US Space Force

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Asked why we need Golden Dome, the man in charge points to a Hollywood film

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“If they see how prepared we are, no one starts a nuclear war.”

A test of the nation’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense system at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, in 2019. Credit: US Air Force/Senior Airman Clayton Wear

Near the end of the film A House of Dynamite, a fictional American president portrayed by Idris Elba sums up the theory of nuclear deterrence.

“Just being ready is the point, right?” Elba says. “It keeps people in check. Keeps the world straight. If they see how prepared we are, no one starts a nuclear war.”

There’s a lot that goes wrong in the film, namely the collapse of deterrence itself. For more than 60 years, the US military has used its vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, constantly deployed on Navy submarines, at Air Force bomber bases, and in Minuteman missile fields, as a way of saying, “Don’t mess with us.” In the event of a first strike against the United States, an adversary would be assured of an overwhelming nuclear response, giving rise to the concept of mutual assured destruction.

The Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense shield, still in its nascent phase, could fundamentally transform nuclear strategy. One might argue that Golden Dome, if demonstrated as successful, could reshape deterrence in ways not seen since the United States and the Soviet Union first escalated their nuclear arms race in the 1950s.

Theory of deterrence

Production of A House of Dynamite, released in October, began well before President Donald Trump retook the White House and started issuing a bevy of executive orders, one of which directed the Pentagon to start work on a defense shield to protect the US homeland from missile and drone attacks. This initiative was later named Golden Dome, a twist on Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

Proponents of the Golden Dome program say it’s necessary to defend the United States against evolving threats, especially in a time of “great power competition” with nuclear-armed China. Golden Dome is supposed to defend against traditional ballistic missiles, maneuverable hypersonic missiles, cruise missiles, and slower-moving drones. All of these types of weapons have seen use on battlefields in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Russia in the last several years.

Opponents argue that Golden Dome will cost untold hundreds of billions of dollars, destabilize the global order, and increase the risk of a nuclear attack. Their thinking goes that if an adversary’s leaders believe the United States can protect itself from widespread destruction—and therefore remove the motivation for a massive US response—that might be enough for an adversary to pull the trigger on a nuclear attack.

Inevitably, at least a handful of nuclear-tipped missiles would make it through the Golden Dome shield in such a scenario, and countless Americans would die, critics say. People made similar arguments against former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as Star Wars, before its cancellation. Ars interviewed Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) earlier this year about why he’s against Golden Dome.

Getting boxed in

Following orders from the Trump administration, military officials have said little about Golden Dome after a flurry of White House announcements and Oval Office photo ops earlier this year. The shield will consist of hundreds or thousands of Space-Based Interceptors on satellites prepositioned in low-Earth orbit, ready to fire small rockets to strike any ballistic missile that threatens the United States. No one is prepared to say how many interceptors or how long it will take to deploy a comprehensive space-based defense system.

In order to work, Golden Dome also needs ground-based interceptors, radar arrays, missile tracking and data relay satellites, and a sophisticated computer network to tie it all together. Some of these capabilities exist today, but space-based interceptors (SBIs) do not. The Trump administration claims an initial homeland defense system could be ready by mid-2028 at a cost of $175 billion. But that won’t be the final product, and Pentagon officials haven’t said how long or how much it will cost to build out the entire network.

The four-star general in charge of developing Golden Dome, Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, defended the military’s reluctance to release more information to taxpayers. He said the military is sharing more about the Golden Dome architecture in “one-on-one” meetings with 200 to 300 companies vying for a lucrative slice of the program.

Gen. Michael Guetlein testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee about joint force readiness in Washington, DC, on March 12, 2025. Credit: Eric Dietrich/US Air Force

“That transparency may not come in an industry symposium, but it is coming in one-on-ones,” Guetlein said in a discussion Saturday at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “It’s not coming in an industry symposium because you guys are not the only ones in the audience, and there are people in that audience that I don’t want to know what we’re doing.

“But I do know that… our industrial partners are all in on it and are supported, so they are pretty well-informed to the max amount I can inform them today,” Guetlein said. “We’ll continue to do more.”

Some public discourse is necessary to establish deterrence. Guetlein said he “hopes” to release more information to the public next year. For now, nearly 11 months after Trump’s order kick-started Golden Dome, nearly all of it remains under a veil of secrecy.

“We will have some things in place that allow us to start having those kind of conversations,” Guetlein said. “I think A House of Dynamite was a good place to start the dialogue. It opens up the dialogue to the American public that we have to change the defense equation. We have to provide decision space to the United States president so that we don’t get ourselves boxed in.”

Spoiler alert

The military’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, which would be used to destroy an incoming missile before it ever reaches US airspace, has a success rate of less than 60 percent in testing. There are just 44 ground-based midcourse interceptors in the Pentagon’s inventory, enough to mount a defense against one or several missiles from a rogue state like North Korea, but not enough to put a dent in any large-scale nuclear attack.

The next part of this story contains spoilers.

In A House of Dynamite, the military launches two GBIs to destroy a single ballistic missile of unknown origin heading for the United States. Both interceptors fail. What’s more, for a nuclear-armed missile to actually reach a target in the United States, one assumes defense and deterrence have also failed. The president must decide what to do next. Respond with an attack? If so, attack where?

Idris Elba portrays an unnamed president of the United States in A House of Dynamite. Credit: Netflix

The film succeeds in creating suspense. It also gets a lot of technical details right, even if the ending left many viewers disappointed. According to at least two senior Pentagon leaders, the film helps illustrate why it’s time for Golden Dome. It is worth noting that the filmmakers behind A House of Dynamite—director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim—said one of their goals with the movie was to show that missile defense systems are not infallible.

But Troy Meink, the secretary of the Air Force, said no president should ever wrestle with the decisions facing Elba’s character in the final minutes of the film.

“One of the things that A House of Dynamite really highlighted is the fact that you can’t let yourself be in a situation where you either have a very low chance of stopping it, or you go full nuke in return,” Meink said. “You just can’t let yourself get in that situation, and that’s why we need this [Golden Dome].”

Non-disclosure

There was a bit of news that Guetlein briefly mentioned in Saturday’s discussion at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Guetlein confirmed the Pentagon recently awarded 18 contracts to develop technology for SBIs capable of targeting enemy missiles during their boost phase, before they reach their top speeds and have an opportunity to deploy countermeasures.

The Space Force awarded the prototype development deals in November, but officials didn’t say how many or which companies received the contracts. Guetlein said the number was 18. The value of each contract falls below the $9 million public disclosure threshold for Pentagon programs.

At the same time, Guetlein said the military is working with companies on command-and-control and fire-control software.

“We are in discussions with the department on the need to acquire more transport capability, which is the ability to move data through space, more sensing capability, more missile warning, missile track capability,” he said. “We are waiting on those contracts to come in and to move forward on those, but we have given our needs to the department.”

This illustration released by Apex depicts a Space-Based Interceptor fired from a satellite in low-Earth orbit. Credit: Apex

Next, the Space Force plans to award prototype contracts for midcourse SBIs, perhaps as soon as February, according to a procurement document released by Space Systems Command’s program executive office for space combat power. Like their ground-based counterparts already on alert, these kinds of interceptors would be used to take out ballistic missiles as they coast through space.

Several death knells doomed the Reagan-era Star Wars plan. One was political: the fall of the Soviet Union. The others were economic and technical. It was not possible to affordably build and launch numerous SBIs, but the cost of space access is coming down, largely thanks to reusable rockets. Many of the technologies that will underpin Golden Dome, like automation and AI, sensor sensitivity, and laser communications in space, were simply not available 40 years ago.

It also helps that the Pentagon has a head-start on Golden Dome with GMD and an inventory of smaller interceptors for shorter-range missiles. Key elements of a space-based sensor network required for detecting, tracking, and targeting ballistic and hypersonic missiles started launching in 2024.

But SBIs don’t yet exist. They are among the most challenging, and most controversial, parts of Golden Dome. That’s why the Space Force is focusing on awarding the first batches of SBI contracts.

“We are meeting all of our… objectives to date,” said Guetlein, who previously compared Golden Dome to the Manhattan Project. “I think we’re on a good trajectory. But I will tell you, it is not a gimme putt. It is an extremely complex thing that we’re getting ready to do.”

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Asked why we need Golden Dome, the man in charge points to a Hollywood film Read More »

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ULA aimed to launch up to 10 Vulcan rockets this year—it will fly just once

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Engineers traced the problem to a manufacturing defect in an insulator on the solid rocket motor, and telemetry data from all four boosters on the following flight in August exhibited “spot-on” performance, according to Bruno. But officials decided to recover the spent expendable motor casings from the Atlantic Ocean for inspections to confirm there were no other surprises or close calls.

The hangup delaying the next Vulcan launches isn’t in rocket production. ULA has hardware for multiple Vulcan rockets in storage at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Instead, one key reason for Vulcan’s past delays has been the rocket’s performance, particularly its solid rocket boosters. It isn’t clear whether the latest delays are related to the readiness of the Space Force’s GSSAP satellites (the next GPS satellite to fly on Vulcan has been available for launch since 2022), the inspections of Vulcan’s solid rocket motors, or something else.

Vulcan booster cores in storage at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Credit: United Launch Alliance

A Space Systems Command spokesperson told Ars that “appropriate actions are being executed to ensure a successful USSF-87 mission … The teams analyze all hardware as well as available data from previous missions to evaluate space flight worthiness of future missions.”

The spokesperson did not provide a specific answer to a question from Ars about inspections on the solid rocket motors from the most recent Vulcan flight.

ULA’s outfitting of a new rocket assembly hangar and a second mobile launch platform for the Vulcan rocket at Cape Canaveral has also seen delays. With so many launches in its backlog, ULA needs capacity to stack and prepare at least two rockets in different buildings at the same time. Eventually, the company’s goal is to launch at an average clip of twice per month.

On Monday, ground crews at Cape Canaveral moved the second Vulcan launch platform to the company’s launch pad for fit checks and “initial technical testing.” This is a good sign that the company is moving closer to ramping up the Vulcan launch cadence, but it’s now clear it won’t happen this year.

Vulcan’s slow launch rate since its first flight in January 2024 is not unusual for new rockets. It took 28 months for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and ULA’s Atlas V to reach their fourth flight, a timeline that the Vulcan vehicle will reach in May 2026.

The Delta IV rocket from ULA flew its fourth mission 25 months after debuting in 2002. Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket reached its fourth flight in 16 months, but it shares more in common with its predecessor than the others. SpaceX’s Starship also had a faster ramp-up, with its fourth test flight coming less than 14 months after the first.

ULA aimed to launch up to 10 Vulcan rockets this year—it will fly just once Read More »

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Rivals object to SpaceX’s Starship plans in Florida—who’s interfering with whom?

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“We’re going to continue to treat any LOX-methane vehicle with 100 percent TNT blast equivalency.”

Artist’s illustration of Starships stacked on two launch pads at the Space Force’s Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Credit: SpaceX

The commander of the military unit responsible for running the Cape Canaveral spaceport in Florida expects SpaceX to begin launching Starship rockets there next year.

Launch companies with facilities near SpaceX’s Starship pads are not pleased. SpaceX’s two chief rivals, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, complained last year that SpaceX’s proposal of launching as many as 120 Starships per year from Florida’s Space Coast could force them to routinely clear personnel from their launch pads for safety reasons.

This isn’t the first time Blue Origin and ULA have tried to throw up roadblocks in front of SpaceX. The companies sought to prevent NASA from leasing a disused launch pad to SpaceX in 2013, but they lost the fight.

Col. Brian Chatman, commander of a Space Force unit called Space Launch Delta 45, confirmed to reporters on Friday that Starship launches will sometimes restrict SpaceX’s neighbors from accessing their launch pads—at least in the beginning. Space Launch Delta 45, formerly known as the 45th Space Wing, operates the Eastern Range, which oversees launch safety from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s nearby Kennedy Space Center.

