Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Space Force! With Special Guest Brian Weeden

Episode Date: July 6, 2018

The President recently ordered the creation of Space Force—but what does that mean? What are the implications for militarization of space? National security expert Dr. Brian Weeden joins the show to explain the announcement. Weeden also breaks down Space Policy Directive #3, which directs the Department of Commerce to begin tracking space debris and other potential dangers to spacecraft in Earth orbit. Casey, Jason and Mat take a detour to discuss the James Webb Space Telescope's latest breach, which delays the launch until March of 2021. More resources to explore this month’s topics are athttp://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/space-policy-edition-27.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Young people from all over the globe are joining up to fight for the future. I'm doing my part. I'm doing my part. I'm doing my part. They're doing their part. Are you? Join the mobile infantry and save the world. Service guarantees citizenship.

That's right. Service guarantees citizenship. That's right. Service guarantees citizenship. That's Starship Troopers, not Space Force. But who knows where we might end up with that kind of stuff. Starship Troopers, the classic film of great irony based on that Robert Heinlein book of many years ago. Welcome back, everybody. This is Matt Kaplan, host of Planetary Radio with the monthly Space Policy Edition. And that means, of course, that I am joined by Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, and Jason Callahan, the Space Policy Advisor to the Society. Jason, talking to us from his home there within the Beltway. Gentlemen, welcome back. Always a pleasure. Hey, guys, good to us from his home there within the Beltway. Gentlemen, welcome back.

Always a pleasure. Hey, guys. Good to hear from you again. And I just want to point out the level of in-depth policy discussion was basically summarized by the opening. So that is about as deep as Space Force. And we have a whole interview with Space Force today. We have a special guest I just interviewed, Dr. Brian Whedon from the Secure World Foundation, a Ph.D. in public policy and administration, a lot of national security space experience. We're going to go into very much depth about Space Force, the announcement, what it means, what may be happening.

And I thought it was pretty interesting. Matt, what about you? Absolutely fascinating. Yeah. And probably the longest conversation that we've had with a guest on Space Policy Edition so far. Well worth your sticking around for. Issues with national security space. There's kind of a lot going on there. There's a lot to talk about. Clearly. Yes, there's a lot of moving parts to address.

So what a joy that we get to talk as long as we did. Well, Casey, keep in mind, you know, people often forget that the civil space program in the United States is about a quarter the size of the defense and intelligence space program in the United States. So it, it stands to reason that there would be a lot of moving parts, right? Yes, there's a apparently you just can't snap your fingers and create a new branch of the military out of thin air. No, not according to constitutional protocol. No. Nice way of putting that as a protocol. Let's hope it stays that way.

We're going to briefly here talk about James Webb Space Telescope because it's everyone's favorite breaching program right now. But Jason, you know, we talk about this with Brian a lot, but do you have any broad reactions to the Space Force announcement, the directive, the concept itself, anything you want to get off your chest about it? Overall, this really isn't my issue. And I'm glad that we have Brian on. I've known Brian for a number of years. He's really, really bright on these issues. All of that said, I think there are reasons, pro and con, for approaching the issue in this manner. But overall, we've seen this debate over a number of years in Congress, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of stomach in Congress for standing up another branch of the military at the moment. If I had to bet, I would say that this is probably not

going to be something that we see actually happen in the next couple of years. But I could be wrong. Your betting average is doing pretty good now with the breach of James Webb. I believe you put a wager on that, I think, in one of these shows two years ago, as we were getting to this point. So a lot has to happen, but we'll go into that in the interview. Matt, I didn't mean to jump in in front of you on this, but I think it was one of these big things that is happening. It burst into public consciousness, the Space Force concept.

But as a reminder, there's a lot yet to happen. Nothing has really changed yet. And it certainly doesn't mean that we're going to have people with laser blasters flying around in spaceships in low Earth orbit. Yeah, I don't think that was at all the intent of that announcement. One of the most interesting things that I heard Brian Whedon say, and it was out of his frustration, is that, you know, this has been kicked around within his circle for a long time. But it wasn't until it got mentioned by the president that all of a sudden every media organization in this country and elsewhere decided that they had to have some expertise and talk about Space Force. Is it coming or not?

