Democratic and Republican. Both Boeing’s Starliner and SNC’s Dream Chaser have fallen behind schedule, but, with SpaceX’s high-profile successes, there’s a lot of support for maintaining the existing commercial cargo and crew programs. hina show signs they’re planning for a future in which they could militarily contest the U.S.’s historic dominance in orbit.