Chatman’s unit is responsible for ensuring all personnel remain outside of danger areas during testing and launch operations. The range’s responsibility extends to public safety outside the gates of the spaceport.

“There is no better time to be here on the Space Coast than where we are at today,” Chatman said. “We are breaking records on the launch manifest. We are getting capability on orbit that is essential to national security, and we’re doing that at a time of strategic challenge.”

SpaceX is well along in constructing a Starship launch site on NASA property at Kennedy Space Center within the confines of Launch Complex-39A, where SpaceX also launches its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. The company wants to build another Starship launch site on Space Force property a few miles to the south.

“Early to mid-next year is when we anticipate Starship coming out here to be able to launch,” Chatman said. “We’ll have the range ready to support at that time.”

Enter the Goliath

Starship and its Super Heavy booster combine to form the largest rocket ever built. Its newest version stands more than 400 feet (120 meters) tall with more than 11 million pounds (5,000 metric tons) of combustible methane and liquid oxygen propellants. That will be replaced by a taller rocket, perhaps as soon as 2027, with about 20 percent more propellant onboard.

While there’s also risk with Starships and Super Heavy boosters returning to Cape Canaveral from space, safety officials worry about what would happen if a Starship and Super Heavy booster detonated with their propellant tanks full. The concern is the same for all rockets, which is why officials evacuate predetermined keep-out zones around launch pads that are fueled up for flight.

But the keep-out zones around SpaceX’s Starship launch pads will extend farther than those around the other launch sites at Cape Canaveral. First, Starship is simply much bigger and uses more propellant than any other rocket. Secondly, Starship’s engines consume methane fuel in combination with liquid oxygen, a blend commonly known as LOX/methane or methalox.

And finally, Starship lacks the track record of older rockets like the Falcon 9, adding a degree of conservatism to the Space Force’s risk calculations. Other launch pads will inevitably fall within the footprint of Starship’s range safety keep-out zones, also known as blast danger areas, or BDAs.

SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy booster lift off from Starbase, Texas, in March 2025. Credit: SpaceX

The danger area will be larger for an actual launch, but workers will still need to clear areas closer to Starship launch pads during static fire tests, when the rocket fires its engines while remaining on the ground. This is what prompted ULA and Blue Origin to lodge their protests.

“They understand neighboring operations,” Chatman said in a media roundtable on Friday. “They understand that we will allow the maximum efficiency possible to facilitate their operations, but there will be times that we’re not going to let them go to their launch complex because it’s neighboring a hazardous activity.”

The good news for these other companies is that Eastern Range’s keep-out zones will almost certainly get smaller by the time SpaceX gets anywhere close to 120 Starship launches per year. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is currently launching at a similar cadence. The blast danger areas for those launches are small and short-lived because the Space Force’s confidence in the Falcon 9’s safety is “extremely high,” Chatman said.

“From a blast damage assessment perspective, specific to the Falcon 9, we know what that keep-out area is,” Chatman said. “It’s the new combination of new fuels—LOX/methane—which is kind of a game-changer as we look at some of the heavy vehicles that are coming to launch. We just don’t have the analysis on to be able to say, ‘Hey, from a testing perspective, how small can we reduce the BDA and be safe?’”

Methane has become a popular fuel choice, supplanting refined kerosene, liquid hydrogen, or solid fuels commonly used on previous generations of rockets. Methane leaves behind less soot than kerosene, easing engine reusability, while it’s simpler to handle than liquid hydrogen.

Aside from Starship, Blue Origin’s New Glenn and ULA’s Vulcan rockets use liquified natural gas, a fuel very similar to methane. Both rockets are smaller than Starship, but Blue Origin last week unveiled the design of a souped-up New Glenn rocket that will nearly match Starship’s scale.

A few years ago, NASA, the Space Force, and the Federal Aviation Administration decided to look into the explosive potential of methalox rockets. There had been countless tests of explosions of gaseous methane, but data on detonations of liquid methane and liquid oxygen was scarce at the time—just a couple of tests at less than 10 metric tons, according to NASA. So, the government’s default position was to assume an explosion would be equivalent to the energy released by the same amount of TNT. This assumption drives the large keep-out zones the Space Force has drawn around SpaceX’s future Starship launch pads, one of which is seen in the map below.

This map from a Space Force environmental impact statement shows potential restricted access zones around SpaceX’s proposed Starship launch site at Space Launch Complex-37. The restricted zones cover launch pads operated by United Launch Alliance, Relativity Space, and Stoke Space. Credit: SpaceX

Spending millions to blow stuff up

Chatman said the Space Force is prepared to update its blast danger areas once its government partners, SpaceX, and Blue Origin complete testing and analyze their results. Over dozens of tests, engineers are examining how methane and liquid oxygen react to different kinds of accidents, such as impact velocity, pressure, mass ratio, or how much propellant is in the mix.

“That is ongoing currently,” Chatman said. “[We are] working in close partnership with SpaceX and Blue Origin on the LOX/methane combination and the explicit equivalency to identify how much we can … reduce that blast radius. Those discussions are happening, have been happening the last couple years, and are looking to culminate here in ’26.

“Until we get that data from the testing that is ongoing and the analysis that needs to occur, we’re going to continue to treat any LOX-methane vehicle with 100 percent TNT blast equivalency, and have a maximized keep-out zone, simply from a public safety perspective,” Chatman said.

The data so far show promising results. “We do expect that BDA to shrink,” he said. “We expect that to shrink based on some of the initial testing that has been done and the initial data reviews that have been done.”

That’s imperative, not just for Starship’s neighbors at the Cape Canaveral spaceport, but for SpaceX itself. The company forecasts a future in which it will launch Starships more often than the Falcon 9, requiring near-continuous operations at multiple launch pads.

Chatman mentioned one future scenario in which SpaceX might want to launch Starships in close proximity to one another from neighboring pads.

“At that point in the future, I do anticipate the blast damage assessments to shrink down based on the testing that will have been accomplished and dataset will have been reviewed, [and] that we’ll be in a comfortable set to be able to facilitate all launch operations. But until we have that data, until I’m comfortable with what that data shows, with regards to reducing the BDA, keep-out zone, we’re going to continue with the 100 percent TNT equivalency just from a public safety perspective.”

SpaceX has performed explosive LOX/methane tests, including the one seen here, at its development facility in McGregor, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

The Commercial Space Federation, a lobbying group, submitted written testimony to Congress in 2023 arguing the government should be using “existing industry data” to inform its understanding of the explosive potential methane and liquid oxygen. That data, the federation said, suggests the government should set its TNT blast equivalency to no greater than 25 percent, a change that would greatly reduce the size of keep-out zones around launch pads. The organization’s members include prominent methane users SpaceX, Blue Origin, Relativity Space, and Stoke Space, all of which have launch sites at Cape Canaveral.

The government’s methalox testing plans were expected to cost at least $80 million, according to the Commercial Space Federation.

The concern among engineers is that liquid oxygen and methane are highly miscible, meaning they mix together easily, raising the risk of a “condensed phase detonation” with “significantly higher overpressures” than rockets with liquid hydrogen or kerosene fuels. Small-scale mixtures of liquid oxygen and liquified natural gas have “shown a broad detonable range with yields greater than that of TNT,” NASA wrote in 2023.

SpaceX released some basic results of its own methalox detonation tests in September, before the government draws its own conclusions on the matter. The company said it conducted “extensive testing” to refine blast danger areas to “be commensurate with the physics of new launch systems.”

Like the Commercial Space Federation, SpaceX said government officials are relying on “highly conservative approaches to establishing blast danger areas, simply because they lack the data to make refined, accurate clear zones. In the absence of data, clear areas of LOX/methane rockets have defaulted to very large zones that could be disruptive to operations.”

More like an airport

SpaceX said it has conducted sub-scale methalox detonation tests “in close collaboration with NASA,” while also gathering data from full-scale Starship tests in Starbase, Texas, including information from test flights and from recent ground test failures. SpaceX controls much of the land around its South Texas facility, so there’s little interruption to third parties when Starships launch from there.

“With this data, SpaceX has been able to establish a scientifically robust, physics-based yield calculation that will help ‘fill the gap’ in scientific knowledge regarding LOX/methane rockets,” SpaceX said.

The company did not disclose the yield calculation, but it shared maps showing its proposed clear areas around the future Starship launch sites at Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center. They are significantly smarter than the clear areas originally envisioned by the Space Force and NASA, but SpaceX says it uses “actual test data on explosive yield and include a conservative factor of safety.”

The proposed clear distances will have no effect on any other operational launch site or on traffic on the primary north-south road crossing the spaceport, the company said. “SpaceX looks forward to having an open, honest, and reasonable discussion based on science and data regarding spaceport operations with industry colleagues.”

SpaceX will have that opportunity next month. The Space Force and NASA are convening a “reverse industry day” in mid-December during which launch companies will bring their ideas for the future of the Cape Canaveral spaceport to the government. The spaceport has hosted 101 space launches so far this year, an annual record dominated by SpaceX’s rapid-fire Falcon 9 launch cadence.

Chatman anticipates about the same number—perhaps 100 to 115 launches—from Florida’s Space Coast next year, and some forecasts show 300 to 350 launches per year by 2035. The numbers could go down before they rise again. “As we bring on larger lift capabilities like Starship and follow-on large launch capabilities out here to the Eastern Range, that will reduce the total number of launches, because we can get more mass to orbit with heavier lift vehicles,” Chatman said.

Blue Origin’s first recovered New Glenn booster returned to the company’s launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, last week after a successful launch and landing. Credit: Blue Origin

Launch companies have some work to do to make those numbers become real. Space Force officials have identified their own potential bottlenecks, including a shortage of facilities for preparing satellites for launch and the flow of commodities like propellants and high-pressure gases into the spaceport.

Concerns as mundane as traffic jams are now enough of a factor to consider using automated scanners at vehicle inspection points and potentially adding a dedicated lane for slow-moving transporters carrying rocket boosters from one place to another across the launch base, according to Chatman. This is becoming more important as SpaceX, and now Blue Origin, routinely shuttle their reusable rockets from place to place.

Space Force officials largely attribute the steep climb in launch rates at Cape Canaveral to the launch industry’s embrace of automated self-destruct mechanisms. These pyrotechnic devices have largely replaced manual flight termination systems, which require ground support from a larger team of range safety engineers, including radar operators and flight control officers with the authority to send a destruct command to the rocket if it flies off course. Now, that is all done autonomously on most US launch vehicles.

The Space Force mandated that launch companies using military spaceports switch to autonomous safety systems by October 1 2025, but military officials issued waivers for human-in-the-loop destruct devices to continue flying on United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket, NASA’s Space Launch System, and the US Navy’s ballistic missile fleet. That means those launches will be more labor-intensive for the Space Force, but the Atlas V is nearing retirement, and the SLS and the Navy only occasionally appear on the Cape Canaveral launch schedule.

Listing image: SpaceX

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Rivals object to SpaceX’s Starship plans in Florida—who’s interfering with whom? Read More »

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Pentagon contract figures show ULA’s Vulcan rocket is getting more expensive

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A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket with NASA’s Psyche spacecraft launches from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on October 13, 2023. Credit: Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images

The launch orders announced Friday comprise the second batch of NSSL Phase 3 missions the Space Force has awarded to SpaceX and ULA.

It’s important to remember that these prices aren’t what ULA or SpaceX would charge a commercial satellite customer. The US government pays a premium for access to space. The Space Force, the National Reconnaissance Office, and NASA don’t insure their launches like a commercial customer would do. Instead, government agencies have more insight into their launch contractors, including inspections, flight data reviews, risk assessments, and security checks. Government missions also typically get priority on ULA and SpaceX’s launch schedules. All of this adds up to more money.