Will the force be with us? He was very, very grateful to have this opportunity to talk about it in depth. But that's all coming. Let me give the sales pitch here. You've heard us do this before, and you will hear it again on Space Policy Edition. This is all possible, bringing you conversations like Casey is about to have with Brian Whedon and everything else we do at the Planetary Society. Our entire space policy effort, of course, is thanks to our members. And we would

love it if you would join us by going to planetary.org slash membership and look at all the great levels that we have there available to you to participate in everything the society does. Are there other space policy directed campaigns or efforts underway, Casey? We just wrapped up our primary fundraising campaign for the year. I encourage people to become members. We do have an active opportunity to send a message to Congress supporting the better of the two NASA budgets, particularly for planetary science, at planetary.org slash spaceadvocate. There's a link right there on the main page. You can fill that out, write your member of Congress if you're in the U.S. If you're outside the U.S., we have all these new restrictions on privacy that we can't actually offer, unfortunately,

petitions to the White House anymore. So if you live in the U.S., have an address there, you can use this, write to Congress, support NASA's budget for 2019. Let's go to JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope. And Casey, every time you use the term breaching, I think of this gigantic whale flinging itself out of the sea and causing a tremendous splash in the ocean when it comes back down. Decent metaphor? Barely call it a metaphor. It's about whale-sized, I think. And maybe they did, in fact, use seawater to flush out those pipes that caused the breach. No. All right. So what happened? We got the official report. So we knew that James Webb was delayed. We talked about this a few episodes ago. We knew that it was going to cost more than the $8 billion cost cap. Now we know what those numbers are. And we now know what the exact launch date is. It is being pushed off two and a half years to March 30 2021 is the new launch date. It was

originally supposed to launch in this October of 2018. So this is not good, as you might imagine, and it is expensive. It's going to add roughly $800 million to the development cost of the mission. I mean, the total costs are about a billion dollars. They absorbed, they had about $200 million in internal funds that they can apply to it. But this is just not great for anybody. Congress is going to be extremely mad about this. And it's going to have really long-term implications for the rest of astrophysics, which I think, Jason, is something you wanted to mention.

Yeah. Before we get too far into that, I would like to just clarify a little bit about what Matt was talking about having to do with the breach or the term breach. That actually comes from congressional legislation. So NASA and the military have rules that they have to follow, dictated by law, about cost overruns and schedule overruns. So in the case of NASA, any project over, I think it's $150 million, if it breaches its cost by 15% or its schedule by six months, NASA cannot just reassign funds to that project. They have to go to Congress and ask for legislation to allow that project to continue. That's a huge deal. It's made even worse in this case by the fact that JWST already breached once and NASA went to Congress and Congress put very stringent language into their appropriation, saying that the project will not breach an $8 billion lifecycle cost. They've just done that.

So we'll see what happens with Congress. They gave no room. I remember many times talking with appropriators and their staff saying every time they put into the appropriation, like thou shall not spend more than $8 billion, not a penny more. And we're getting many, was it billions of pennies now, I guess more, unfortunately. And again, there's not a good solution to this. I mean, the report itself, and we'll link to this, you can read the report for yourself on our show page. There were some real fundamental problems. This space observatory is just fantastically complex. And Jason, if there's one thing I've learned from you is that when, whenever you have the C word in for

a spacecraft as part of its development, you're going to have a huge amounts of risk because you're developing technology that you don't know how to make. So you're figuring out for the first time, but on a schedule and you have to be able to assume that there's just no way to properly predict that you're going to be able to figure it out in time. But then, put that off for one second, they said $600 million, effectively, of this $800 million overrun is from human error, which is a fantastic amount of money. And what happened was some technicians put the wrong kind of solvent

in propulsion valves, which necessitates the replacement of those valves in this incredibly complex giant machine. And then they also applied excess voltage to some of the transducers. They had fasteners come off during a shake test that they have to find and locate within the spacecraft. I mean, this is the primary reason that this is happening.