A heavy burden

Four of the five launches awarded to SpaceX Friday will use the company’s larger Falcon Heavy rocket, according to Lt. Col. Kristina Stewart at Space Systems Command. One will fly on SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9. This is the first time a majority of the Space Force’s annual launch orders has required the lift capability of a Falcon Heavy, with three Falcon 9 booster cores combining to heave larger payloads into space.

All versions of ULA’s Vulcan rocket use a single core booster, with varying numbers of strap-on solid-fueled rocket motors to provide extra thrust off the launch pad.

Here’s a breakdown of the seven new missions assigned to SpaceX and ULA:

• USSF-149: Classified payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Florida

• USSF-63: Classified payload on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Florida

• USSF-155: Classified payload SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Florida

• USSF-205: WGS-12 communications satellite on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Florida

• NROL-86: Classified payload on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Florida

• USSF-88: GPS IIIF-4 navigation satellite on a ULA Vulcan VC2S (two solid rocket boosters) from Florida

• NROL-88: Classified payload on a ULA Vulcan VC4S (four solid rocket boosters) from Florida

Pentagon contract figures show ULA’s Vulcan rocket is getting more expensive Read More »

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Trump’s Golden Dome will cost 10 to 100 times more than the Manhattan Project

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Instead, the $252 billion option would include additional Patriot missile batteries and air-control squadrons, dozens of new aircraft, and next-generation systems to defend against drone and cruise missile attacks on major population centers, military bases, and other key areas.

At the other end of the spectrum, Harrison writes that the “most robust air and missile defense shield possible” will cost some $3.6 trillion through 2045, nearly double the life cycle cost of the F-35 fighter jet, the most expensive weapons program in history.

“In his Oval Office announcement, President Trump set a high bar for Golden Dome, declaring that it would complete ‘the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago, forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland and the success rate is very close to 100 percent,'” Harrison writes.

The numbers necessary to achieve this kind of muscular defense are staggering: 85,400 space-based interceptors, 14,510 new air-launched interceptors, 46,904 more surface-launched interceptors, hundreds of new sensors on land, in the air, at sea, and in space to detect incoming threats, and more than 20,000 additional military personnel.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket could offer a much cheaper ride to orbit for thousands of space-based missile interceptors. Credit: SpaceX

No one has placed missile interceptors in space before, and it will require thousands of them to meet even the most basic goals for Golden Dome. Another option Harrison presents in his paper would emphasize fast-tracking a limited number of space-based interceptors that could defend against a smaller attack of up to five ballistic missiles, plus new missile warning and tracking satellites, ground- and sea-based interceptors, and other augmentations of existing missile-defense forces.

That would cost an estimated $471 billion over the next 20 years.

Supporters of the Golden Dome project say it’s much more feasible today to field space-based interceptors than it was in the Reagan era. Commercial assembly lines are now churning out thousands of satellites per year, and it’s cheaper to launch them today than it was 40 years ago.

A report released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in May examined the effect of reduced launch prices on potential Golden Dome architectures. The CBO estimated that the cost of deploying between 1,000 and 2,000 space-based interceptors would be between 30 and 40 percent cheaper today than the CBO found in a previous study in 2004.

But the costs just for deploying up to 2,000 space-based interceptors remain astounding, ranging from $161 billion to $542 billion over 20 years, even with today’s reduced launch prices, according to the CBO. The overwhelming share of the cost today would be developing and building the interceptors themselves, not launching them.

Trump’s Golden Dome will cost 10 to 100 times more than the Manhattan Project Read More »

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Pentagon begins deploying new satellite network to link sensors with shooters

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“This is the first time we’ll have a space layer fully integrated into our warfighting operations.”

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, with a payload of 21 data-relay satellites for the US military’s Space Development Agency. Credit: SpaceX

The first 21 satellites in a constellation that could become a cornerstone for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile-defense shield successfully launched from California Wednesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The Falcon 9 took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, at 7: 12 am PDT (10: 12 am EDT; 14: 12 UTC) and headed south over the Pacific Ocean, heading for an orbit over the poles before releasing the 21 military-owned satellites to begin several weeks of activations and checkouts.

These 21 satellites will boost themselves to a final orbit at an altitude of roughly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers). The Pentagon plans to launch 133 more satellites over the next nine months to complete the build-out of the Space Development Agency’s first-generation, or Tranche 1, constellation of missile-tracking and data-relay satellites.

“We had a great launch today for the Space Development Agency, putting this array of space vehicles into orbit in support of their revolutionary new architecture,” said Col. Ryan Hiserote, system program director for the Space Force’s assured access to space launch execution division.

Over the horizon

Military officials have worked for six years to reach this moment. The Space Development Agency (SDA) was established during the first Trump administration, which made plans for an initial set of demonstration satellites that launched a couple of years ago. In 2022, the Pentagon awarded contracts for the first 154 operational spacecraft. The first batch of 21 data-relay satellites built by Colorado-based York Space Systems is what went up Wednesday.

“Back in 2019, when the SDA was stood up, it was to do two things. One was to make sure that we can do beyond line of sight targeting, and the other was to pace the threat, the emerging threat, in the missile-warning and missile-tracking domain. That’s what the focus has been,” said Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo, the SDA’s acting director.

Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink and Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) pose with industry and government teams in front of the Space Development’s first 21 operational satellites at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Cramer is one the most prominent backers of the Golden Dome program in the US Senate. Credit: US Air Force/Staff Sgt. Daekwon Stith

Historically, the military communications and missile-warning networks have used a handful of large, expensive satellites in geosynchronous orbit some 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above the Earth. This architecture was devised during the Cold War and is optimized for nuclear conflict and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

For example, the military’s ultra-hardened Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellites in geosynchronous orbit are designed to operate through an electromagnetic pulse and nuclear scintillation. The Space Force’s missile-warning satellites are also in geosynchronous orbit, with infrared sensors tuned to detect the heat plume of a missile launch.

The problem? Those satellites cost more than $1 billion a pop. They’re also vulnerable to attack from a foreign adversary. Pentagon officials say the SDA’s satellite constellation, officially called the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, is tailored to detect and track more modern threats, such as smaller missiles and hypersonic weapons carrying conventional warheads. It’s easier for these missiles to evade the eyes of older early warning satellites.

What’s more, the SDA’s fleet in low-Earth orbit will have numerous satellites. Losing one or several satellites to an attack would not degrade the constellation’s overall capability. The SDA’s new relay satellites cost between $14 and $15 million each, according to Sandhoo. The total cost of the first tranche of 154 operational satellites totals approximately $3.1 billion.

Multi-mission satellites

These satellites will not only detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missile launches; they will also transmit signals between US forces using an existing encrypted tactical data link network known as Link 16. This UHF system is used by NATO and other US allies to allow military aircraft, ships, and land forces to share tactical information through text messages, pictures, data, and voice communication in near real time, according to the SDA’s website.

Up to now, Link 16 radios were ubiquitous on fighter jets, helicopters, naval vessels, and missile batteries. But they had a severe limitation. Link 16 was only able to close a radio link with a clear line of sight. The Space Development Agency’s satellites will change that, providing direct-to-weapon connectivity from sensors to shooters on Earth’s surface, in the air, and in space.

The relay satellites, which the SDA calls the transport layer, are also equipped with Ka-band and laser communication terminals for higher-bandwidth connectivity.

“What the transport layer does is it extends beyond the line of sight,” Sandhoo said. “Now, you’re able to talk not only to within a couple of miles with your Link 16 radios, (but) we can use space to, let’s say, go from Hawaii out to Guam using those tactical radios, using a space layer.”

The Space Development Agency’s “Tranche 1” architecture includes 154 operational satellites, 126 for data relay and 28 for missile tracking. With this illustration, the SDA does its best to show how the complex architecture is supposed to work. Credit: Space Development Agency

Another batch of SDA relay satellites will launch next month, and more will head to space in November. In all, it will take 10 launches to fully deploy the SDA’s Tranche 1 constellation. Six of those missions will carry data-relay satellites, and four will carry satellites with sensors to detect and track missile launches. The Pentagon selected several contractors to build the satellites, so the military is not reliant on a single company. The builders of the SDA’s operational satellites include York, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and L3Harris.

“We will increase coverage as we get the rest of those launches on orbit,” said Michael Eppolito, the SDA’s acting deputy director.

The satellites will connect with one another using inter-satellite laser links, creating a mesh network with sufficient range to provide regional communications, missile warning, and targeting coverage over the Western Pacific beginning in 2027. US Indo-Pacific Command, which oversees military operations in this region, is slated to become the first combatant command to take up use of the SDA’s satellite constellation.

This is not incidental. US officials see China as the nation’s primary strategic threat, and Indo-Pacific Command would be on the front lines of any future conflict between Chinese and US forces. The SDA has contracts in place for more than 270 second-generation, or Tranche 2, satellites, to further expand the network’s reach. There’s also a third generation in the works, but the Pentagon has paused part of the SDA’s Tranche 3 program to evaluate other architectures, including one offered by SpaceX.

Teaching tactical operators to use the new capabilities offered by the SDA’s satellite fleet could be just as challenging as building the network itself. To do this, the Pentagon plans to put soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines through “warfighter immersion” training beginning next year. This training will allow US forces to “get used to using space from this construct,” Sandhoo said.

“This is different than how it has been done in the past,” Sandhoo said. “This is the first time we’ll have a space layer actually fully integrated into our warfighting operations.”

The SDA’s satellite architecture is a harbinger for what’s to come with the Pentagon’s Golden Dome system, a missile-defense shield for the US homeland proposed by President Donald Trump in an executive order in January. Congress authorized a down payment on Golden Dome in July, the first piece of funding for what the White House says will cost $175 billion over the next three years.

Golden Dome, as currently envisioned, will require thousands of satellites in low-Earth orbit to track missile launches and space-based interceptors to attempt to shoot them down. The Trump administration hasn’t said how much of the shield might be deployed by the end of 2028, or what the entire system might eventually cost.

But the capabilities of the SDA’s satellites will lay the foundation for any regional or national missile-defense shield. Therefore, it seems likely that the military will incorporate the SDA network into Golden Dome, which, at least at first, is likely to consist of technologies already in space or nearing launch. Apart from the Space Development Agency’s architecture in low-Earth orbit (LEO), the Space Force was already developing a new generation of missile-warning satellites to replace aging platforms in geosynchronous orbit (GEO), plus a fleet of missile-warning satellites to fly at a midrange altitude between LEO and GEO.

Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, commander of US Northern Command, said in April that Golden Dome “for the first time integrates multiple layers into one system that allows us to detect, track, and defeat multiple types of threats that affect us in different domains.

“So, while a lot of the components and the requirements were there in the past, this is the first time that it’s all tied together in one system,” he said.

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Trump’s move of SPACECOM to Alabama has little to do with national security

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The Pentagon says the move will save money, but acknowledges risk to military readiness.

President Donald Trump speaks to the media in the Oval Office at the White House on September 2, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images

President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that US Space Command will be relocated from Colorado to Alabama, returning to the Pentagon’s plans for the command’s headquarters from the final days of Trump’s first term in the White House.

The headquarters will move to the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Trump made the announcement in the Oval Office, flanked by Republican members of the Alabama congressional delegation.

The move will “help America defend and dominate the high frontier,” Trump said. It also marks another twist on a contentious issue that has pitted Colorado and Alabama against one another in a fight for the right to be home to the permanent headquarters of Space Command (SPACECOM), a unified combatant command responsible for carrying out military operations in space.

Space Command is separate from the Space Force and is made up of personnel from all branches of the armed services. The Space Force, on the other hand, is charged with supplying personnel and technology for use by multiple combatant commands. The newest armed service, established in 2019 during President Trump’s first term, is part of the Department of the Air Force, which also had the authority for recommending where to base Space Command’s permanent headquarters.

“US Space Command stands ready to carry out the direction of the president following today’s announcement of Huntsville, Alabama, as the command’s permanent headquarters location,” SPACECOM wrote on its official X account.

Military officials in the first Trump administration considered potential sites in Colorado, Florida, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Texas before the Air Force recommended basing Space Command in Huntsville, Alabama, on January 13, 2021, a week before Trump left office.

Members of Colorado’s congressional delegation protested the decision, suggesting the recommendation was political. Trump won a larger share of votes in Alabama in 2016, 2020, and 2024 than in any of the other states in contention. On average, a higher percentage of Colorado’s citizens cast their votes against Trump than in the other five states vying for Space Command’s permanent headquarters.

Trump’s reasons

Trump cited three reasons Tuesday for basing Space Command in Alabama. He noted Redstone Arsenal’s proximity to other government and industrial space facilities, the persistence of Alabama officials in luring the headquarters away from Colorado, and Colorado’s use of mail-in voting, a policy that has drawn Trump’s ire but is wholly unrelated to military space matters.

“That played a big factor, also,” Trump said of Colorado’s mail-in voting law.

None of the reasons for the relocation that Trump mentioned in his remarks on Tuesday explained why Alabama is a better place for Space Command’s headquarters than Colorado, although the Air Force has pointed to cost savings as a rationale for the move.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation concluded in 2022 that the Air Force did not follow “best practices” in formulating its recommendation to place Space Command at Redstone Arsenal, leading to “significant shortfalls in its transparency and credibility.”

A separate report in 2022 from the Pentagon’s own inspector general concluded the Air Force’s basing decision process was “reasonable” and complied with military policy and federal law, but criticized the decision-makers’ record-keeping.

Former President Joe Biden’s secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall, stood by the recommendation in 2023 to relocate Space Command to Alabama, citing an estimated $426 million in cost savings due to lower construction and personnel costs in Huntsville relative to Colorado Springs. However, since then, Space Command achieved full operational capability at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado.

Now-retired Army Gen. James Dickinson raised concerns about moving Space Command from Colorado to Alabama. Credit: US Space Force/Tech. Sgt. Luke Kitterman

Army Gen. James Dickinson, head of Space Command from 2020 until 2023, favored keeping the headquarters in Colorado, according to a separate inspector general report released earlier this year.

“Mission success is highly dependent on human capital and infrastructure,” Dickinson wrote in a 2023 memorandum to the secretary of the Air Force. “There is risk that most of the 1,000 civilians, contractors, and reservists will not relocate to another location.”

One division chief within Space Command’s plans and policy directorate told the Pentagon’s inspector general in May 2024 that they feared losing 90 percent of their civilian workforce if the Air Force announced a relocation. A representative of another directorate told the inspector general’s office that they could say “with certainty” only one of 25 civilian employees in their division would move to a new headquarters location.

Officials at Redstone Arsenal and information technology experts at Space Command concluded it would take three to four years to construct temporary facilities in Huntsville with the same capacity, connectivity, and security as those already in use in Colorado Springs, according to the DoD inspector general.

Tension under Biden

Essentially, the inspector general reported, officials at the Pentagon made cost savings their top consideration in where to garrison Space Command. Leaders at Space Command prioritized military readiness.

President Biden decided in July 2023 that Space Command’s headquarters would remain in Colorado Springs. The decision, according to the Pentagon’s press secretary at the time, would “ensure peak readiness in the space domain for our nation during a critical period.” Alabama lawmakers decried Biden’s decision in favor of Colorado, claiming it, too, was politically motivated.

Space Command reached full operational capability at its headquarters at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, two years ahead of schedule in December 2023. At the time, Space Command leaders said they could only declare Space Command fully operational upon the selection of a permanent headquarters.

Now, a year-and-a-half later, the Trump administration will uproot the headquarters and move it more than 1,000 miles to Alabama. But it hasn’t been smooth sailing for Space Command in Colorado.

A new report by the GAO published in May said Space Command faced “ongoing personnel, facilities, and communications challenges” at Peterson, despite the command’s declaration of full operational capability. Space Command officials told the GAO the command’s posture at Peterson is “not sustainable long term and new military construction would be needed” in Colorado Springs.

Space Command was originally established in 1985. The George W. Bush administration later transferred responsibility for military space activities to the US Strategic Command, as part of a post-9/11 reorganization of the military’s command structure. President Trump reestablished Space Command in 2019, months before Congress passed legislation to make the Space Force the nation’s newest military branch.

Throughout its existence, Space Command has been headquartered at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs. But now, Pentagon officials say the growing importance of military space operations and potentially space warfare requires Space Command to occupy a larger headquarters than the existing facility at Peterson.

Peterson Space Force Base is also the headquarters of North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, US Northern Command, and Space Operations Command, all of which work closely with Space Command. Space Command officials told the GAO there were benefits in being co-located with operational space missions and centers, where engineers and operators control some of the military’s most important spacecraft in orbit.

Several large space companies also have significant operations or headquarters in the Denver metro area, including Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance, BAE Systems, and Sierra Space.

In Alabama, ULA and Blue Origin operate rocket and engine factories near Huntsville. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command are located at Redstone Arsenal itself.

The headquarters building at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. Credit: US Space Force/Keefer Patterson

Colorado’s congressional delegation—six Democrats and four Republicans—issued a joint statement Tuesday expressing their disappointment in Trump’s decision.

“Today’s decision to move US Space Command’s headquarters out of Colorado and to Alabama will directly harm our state and the nation,” the delegation said in a statement. “We are united in fighting to reverse this decision. Bottom line—moving Space Command headquarters weakens our national security at the worst possible time.”

The relocation of Space Command headquarters is estimated to bring about 1,600 direct jobs to Huntsville, Alabama. The area surrounding the headquarters will also derive indirect economic benefits, something Colorado lawmakers said they fear will come at the expense of businesses and workers in Colorado Springs.

“Being prepared for any threats should be the nation’s top priority; a crucial part of that is keeping in place what is already fully operational,” the Colorado lawmakers wrote. “Moving Space Command would not result in any additional operational capabilities than what we have up and running in Colorado Springs now. Colorado Springs is the appropriate home for US Space Command, and we will take the necessary action to keep it there.”

Alabama’s senators and representatives celebrated Trump’s announcement Tuesday.

“The Air Force originally selected Huntsville in 2021 based 100 percent on merit as the best choice,” said Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Alabama). “President Biden reversed that decision based on politics. This wrong has been righted and Space Command will take its place among Huntsville’s world-renowned space, aeronautics, and defense leaders.”

Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement that the Trump administration should provide “full transparency” and the “full details of this poor decision.”

“We hope other vital military units and missions are retained and expanded in Colorado Springs. Colorado remains an ideal location for future missions, including Golden Dome,” Polis said, referring to the Pentagon’s proposed homeland missile defense system.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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US military’s X-37B spaceplane stays relevant with launch of another mission

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“Quantum inertial sensors are not only scientifically intriguing, but they also have direct defense applications,” said Lt. Col. Nicholas Estep, an Air Force engineer who manages the DIU’s emerging technology portfolio. “If we can field devices that provide a leap in sensitivity and precision for observing platform motion over what is available today, then there’s an opportunity for strategic gains across the DoD.”

Teaching an old dog new tricks

The Pentagon’s twin X-37Bs have logged more than 4,200 days in orbit, equivalent to about 11-and-a-half years. The spaceplanes have flown in secrecy for nearly all of that time.

The most recent flight, Mission 7, ended in March with a runway landing at Vandenberg after a mission of more than 14 months that carried the spaceplane higher than ever before, all the way to an altitude approaching 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers). The high-altitude elliptical orbit required a boost on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

In the final phase of the mission, ground controllers commanded the X-37B to gently dip into the atmosphere to demonstrate the spacecraft could use “aerobraking” maneuvers to bring its orbit closer to Earth in preparation for reentry.

An X-37B spaceplane is ready for encapsulation inside the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairing. Credit: US Space Force

Now, on Mission 8, the spaceplane heads back to low-Earth orbit hosting quantum navigation and laser communications experiments. Few people, if any, envisioned these kinds of missions flying on the X-37B when it first soared to space 15 years ago. At that time, quantum sensing was confined to the lab, and the first laser communication demonstrations in space were barely underway. SpaceX hadn’t revealed its plans for the Falcon Heavy rocket, which the X-37B needed to get to its higher orbit on the last mission.

The laser communications experiments on this flight will involve optical inter-satellite links with “proliferated commercial satellite networks in low-Earth orbit,” the Space Force said. This is likely a reference to SpaceX’s Starlink or Starshield broadband satellites. Laser links enable faster transmission of data, while offering more security against eavesdropping or intercepts.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s chief of space operations, said in a statement that the laser communications experiment “will mark an important step in the US Space Force’s ability to leverage proliferated space networks as part of a diversified and redundant space architectures. In so doing, it will strengthen the resilience, reliability, adaptability and data transport speeds of our satellite communications architecture.”

US military’s X-37B spaceplane stays relevant with launch of another mission Read More »

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Space Force officials take secrecy to new heights ahead of key rocket launch

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The Vulcan rocket checks off several important boxes for the Space Force. First, it relies entirely on US-made rocket engines. The Atlas V rocket it is replacing uses Russian-built main engines, and given the chilled relations between the two powers, US officials have long desired to stop using Russian engines to power the Pentagon’s satellites into orbit. Second, ULA says the Vulcan rocket will eventually provide a heavy-lift launch capability at a lower cost than the company’s now-retired Delta IV Heavy rocket.

Third, Vulcan provides the Space Force with an alternative to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, which have been the only rockets in their class available to the military since the last national security mission was launched on an Atlas V rocket one year ago.

Col. Jim Horne, mission director for the USSF-106 launch, said this flight marks a “pretty historic point in our program’s history. We officially end our reliance on Russian-made main engines with this launch, and we continue to maintain our assured access to space with at least two independent rocket service companies that we can leverage to get our capabilities on orbit.”

What’s onboard?

The Space Force has only acknowledged one of the satellites aboard the USSF-106 mission, but there are more payloads cocooned inside the Vulcan rocket’s fairing.

The $250 million mission that officials are willing to talk about is named Navigation Technology Satellite-3, or NTS-3. This experimental spacecraft will test new satellite navigation technologies that may eventually find their way on next-generation GPS satellites. A key focus for engineers who designed and will operate the NTS-3 satellite is to look at ways of overcoming GPS jamming and spoofing, which can degrade satellite navigation signals used by military forces, commercial airliners, and civilian drivers.

“We’re going to be doing, we anticipate, over 100 different experiments,” said Joanna Hinks, senior research aerospace engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s space vehicles directorate, which manages the NTS-3 mission. “Some of the major areas we’re looking at—we have an electronically steerable phased array antenna so that we can deliver higher power to get through interference to the location that it’s needed.”

Arlen Biersgreen, then-program manager for the NTS-3 satellite mission at the Air Force Research Laboratory, presents a one-third scale model of the NTS-3 spacecraft to an audience in 2022. Credit: US Air Force/Andrea Rael

GPS jamming is especially a problem in and near war zones. Investigators probing the crash of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 last December determined GPS jamming, likely by Russian military forces attempting to counter a Ukrainian drone strike, interfered with the aircraft’s navigation as it approached its destination in the Russian republic of Chechnya. Azerbaijani government officials blamed a Russian surface-to-air missile for damaging the aircraft, ultimately leading to a crash in nearby Kazakhstan that killed 38 people.

“We have a number of different advanced signals that we’ve designed,” Hinks said. “One of those is the Chimera anti-spoofing signal… to protect civil users from spoofing that’s affecting so many aircraft worldwide today, as well as ships.”

The NTS-3 spacecraft, developed by L3Harris and Northrop Grumman, only takes up a fraction of the Vulcan rocket’s capacity. The satellite weighs less than 3,000 pounds (about 1,250 kilograms), about a quarter of what this version of the Vulcan rocket can deliver to geosynchronous orbit.

Space Force officials take secrecy to new heights ahead of key rocket launch Read More »

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The military’s squad of satellite trackers is now routinely going on alert

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“I hope this blows your mind because it blows my mind.”

A Long March 3B rocket carrying a new Chinese Beidou navigation satellite lifts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on May 17, 2023. Credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images

This is Part 2 of our interview with Col. Raj Agrawal, the former commander of the Space Force’s Space Mission Delta 2.

If it seems like there’s a satellite launch almost every day, the numbers will back you up.

The US Space Force’s Mission Delta 2 is a unit that reports to Space Operations Command, with the job of sorting out the nearly 50,000 trackable objects humans have launched into orbit.

Dozens of satellites are being launched each week, primarily by SpaceX to continue deploying the Starlink broadband network. The US military has advance notice of these launches—most of them originate from Space Force property—and knows exactly where they’re going and what they’re doing.

That’s usually not the case when China or Russia (and occasionally Iran or North Korea) launches something into orbit. With rare exceptions, like human spaceflight missions, Chinese and Russian officials don’t publish any specifics about what their rockets are carrying or what altitude they’re going to.

That creates a problem for military operators tasked with monitoring traffic in orbit and breeds anxiety among US forces responsible for making sure potential adversaries don’t gain an edge in space. Will this launch deploy something that can destroy or disable a US satellite? Will this new satellite have a new capability to surveil allied forces on the ground or at sea?

Of course, this is precisely the point of keeping launch details under wraps. The US government doesn’t publish orbital data on its most sensitive satellites, such as spy craft collecting intelligence on foreign governments.

But you can’t hide in low-Earth orbit, a region extending hundreds of miles into space. Col. Raj Agrawal, who commanded Mission Delta 2 until earlier this month, knows this all too well. Agrawal handed over command to Col. Barry Croker as planned after a two-year tour of duty at Mission Delta 2.

Col. Raj Agrawal, then-Mission Delta 2 commander, delivers remarks to audience members during the Mission Delta 2 redesignation ceremony in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on October 31, 2024. Credit: US Space Force

Some space enthusiasts have made a hobby of tracking US and foreign military satellites as they fly overhead, stringing together a series of observations over time to create fairly precise estimates of an object’s altitude and inclination.

Commercial companies are also getting in on the game of space domain awareness. But most are based in the United States or allied nations and have close partnerships with the US government. Therefore, they only release information on satellites owned by China and Russia. This is how Ars learned of interesting maneuvers underway with a Chinese refueling satellite and suspected Russian satellite killers.

Theoretically, there’s nothing to stop a Chinese company, for example, from taking a similar tack on revealing classified maneuvers conducted by US military satellites.

The Space Force has an array of sensors scattered around the world to detect and track satellites and space debris. The 18th and 19th Space Defense Squadrons, which were both under Agrawal’s command at Mission Delta 2, are the units responsible for this work.

Preparing for the worst

One of the most dynamic times in the life of a Space Force satellite tracker is when China or Russia launches something new, according to Agrawal. His command pulls together open source information, such as airspace and maritime warning notices, to know when a launch might be scheduled.

This is not unlike how outside observers, like hobbyist trackers and space reporters, get a heads-up that something is about to happen. These notices tell you when a launch might occur, where it will take off from, and which direction it will go. What’s different for the Space Force is access to top-secret intelligence that might clue military officials in on what the rocket is actually carrying. China, in particular, often declares that its satellites are experimental, when Western analysts believe they are designed to support military activities.

That’s when US forces swing into action. Sometimes, military forces go on alert. Commanders develop plans to detect, track, and target the objects associated with a new launch, just in case they are “hostile,” Agrawal said.

We asked Agrawal to take us through the process his team uses to prepare for and respond to one of these unannounced, or “non-cooperative,” launches. This portion of our interview is published below, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Ars: Let’s say there’s a Russian or Chinese launch. How do you find out there’s a launch coming? Do you watch for NOTAMs (Notices to Airmen), like I do, and try to go from there?

Agrawal: I think the conversation starts the same way that it probably starts with you and any other technology-interested American. We begin with what’s available. We certainly have insight through intelligence means to be able to get ahead of some of that, but we’re using a lot of the same sources to refine our understanding of what may happen, and then we have access to other intel.

The good thing is that the Space Force is a part of the Intelligence Community. We’re plugged into an entire Intelligence Community focused on anything that might be of national security interest. So we’re able to get ahead. Maybe we can narrow down NOTAMs; maybe we can anticipate behavior. Maybe we have other activities going on in other domains or on the Internet, the cyber domain, and so on, that begin to tip off activity.

Certainly, we’ve begun to understand patterns of behavior. But no matter what, it’s not the same level of understanding as those who just cooperate and work together as allies and friends. And if there’s a launch that does occur, we’re not communicating with that launch control center. We’re certainly not communicating with the folks that are determining whether or not the launch will be safe, if it’ll be nominal, how many payloads are going to deploy, where they’re going to deploy to.

I certainly understand why a nation might feel that they want to protect that. But when you’re fielding into LEO [low-Earth orbit] in particular, you’re not really going to hide there. You’re really just creating uncertainty, and now we’re having to deal with that uncertainty. We eventually know where everything is, but in that meantime, you’re creating a lot of risk for all the other nations and organizations that have fielded capability in LEO as well.

Find, fix, track, target

Ars: Can you take me through what it’s like for you and your team during one of these launches? When one comes to your attention, through a NOTAM or something else, how do you prepare for it? What are you looking for as you get ready for it? How often are you surprised by something with one of these launches?

Agrawal: Those are good questions. Some of it, I’ll be more philosophical on, and others I can be specific on. But on a routine basis, our formation is briefed on all of the launches we’re aware of, to varying degrees, with the varying levels of confidence, and at what classifications have we derived that information.

In fact, we also have a weekly briefing where we go into depth on how we have planned against some of what we believe to be potentially higher threats. How many organizations are involved in that mission plan? Those mission plans are done at a very tactical level by captains and NCOs [non-commissioned officers] that are part of the combat squadrons that are most often presented to US Space Command…

That integrated mission planning involves not just Mission Delta 2 forces but also presented forces by our intelligence delta [Space Force units are called deltas], by our missile warning and missile tracking delta, by our SATCOM [satellite communications] delta, and so on—from what we think is on the launch pad, what we think might be deployed, what those capabilities are. But also what might be held at risk as a result of those deployments, not just in terms of maneuver but also what might these even experimental—advertised “experimental”—capabilities be capable of, and what harm might be caused, and how do we mission-plan against those potential unprofessional or hostile behaviors?

As you can imagine, that’s a very sophisticated mission plan for some of these launches based on what we know about them. Certainly, I can’t, in this environment, confirm or deny any of the specific launches… because I get access to more fidelity and more confidence on those launches, the timing and what’s on them, but the precursor for the vast majority of all these launches is that mission plan.

That happens at a very tactical level. That is now posturing the force. And it’s a joint force. It’s not just us, Space Force forces, but it’s other services’ capabilities as well that are posturing to respond to that. And the truth is that we even have partners, other nations, other agencies, intel agencies, that have capability that have now postured against some of these launches to now be committed to understanding, did we anticipate this properly? Did we not?

And then, what are our branch plans in case it behaves in a way that we didn’t anticipate? How do we react to it? What do we need to task, posture, notify, and so on to then get observations, find, fix, track, target? So we’re fulfilling the preponderance of what we call the kill chain, for what we consider to be a non-cooperative launch, with a hope that it behaves peacefully but anticipating that it’ll behave in a way that’s unprofessional or hostile… We have multiple chat rooms at multiple classifications that are communicating in terms of “All right, is it launching the way we expected it to, or did it deviate? If it deviated, whose forces are now at risk as a result of that?”

A spectator takes photos before the launch of the Long March 7A rocket carrying the ChinaSat 3B satellite from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China on May 20, 2025. Credit: Meng Zhongde/VCG via Getty Images

Now, we even have down to the fidelity of what forces on the ground or on the ocean may not have capability… because of maneuvers or protective measures that the US Space Force has to take in order to deviate from its mission because of that behavior. The conversation, the way it was five years ago and the way it is today, is very, very different in terms of just a launch because now that launch, in many cases, is presenting a risk to the joint force.

We’re acting like a joint force. So that Marine, that sailor, that special operator on the ground who was expecting that capability now is notified in advance of losing that capability, and we have measures in place to mitigate those outages. And if not, then we let them know that “Hey, you’re not going to have the space capability for some period of time. We’ll let you know when we’re back. You have to go back to legacy operations for some period of time until we’re back into nominal configuration.”

I hope this blows your mind because it blows my mind in the way that we now do even just launch processing. It’s very different than what we used to do.

Ars: So you’re communicating as a team in advance of a launch and communicating down to the tactical level, saying that this launch is happening, this is what it may be doing, so watch out?

Agrawal: Yeah. It’s not as simple as a ballistic missile warning attack, where it’s duck and cover. Now, it’s “Hey, we’ve anticipated the things that could occur that could affect your ability to do your mission as a result of this particular launch with its expected payload, and what we believe it may do.” So it’s not just a general warning. It’s a very scoped warning.

As that launch continues, we’re able to then communicate more specifically on which forces may lose what, at what time, and for how long. And it’s getting better and better as the rest of the US Space Force, as they present capability trained to that level of understanding as well… We train this together. We operate together and we communicate together so that the tactical user—sometimes it’s us at US Space Force, but many times it’s somebody on the surface of the Earth that has to understand how their environment, their capability, has changed as a result of what’s happening in, to, and from space.

Ars: The types of launches where you don’t know exactly what’s coming are getting more common now. Is it normal for you to be on this alert posture for all of the launches out of China or Russia?

Agrawal: Yeah. You see it now. The launch manifest is just ridiculous, never mind the ones we know about. The ones that we have to reach out into the intelligence world and learn about, that’s getting ridiculous, too. We don’t have to have this whole machine postured this way for cooperative launches. So the amount of energy we’re expending for a non-cooperative launch is immense. We can do it. We can keep doing it, but you’re just putting us on alert… and you’re putting us in a position where we’re getting ready for bad behavior with the entire general force, as opposed to a cooperative launch, where we can anticipate. If there’s an anomaly, we can anticipate those and work through them. But we’re working through it with friends, and we’re communicating.

We’re not having to put tactical warfighters on alert every time … but for those payloads that we have more concern about. But still, it’s a very different approach, and that’s why we are actively working with as many nations as possible in Mission Delta 2 to get folks to sign on with Space Command’s space situational awareness sharing agreements, to go at space operations as friends, as allies, as partners, working together. So that way, we’re not posturing for something higher-end as a result of the launch, but we’re doing this together. So, with every nation we can, we’re getting out there—South America, Africa, every nation that will meet with us, we want to meet with them and help them get on the path with US Space Command to share data, to work as friends, and use space responsibly.”

A Long March 3B carrier rocket carrying the Shijian 21 satellite lifts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on October 24, 2021. Credit: Li Jieyi/VCG via Getty Images

Ars: How long does it take you to sort out and get a track on all of the objects for an uncooperative launch?

Agrawal: That question is a tough one to answer. We can move very, very quickly, but there are times when we have made a determination of what we think something is, what it is and where it’s going, and intent; there might be some lag to get it into a public catalog due to a number of factors, to include decisions being made by combatant commanders, because, again, our primary objective is not the public-facing catalog. The primary objective is, do we have a risk or not?

If we have a risk, let’s understand, let’s figure out to what degree do we think we have to manage this within the Department of Defense. And to what degree do we believe, “Oh, no, this can go in the public catalog. This is a predictable elset (element set)”? What we focus on with (the public catalog) are things that help with predictability, with spaceflight safety, with security, spaceflight security. So you sometimes might see a lag there, but that’s because we’re wrestling with the security aspect of the degree to which we need to manage this internally before we believe it’s predictable. But once we believe it’s predictable, we put it in the catalog, and we put it on space-track.org. There’s some nuance in there that isn’t relative to technology or process but more on national security.

On the flip side, what used to take hours and days is now getting down to seconds and minutes. We’ve overhauled—not 100 percent, but to a large degree—and got high-speed satellite communications from sensors to the centers of SDA (Space Domain Awareness) processing. We’re getting higher-end processing. We’re now duplicating the ability to process, duplicating that capability across multiple units. So what used to just be human labor intensive, and also kind of dial-up speed of transmission, we’ve now gone to high-speed transport. You’re seeing a lot of innovation occur, and a lot of data fusion occur, that’s getting us to seconds and minutes.

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

The military’s squad of satellite trackers is now routinely going on alert Read More »

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Ars spoke with the military’s chief orbital traffic cop—here’s what we learned

china, Features, military space, raj agrawal, russia, Science, Space, space debris, space traffic management, US Space Force / /

“We have some 2,000 or 2,200 objects that I call the ‘red order of battle.'”

Col. Raj Agrawal participates in a change of command ceremony to mark his departure from Mission Delta 2 at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. Col. Barry Croker became the new commander of Mission Delta 2 on July 3.

For two years, Col. Raj Agrawal commanded the US military unit responsible for tracking nearly 50,000 human-made objects whipping through space. In this role, he was keeper of the orbital catalog and led teams tasked with discerning whether other countries’ satellites, mainly China and Russia, are peaceful or present a military threat to US forces.

This job is becoming more important as the Space Force prepares for the possibility of orbital warfare.

Ars visited with Agrawal in the final weeks of his two-year tour of duty as commander of Mission Delta 2, a military unit at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. Mission Delta 2 collects and fuses data from a network of sensors “to identify, characterize, and exploit opportunities and mitigate vulnerabilities” in orbit, according to a Space Force fact sheet.

This involves operating radars and telescopes, analyzing intelligence information, and “mapping the geocentric space terrain” to “deliver a combat-ready common operational picture” to military commanders. Agrawal’s job has long existed in one form or another, but the job description is different today. Instead of just keeping up with where things are in space—a job challenging enough—military officials now wrestle with distinguishing which objects might have a nefarious purpose.

From teacher to commander

Agrawal’s time at Mission Delta 2 ended on July 3. His next assignment will be as Space Force chair at the National Defense University. This marks a return to education for Agrawal, who served as a Texas schoolteacher for eight years before receiving his commission as an Air Force officer in 2001.

“Teaching is, I think, at the heart of everything I do,” Agrawal said. 

He taught music and math at Trimble Technical High School, an inner city vocational school in Fort Worth. “Most of my students were in broken homes and unfortunate circumstances,” Agrawal said. “I went to church with those kids and those families, and a lot of times, I was the one bringing them home and taking them to school. What was [satisfying] about that was a lot of those students ended up living very fulfilling lives.”

Agrawal felt a calling for higher service and signed up to join the Air Force. Given his background in music, he initially auditioned for and was accepted into the Air Force Band. But someone urged him to apply for Officer Candidate School, and Agrawal got in. “I ended up on a very different path.”

Agrawal was initially accepted into the ICBM career field, but that changed after the September 11 attacks. “That was a time with anyone with a name like mine had a hard time,” he said. “It took a little bit of time to get my security clearance.”

Instead, the Air Force assigned him to work in space operations. Agrawal quickly became an instructor in space situational awareness, did a tour at the National Reconnaissance Office, then found himself working at the Pentagon in 2019 as the Defense Department prepared to set up the Space Force as a new military service. Agrawal was tasked with leading a team of 100 people to draft the first Space Force budget.

Then, he received the call to report to Peterson Space Force Base to take command of what is now Mission Delta 2, the inheritor of decades of Air Force experience cataloging everything in orbit down to the size of a softball. The catalog was stable and predictable, lingering below 10,000 trackable objects until 2007. That’s when China tested an anti-satellite missile, shattering an old Chinese spacecraft into more than 3,500 pieces large enough to be routinely detected by the US military’s Space Surveillance Network.

This graph from the European Space Agency shows the growing number of trackable objects in orbit. Credit: European Space Agency

Two years later, an Iridium communications satellite collided with a defunct Russian spacecraft, adding thousands more debris fragments to low-Earth orbit. A rapid uptick in the pace of launches since then has added to the problem, further congesting busy orbital traffic lanes a hundred miles above the Earth. Today, the orbital catalog numbers roughly 48,000 objects.

“This compiled data, known as the space catalog, is distributed across the military, intelligence community, commercial space entities, and to the public, free of charge,” officials wrote in a fact sheet describing Mission Delta 2’s role at Space Operations Command. Deltas are Space Force military units roughly equivalent to a wing or group command in the Air Force.

The room where it happens

The good news is that the US military is getting better at tracking things in space. A network of modern radars and telescopes on the ground and in space can now spot objects as small as a golf ball. Space is big, but these objects routinely pass close to one another. At speeds of nearly 5 miles per second, an impact will be catastrophic.

But there’s a new problem. Today, the US military must not only screen for accidental collisions but also guard against an attack on US satellites in orbit. Space is militarized, a fact illustrated by growing fleets of satellites—primarily American, Chinese, and Russian—capable of approaching another country’s assets in orbit, and in some cases, disable or destroy them. This has raised fears at the Pentagon that an adversary could take out US satellites critical for missile warning, navigation, and communications, with severe consequences impacting military operations and daily civilian life.

This new reality compelled the creation of the Space Force in 2019, beginning a yearslong process of migrating existing Air Force units into the new service. Now, the Pentagon is posturing for orbital warfare by investing in new technologies and reorganizing the military’s command structure.

Today, the Space Force is responsible for predicting when objects in orbit will come close to one another. This is called a conjunction in the parlance of orbital mechanics. The US military routinely issues conjunction warnings to commercial and foreign satellite operators to give them an opportunity to move their satellites out of harm’s way. These notices also go to NASA if there’s a chance of a close call with the International Space Station (ISS).

The first Trump administration approved a new policy to transfer responsibility for these collision warnings to the Department of Commerce, allowing the military to focus on national security objectives.

But the White House’s budget request for next year would cancel the Commerce Department’s initiative to take over collision warnings. Our discussion with Agrawal occurred before the details of the White House budget were made public last month, and his comments reflect official Space Force policy at the time of the interview. “In uniform, we align to policy,” Agrawal wrote on his LinkedIn account. “We inform policy decisions, but once they’re made, we align our support accordingly.”

US Space Force officials show the 18th Space Defense Squadron’s operations floor to officials from the German Space Situational Awareness Centre during an “Operator Exchange” event at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on April 7, 2022. Credit: US Space Force/Tech. Sgt. Luke Kitterman

Since our interview, analysts have also noticed an uptick in interesting Russian activity in space and tracked a suspected Chinese satellite refueling mission in geosynchronous orbit.

Let’s rewind the tape to 2007, the time of China’s game-changing anti-satellite test. Gen. Chance Saltzman, today the Space Force’s Chief of Space Operations, was a lieutenant colonel in command of the Air Force’s 614th Space Operations Squadron at the time. He was on duty when Air Force operators first realized China had tested an anti-satellite missile. Saltzman has called the moment a “pivot point” in space operations. “For those of us that are neck-deep in the business, we did have to think differently from that day on,” Saltzman said in 2023.

Agrawal was in the room, too. “I was on the crew that needed to count the pieces,” he told Ars. “I didn’t know the significance of what was happening until after many years, but the Chinese had clearly changed the nature of the space environment.”

The 2007 anti-satellite test also clearly changed the trajectory of Agrawal’s career. We present part of our discussion with Agrawal below, and we’ll share the rest of the conversation tomorrow. The text has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Ars: The Space Force’s role in monitoring activities in space has changed a lot in the last few years. Can you tell me about these changes, and what’s the difference between what you used to call Space Situational Awareness, and what is now called Space Domain Awareness?

Agrawal: We just finished our fifth year as a Space Force, so as a result of standing up a military service focused on space, we shifted our activities to focus on what the joint force requires for combat space power. We’ve been doing space operations for going on seven decades. I think a lot of folks think that it was a rebranding, as opposed to a different focus for space operations, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. Compared to Space Domain Awareness (SDA), Space Situational Awareness (SSA) is kind of the knowledge we produce with all these sensors, and anybody can do space situational awareness. You have academia doing that. You’ve got commercial, international partners, and so on. But Space Domain Awareness, Gen. [John “Jay”] Raymond coined the term a couple years before we stood up the Space Force, and he was trying to get after, how do we create a domain focused on operational outcomes? That’s all we could say at the time. We couldn’t say war-fighting domain at the time because of the way of our policy, but our policy shifted to being able to talk about space as a place where, not that we want to wage war, but that we can achieve objectives, and do that with military objectives in mind.

We used to talk about detect, characterize, attribute, predict. And then Gen. [Chance] Saltzman added target onto the construct for Space Domain Awareness, so that we’re very much in the conversation of what it means to do a space-enabled attack and being able to achieve objectives in, from, and to space, and using Space Domain Awareness as a vehicle to do those things. So, with Mission Delta 2, what he did is he took the sustainment part of acquisition, software development, cyber defense, intelligence related to Space Domain Awareness, and then all the things that we were doing in Space Domain Awareness already, put all that together under one command … and called us Mission Delta 2. So, the 18th Space Defense Squadron … that used to kind of be the center of the world for Space Domain Awareness, maybe the only unit that you could say was really doing SDA, where everyone else was kind of doing SSA. When I came into command a couple years ago, and we face now a real threat to having space superiority in the space domain, I disaggregated what we were doing just in the 18th and spread out through a couple of other units … So, that way everyone’s got kind of majors and minors, but we can quickly move a mission in case we get tested in terms of cyber defense or other kinds of vulnerabilities.

This multi-exposure image depicts a satellite-filled sky over Alberta. Credit: Alan Dyer/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

We can’t see the space domain, so it’s not like the air domain and sea domain and land domain, where you can kind of see where everything is, and you might have radars, but ultimately it’s a human that’s verifying whether or not a target or a threat is where it is. For the space domain, we’re doing all that through radars, telescopes, and computers, so the reality we create for everyone is essentially their reality. So, if there’s a gap, if there’s a delay, if there are some signs that we can’t see, that reality is what is created by us, and that is effectively the reality for everyone else, even if there is some other version of reality in space. So, we’re getting better and better at fielding capability to see the complexity, the number of objects, and then translating that into what’s useful for us—because we don’t need to see everything all the time—but what’s useful for us for military operations to achieve military objectives, and so we’ve shifted our focus just to that.

We’re trying to get to where commercial spaceflight safety is managed by the Office of Space Commerce, so they’re training side by side with us to kind of offload that mission and take that on. We’re doing up to a million notifications a day for conjunction assessments, sometimes as low as 600,000. But last year, we did 263 million conjunction notifications. So, we want to get to where the authorities are rightly lined, where civil or commercial notifications are done by an organization that’s not focused on joint war-fighting, and we focus on the things that we want to focus on.

Ars: Thank you for that overview. It helps me see the canvas for everything else we’re going to talk about. So, today, you’re not only tracking new satellites coming over the horizon from a recent launch or watching out for possible collisions, you’re now trying to see where things are going in space and maybe even try to determine intent, right?

Agrawal: Yeah, so the integrated mission delta has helped us have intel analysts and professionals as part of our formation. Their mission is SDA as much as ours is, but they’re using an intel lens. They’re looking at predictive intelligence, right? I don’t want to give away tradecraft, but what they’re focused on is not necessarily where a thing is. It used to be that all we cared about was position and vector, right? As long as you knew an object’s position and the direction they were going, you knew their orbit. You had predictive understanding of what their element set would be, and you only had to do sampling to get a sense of … Is it kind of where we thought it was going to be? … If it was far enough off of its element set, then we would put more energy, more sampling of that particular object, and then effectively re-catalog it.

Now, it’s a different model. We’re looking at state vectors, and we’re looking at anticipatory modeling, where we have some 2,000 or 2,200 objects that I call the “red order of battle”—that are high-interest objects that we anticipate will do things that are not predicted, that are not element set in nature, but that will follow some type of national interest. So, our intel apparatus gets after what things could potentially be a risk, and what things to continue to understand better, and what things we have to be ready to hold at risk. All of that’s happening through all the organizations, certainly within this delta, but in partnership and in support of other capabilities and deltas that are getting after their parts of space superiority.

Hostile or friendly?

Ars: Can you give some examples of these red order of battle objects?

Agrawal: I think you know about Shijian-20 (a “tech demo” satellite that has evaded inspection by US satellites) and Shijian-24C (which the Space Force says demonstrated “dogfighting” in space), things that are advertised as scientific in nature, but clearly demonstrate capability that is not friendly, and certainly are behaving in ways that are unprofessional. In any other domain, we would consider them hostile, but in space, we try to be a lot more nuanced in terms of how we characterize behavior, but still, when something’s behaving in a way that isn’t pre-planned, isn’t pre-coordinated, and potentially causes hazard, harm, or contest with friendly forces, we now get in a situation where we have to talk about is that behavior hostile or not? Is that escalatory or not? Space Command is charged with those authorities, so they work through the legal apparatus in terms of what the definition of a hostile act is and when something behaves in a way that we consider to be of national security interest.

We present all the capability to be able to do all that, and we have to be as cognizant on the service side as the combatant commanders are, so that our intel analysts are informing the forces and the training resources to be able to anticipate the behavior. We’re not simply recognizing it when it happens, but studying nations in the way they behave in all the other domains, in the way that they set policy, in the way that they challenge norms in other international arenas like the UN and various treaties, and so on. The biggest predictor, for us, of hazardous behaviors is when nations don’t coordinate with the international community on activities that are going to occur—launches, maneuvers, and fielding of large constellations, megaconstellations.

A stack of Starlink satellites in space right before deployment

Starlink satellites. Credit: Starlink

There are nearly 8,000 Starlink satellites in orbit today. SpaceX adds dozens of satellites to the constellation each week. Credit: SpaceX

As you know, we work very closely with Starlink, and they’re very, very responsible. They coordinate and flight plan. They use the kind of things that other constellations are starting to use … changes in those elsets (element sets), for lack of a better term, state vectors, we’re on top of that. We’re pre-coordinating that. We’re doing that weeks or months in advance. We’re doing that in real-time in cooperation with these organizations to make sure that space remains safe, secure, accessible, profitable even, for industry. When you have nations, where they’re launching over their population, where they’re creating uncertainty for the rest of the world, there’s nothing else we can do with it other than treat that as potentially hostile behavior. So, it does take a lot more of our resources, a lot more of our interest, and it puts [us] in a situation where we’re posturing the whole joint force to have to deal with that kind of uncertainty, as opposed to cooperative launches with international partners, with allies, with commercial, civil, and academia, where we’re doing that as friends, and we’re doing that in cooperation. If something goes wrong, we’re handling that as friends, and we’re not having to involve the rest of the security apparatus to get after that problem.

Ars: You mentioned that SpaceX shares Starlink orbit information with your team. Is it the same story with Amazon for the Kuiper constellation?

Agrawal: Yeah, it is. The good thing is that all the US and allied commercial entities, so far, have been super cooperative with Mission Delta 2 in particular, to be able to plan out, to talk about challenges, to even change the way they do business, learning more about what we are asking of them in order to be safe. The Office of Space Commerce, obviously, is now in that conversation as well. They’re learning that trade and ideally taking on more of that responsibility. Certainly, the evolution of technology has helped quite a bit, where you have launches that are self-monitored, that are able to maintain their own safety, as opposed to requiring an entire apparatus of what was the US Air Force often having to expend a tremendous amount of resources to provide for the safety of any launch. Now, technology has gotten to a point where a lot of that is self-monitored, self-reported, and you’ll see commercial entities blow up their own rockets no matter what’s onboard if they see that it’s going to cause harm to a population, and so on. So, yeah, we’re getting a lot of cooperation from other nations, allies, partners, close friends that are also sharing and cooperating in the interest of making sure that space remains sustainable and secure.

“We’ve made ourselves responsible”

Ars: One of the great ironies is that after you figure out the positions and tracks of Chinese or Russian satellites or constellations, you’re giving that data right back to them in the form of conjunction and collision notices, right?

Agrawal: We’ve made ourselves responsible. I don’t know that there’s any organization holding us accountable to that. We believe it’s in our interests, in the US’s interests, to provide for a safe, accessible, secure space domain. So, whatever we can do to help other nations also be safe, we’re doing it certainly for their sake, but we’re doing it as much for our sake, too. We want the space domain to be safe and predictable. We do have an apparatus set up in partnership with the State Department, and with a tremendous amount of oversight from the State Department, and through US Space Command to provide for spaceflight safety notifications to China and Russia. We send notes directly to offices within those nations. Most of the time they don’t respond. Russia, I don’t recall, hasn’t responded at all in the past couple of years. China has responded a couple of times to those notifications. And we hope that, through small measures like that, we can demonstrate our commitment to getting to a predictable and safe space environment.

A model of a Chinese satellite refueling spacecraft on display during the 13th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition on October 1, 2021, in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province of China. Credit: Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Ars:  What does China say in response to these notices?

Agrawal: Most of the time it’s copy or acknowledged. I can only recall two instances where they’ve responded. But we did see some hope earlier this year and last year, where they wanted to open up technical exchanges with us and some of their [experts] to talk about spaceflight safety, and what measures they could take to open up those kinds of conversations, and what they could do to get a more secure, safer pace of operations. That, at some point, got delayed because of the holiday that they were going through, and then those conversations just halted, or at least progress on getting those conversations going halted. But we hope that there’ll be an opportunity again in the future where they will open up those doors again and have those kinds of conversations because, again, transparency will get us to a place where we can be predictable, and we can all benefit from orbital regimes, as opposed to using them exploitively. LEO is just one of those places where you’re not going to hide activity there, so you just are creating risk, uncertainty, and potential escalation by launching into LEO and not communicating throughout that whole process.

Ars:  Do you have any numbers on how many of these conjunction notices go to China and Russia? I’m just trying to get an idea of what proportion go to potential adversaries.

Agrawal: A lot. I don’t know the degree of how many thousands go to them, but on a regular basis, I’m dealing with debris notifications from Russian and Chinese ASAT (anti-satellite) testing. That has put the ISS at risk a number of times. We’ve had maneuvers occur in recent history as a result of Chinese rocket body debris. Debris can’t maneuver, and unfortunately, we’ve gotten into situations with particularly those two nations that talk about wanting to have safer operations, but continue to conduct debris-causing tests. We’re going to be dealing with that for generations, and we are going to have to design capability to maneuver around those debris clouds as just a function of operating in space. So, we’ve got to get to a point where we’re not doing that kind of testing in orbit.

Ars: Would it be accurate to say you send these notices to China and Russia daily?

Agrawal: Yeah, absolutely. That’s accurate. These debris clouds are in LEO, so as you can imagine, as those debris clouds go around the Earth every 90 minutes, we’re dealing with conjunctions. There are some parts of orbits that are just unusable as a result of that unsafe ASAT test.

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Ars spoke with the military’s chief orbital traffic cop—here’s what we learned Read More »

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It’s hunting season in orbit as Russia’s killer satellites mystify skywatchers

anti-satellite tests, Features, military space, National Reconnaissance Office, russia, Science, Space, US Space Force / /

“Once more, we play our dangerous game—a game of chess—against our old adversary.”

In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state media agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin gives a speech during the Victory Day military parade at Red Square in central Moscow on May 9, 2025. Credit: Yacheslav Prokofyev/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Russia is a waning space power, but President Vladimir Putin has made sure he still has a saber to rattle in orbit.

This has become more evident in recent weeks, when we saw a pair of rocket launches carrying top-secret military payloads, the release of a mysterious object from a Russian mothership in orbit, and a sequence of complex formation-flying maneuvers with a trio of satellites nearly 400 miles up.

In isolation, each of these things would catch the attention of Western analysts. Taken together, the frenzy of maneuvers represents one of the most significant surges in Russian military space activity since the end of the Cold War. What’s more, all of this is happening as Russia lags further behind the United States and China in everything from rockets to satellite manufacturing. Russian efforts to develop a reusable rocket, field a new human-rated spacecraft to replace the venerable Soyuz, and launch a megaconstellation akin to SpaceX’s Starlink are going nowhere fast.

Russia has completed just eight launches to orbit so far this year, compared to 101 orbital attempts by US launch providers and 36 from China. This puts Russia on pace for the fewest number of orbital launch attempts since 1961, the year Soviet citizen Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space.

For the better part of three decades, Russia’s space program could rely on money from Western governments and commercial companies to build rockets, launch satellites, and ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The money tap dried up after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia also lost access to Ukrainian-made components to go into their launch vehicles and satellites.

Chasing a Keyhole

Amid this retrenchment, Russia is targeting what’s left of its capacity for innovation in space toward pestering the US military. US intelligence officials last year said they believed Russia was pursuing a project to place a nuclear weapon in space. The detonation of a nuclear bomb in orbit could muck up the space environment for years, indiscriminately disabling countless satellites, whether they’re military or civilian.

Russia denied that it planned to launch a satellite with a nuclear weapon, but the country’s representative in the United Nations vetoed a Security Council resolution last year that would have reaffirmed a nearly 50-year-old ban on placing weapons of mass destruction into orbit.

While Russia hasn’t actually put a nuclear bomb into orbit yet, it’s making progress in fielding other kinds of anti-satellite systems. Russia destroyed one of its own satellites with a ground-launched missile in 2021, and high above us today, Russian spacecraft are stalking American spy satellites and keeping US military officials on their toes with a rapid march toward weaponizing space.

The world’s two other space powers, the United States and China, are developing their own “counter-space” weapons. But the US and Chinese militaries have largely focused on using their growing fleets of satellites as force multipliers in the terrestrial domain, enabling precision strikes, high-speed communications, and targeting for air, land, and naval forces. That is starting to change, with US Space Force commanders now openly discussing their own ambitions for offensive and defensive counter-space weapons.

Three of Russia’s eight orbital launches this year have carried payloads that could be categorized as potential anti-satellite weapons, or at least prototypes testing novel technologies that could lead to one. (For context, three of Russia’s other launches this year have gone to the International Space Station, and two launched conventional military communications or navigation satellites.)

One of these mystery payloads launched on May 23, when a Soyuz rocket boosted a satellite into a nearly 300-mile-high orbit perfectly aligned with the path of a US spy satellite owned by the National Reconnaissance Office. The new Russian satellite, designated Kosmos 2588, launched into the same orbital plane as an American satellite known to the public as USA 338, which is widely believed to be a bus-sized KH-11, or Keyhole-class, optical surveillance satellite.

A conceptual drawing of a KH-11 spy satellite, with internal views, based on likely design similarities to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: Giuseppe De Chiara/CC BY-SA 3.0

The governments of Russia and the United States use the Kosmos and USA monikers as cover names for their military satellites.

While their exact design and capabilities are classified, Keyhole satellites are believed to provide the sharpest images of any spy satellite in orbit. They monitor airfields, naval ports, missile plants, and other strategic sites across the globe. In the zeitgeist of geopolitics, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are the likeliest targets for the NRO’s Keyhole satellites. To put it succinctly, Keyhole satellites are some of the US government’s most prized assets in space.

Therefore, it’s not surprising to assume a potential military adversary might want to learn more about them or be in a position to disable or destroy them in the event of war.

Orbital ballet

A quick refresher on orbital mechanics is necessary here. Satellites orbit the Earth in flat planes fixed in inertial space. It’s not a perfect interpretation, but it’s easiest to understand this concept by imagining the background of stars in the sky as a reference map. In the short term, the position of a satellite’s orbit will remain unchanged on this reference map without any perturbation. For something in low-Earth orbit, Earth’s rotation presents a different part of the world to the satellite each time it loops around the planet.

It takes a lot of fuel to make changes to a satellite’s orbital plane, so if you want to send a satellite to rendezvous with another spacecraft already in orbit, it’s best to wait until our planet’s rotation brings the launch site directly under the orbital plane of the target. This happens twice per day for a satellite in low-Earth orbit.

That’s exactly what Russia is doing with a military program named Nivelir. In English, Nivelir translates to “dumpy level”—an optical instrument used by builders and surveyors.

The launch of Kosmos 2588 in May was precisely timed for the moment Earth’s rotation brought the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia underneath the orbital plane of the NRO’s USA 338 Keyhole satellite. Launches to the ISS follow the same roadmap, with crew and cargo vehicles lifting off at exactly the right time—to the second—to intersect with the space station’s orbital plane.

Since 2019, Russia has launched four satellites into bespoke orbits to shadow NRO spy satellites. None of these Russian Nivelir spacecraft have gotten close to their NRO counterparts. The satellites have routinely passed dozens of miles from one another, but the similarities in their orbits would allow Russia’s spacecraft to get a lot closer—and theoretically make physical contact with the American satellite. The Nivelir satellites have even maneuvered to keep up with their NRO targets when US ground controllers have made small adjustments to their orbits.

“This ensures that the orbital planes do not drift apart,” wrote Marco Langbroek, a Dutch archaeologist and university lecturer on space situational awareness. Langbroek runs a website cataloguing military space activity.

This is no accident

There’s reason to believe that the Russian satellites shadowing the NRO in orbit might be more than inspectors or stalkers. Just a couple of weeks ago, another Nivelir satellite named Kosmos 2558 released an unknown object into an orbit that closely mirrors that of an NRO spy satellite named USA 326.

We’ve seen this before. An older Nivelir satellite, Kosmos 2542, released a sub-satellite shortly after launching in 2019 into the same orbital plane as the NRO’s USA 245 satellite, likely a KH-11 platform similar to the USA 338 satellite now being shadowed by Kosmos 2588.

After making multiple passes near the USA 245 spacecraft, Kosmos 2542’s sub-satellite backed off and fired a mysterious projectile in 2020 at a speed fast enough to damage or destroy any target in its sights. US military officials interpreted this as a test of an anti-satellite weapon.

Now, another Russian satellite is behaving in the same way, with a mothership opening up to release a smaller object that could in turn reveal its own surprise inside like a Matryoshka nesting doll. This time, however, the doll is unnesting nearly three years after launch. With Kosmos 2542, this all unfolded within months of arriving in space.

The NRO’s USA 326 satellite launched in February 2022 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. It is believed to be an advanced electro-optical reconnaissance satellite, although the circumstances of its launch suggest a design different from the NRO’s classic Keyhole spy satellites. Credit: SpaceX

In just the last several days, the smaller craft deployed by Kosmos 2558—designated “Object C”—lowered its altitude to reach an orbit in resonance with USA 326, bringing it within 60 miles (100 kilometers) of the NRO satellite every few days.

While US officials are worried about Russian anti-satellite weapons, or ASATs, the behavior of Russia’s Nivelir satellites is puzzling. It’s clear that Russia is deliberately launching these satellites to get close to American spy craft in orbit, a retired senior US military space official told Ars on background.

“If you’re going to launch a LEO [low-Earth orbit] satellite into the exact same plane as another satellite, you’re doing that on purpose,” said the official, who served in numerous leadership positions in the military’s space programs. “Inclination is one thing. We put a bunch of things into Sun-synchronous orbits, but you have a nearly boundless number of planes you can put those into—360 degrees—and then you can go down to probably the quarter-degree and still be differentiated as being a different plane. When you plane-match underneath that, you’re doing that on purpose.”

But why?

What’s not as obvious is why Russia is doing this. Lobbing an anti-satellite, or counter-space, weapon into the same orbital plane as its potential target ties Russia’s hands. Also, a preemptive strike on an American satellite worth $1 billion or more could be seen as an act of war.

“I find it strange that the Russians are doing that, that they’ve invested their rubles in a co-planar LEO counter-space kind of satellite,” the retired military official said. “And why do I say that? Because when you launch into that plane, you’re basically committed to that plane, which means you only have one potential target ever.”

A ground-based anti-satellite missile, like the one Russia tested against one of its own satellites in 2021, could strike any target in low-Earth orbit.

“So why invest in something that is so locked into a target once you put it up there, when you have the flexibility of a ground launch case that’s probably even cheaper?” this official told Ars. “I’d be advocating for more ground-launched ASATs if I really wanted the flexibility to go after new payloads, because this thing can never go after anything new.”

“The only way to look at it is that they’re sending us messages. You say, ‘Hey, I’m going to just annoy the hell out of you. I’m going to put something right on your tail,'” the official said. “And maybe there’s merit to that, and they like that. It doesn’t make sense from a cost-benefit or an operational flexibility perspective, if you think about it, to lock in on a single target.”

Nevertheless, Russia’s Nivelir satellites have shown they could fire a projectile at another spacecraft in orbit, so US officials don’t dismiss the threat. Slingshot Aerospace, a commercial satellite tracking and analytics firm, went straight to the point in its assessment: “Kosmos 2588 is thought to be a Nivelir military inspection satellite with a suspected kinetic weapon onboard.”

Langbroek agrees, writing that he is concerned that Russia might be positioning “dormant” anti-satellite weapons within striking distance of NRO spy platforms.

“To me, the long, ongoing shadowing of what are some of the most prized US military space assets, their KH-11 Advanced Enhanced Crystal high-resolution optical IMINT (imaging intelligence) satellites, is odd for ‘just’ an inspection mission,” Langbroek wrote.

American pilot Francis Gary Powers, second from right, in a Moscow courtroom during his trial on charges of espionage after his U-2 spy plane was shot down while working for the CIA. Credit: Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images

The US military’s ability to spy over vast swaths of Russian territory has been a thorn in Russia’s side since the height of the Cold War.

“They thought they had the edge and shot down Gary Powers,” the retired official said, referring to the Soviet Union’s shoot-down of an American U-2 spy plane in 1960. “They said, ‘We’re going to keep those Americans from spying on us.’ And then they turn around, and we’ve got spy satellites. They’ve always hated them since the 1960s, so I think there’s still this cultural thing out there: ‘That’s our nemesis. We hate those satellites. We’re just going to fight them.'”

Valley of the dolls

Meanwhile, the US Space Force and outside analysts are tracking a separate trio of Russian satellites engaged in a complex orbital dance with one another. These satellites, numbered Kosmos 2581, 2582, and 2583, launched together on a single rocket in February.

While these three spacecraft aren’t shadowing any US spy satellites, things got interesting when one of the satellites released an unidentified object in March in a similar way to how two of Russia’s Nivelir spacecraft have deployed their own sub-satellites.

Kosmos 2581 and 2582 came as close as 50 meters from one another while flying in tandem, according to an analysis by Bart Hendrickx published in the online journal The Space Review earlier this year. The other member of the trio, Kosmos 2583, released its sub-satellite and maneuvered around it for about a month, then raised its orbit to match that of Kosmos 2581.

Finally, in the last week of June, Kosmos 2582 joined them, and all three satellites began flying close to one another, according to Langbroek, who called the frenzy of activity one of the most complex rendezvous and proximity operations exercises Russia has conducted in decades.

Higher still, two more Russian satellites are up to something interesting after launching on June 19 on Russia’s most powerful rocket. After more than 30 years in development, this was the first flight of Russia’s Angara A5 rocket, with a real functioning military satellite onboard, following four prior test launches with dummy payloads.

The payload Russia’s military chose to launch on the Angara A5 is unusual. The rocket deployed its primary passenger, Kosmos 2589, into a peculiar orbit hugging the equator and ranging between approximately 20,000 (12,500 miles) and 51,000 kilometers (31,700 miles) in altitude.

In this orbit, Kosmos 2589 completes a lap around the Earth about once every 24 hours, giving the satellite a synchronicity that allows it to remain nearly fixed in the sky over the same geographic location. These kinds of geosynchronous, or GEO, orbits are usually circular, with a satellite maintaining the same altitude over the equator.

The orbits of Kosmos 2589 and its companion satellite, illustrated in green and purple, bring the two Russian spacecraft through the geostationary satellite belt twice per day. Credit: COMSPOC

But Kosmos 2589 is changing altitude throughout its day-long orbit. Twice per day, on the way up and back down, Kosmos 2589 briefly passes near a large number of US government and commercial satellites in more conventional geosynchronous orbits but then quickly departs the vicinity. At a minimum, this could give Russian officials the ability to capture close-up views of American spy satellites.

Then, a few days after Kosmos 2589 reached orbit last month, commercial tracking sensors detected a second object nearby. Sound familiar? This new object soon started raising its altitude, and Kosmos 2589 followed suit.

Aiming higher

Could this be the start of an effort to extend the reach of Russian inspectors or anti-satellite weapons into higher orbits after years of mysterious activity at lower altitudes?

Jim Shell, a former NRO project manager and scientist at Air Force Space Command, suggested the two satellites seem positioned to cooperate with one another. “Many interesting scenarios here such as ‘spotter shooter’ among others. Certainly something to keep eyes on!” Shell posted Saturday on X.

COMSPOC, a commercial space situational awareness company, said the unusual orbit of Kosmos 2589 and its companion put the Russian satellites in a position to, at a minimum, spy on Western satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

“This unique orbit, which crosses two key satellite regions daily, may aid in monitoring objects in both GEO and graveyard orbits,” COMSPOC wrote on X. “Its slight 1° inclination could also reduce collision risks. While the satellite’s mission remains unclear, its orbit suggests interesting potential roles.”

Historically, Russia’s military has placed less emphasis on operating in geosynchronous orbit than in low-Earth orbit or other unique perches in space. Due to their positions near the equator, geosynchronous orbits are harder to reach from Russian spaceports because of the country’s high latitude. But Russia’s potential adversaries, like the United States and Europe, rely heavily on geosynchronous satellites.

Other Russian satellites have flown near Western communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit, likely in an attempt to eavesdrop on radio transmissions.

“So it is interesting that they may be doing a GEO inspector,” the retired US military space official told Ars. “I would be curious if that’s what it is. We’ve got to watch. We’ve got to wait and see.”

If you’re a fan of spy techno-thrillers, this all might remind you of the plot from The Hunt for Red October, where a new state-of-the-art Russian submarine leaves its frigid port in Murmansk with orders to test a fictional silent propulsion system that could shake up the balance of power between the Soviet and American navies.

Just replace the unforgiving waters of the North Atlantic Ocean with an environment even more inhospitable: the vacuum of space.

A few minutes into the film, the submarine’s commander, Marko Ramius, played by Sean Connery, announces his orders to the crew. “Once more, we play our dangerous game, a game of chess, against our old adversary—the American Navy.”

Today, nearly 40 years removed from the Cold War, the old adversaries are now scheming against one another in space.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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