It just boggles the mind almost that these types of errors could have such a consequence and such a financial consequence to the entire, not just the mission, but the entire astrophysics program. As we get to the end of our discussion, I want to talk a bit about how those kinds of accidents could happen, because I think it's part of a larger narrative about cost overruns in general. But before we get into that, I think we should talk about what this cost overrun is actually going to do to the astrophysics program and potentially the space science program at NASA. They gave some indication within the presentation that Paul Hertz, the director of NASA's astrophysics division, which is one of the four science divisions within NASA's science mission directorate, the ones being Earth science, planetary science and heliophysics. And so they each have their own budget. The goal, they said, is to absorb this cost overrun within astrophysics as much as possible. cost overrun within astrophysics as much as possible. And they will try to preserve, they said, the RNA, the research and analysis funding accounts, which are the ones that give

grants to scientists to do science, and the very small missions, the Explorer missions that are roughly $100, $150 million missions, everything else gets pushed away. So they had been considering these mid-sized billion-ish or so space telescope missions in the next five years. Those are now, I'd say, no chance of happening because that money is going to be assigned to James Webb. Would you say it kind of captures it? Yeah.

And we saw the same thing happen when the Mars Science Lab, Curiosity, went over budget in planetary science. It pushed back a number of other missions in an effort to try and find money to cover those cost overruns. And the examples were the Maven mission was pushed off by a year and a half or two years. The next two discovery announcements of opportunity were delayed for a year or two as well. It doesn't necessarily mean that missions won't fly. It just means that all of those scientists and all of those engineers who had put together the proposals that had been

accepted or were in the process of being accepted, they've got to push their entire schedule back for years. And since most of these people work on soft money, they work on these grants to do these missions. It means they're going to have to go and find money somewhere else to stay alive for however long it takes. It's entirely plausible that some of those people won't come back to that project. The reason that you save the RNA budget line and the small missions is because those are such small amounts of money that the researchers, depending on those, will literally leave the field if you don't supply that cash. It's really a critical blow. It reminds me, I guess, of the opportunity cost of this mission. And as NASA said, their official stance, and you heard

this from Administrator Bridenstine, is that James Webb is going to do world-class potentially transformative science, which is true. It is. It is the highest recommendation from the National Academies or from that original report for astrophysics, which is also true. It is. It is the highest recommendation from the National Academies or from that original report for astrophysics, which is also true. But at the same time, you know, you're spending $9 billion over 15 years on this mission. That is a lot of mid-sized and smaller missions that you could have had instead during and providing data in this entire time. I mean, you really have given yourself over to this one single point of failure, God forbid, mission. And you have a lot of scientists, I mean, you still have, obviously, they've kept up Hubble going, they've kept up a lot of the

observatories that are already there. But you have seen a precipitous drop in new missions in the last 10 years, and it will now continue. Just as a quick joke there, Casey, one of the figures that I noticed in the Independent Review Board's report was that on JWST, there are actually 433 single points of failure, which is a staggering amount for a mission. Elon Musk calls that a high pucker factor. Right. Is that a high pucker factor? Right. And that board we should include in this discussion that found so many errors and had such criticism of the project ended up by saying JWST should move forward. Yeah. As Casey alluded to a minute ago, it is a spectacular mission with unbelievable potential for discovery.

It is worth flying, to be sure. unbelievable potential for discovery. It is worth flying to be sure. But the way that we've been building these large complex missions and the way that they've resulted in cost and schedule overruns is really destructive to the scientific community as a whole. So it's really imperative that NASA and the United States figure out better ways to do large complex systems like this. So Jason, I had a question for you, which is, I mean, again, reading through this report, you're seeing a number of human error, which, I mean, at a certain point when you're building something so fantastically complex, error is bound to happen. Where does this, I don't want to say blame necessarily, but responsibility perhaps? I mean, ultimately NASA is responsible,

but NASA is not building the hardware here. They are contracting with Northrop Grumman, who is the prime contractor on this mission. They're building the spacecraft. They're building the sunshield. It's their technicians. What oversight or what consequences will a prime contractor face when they accidentally flush the propellant valve with the wrong types of solvents and delay emission by two years to $600 million. So just from the penalty aspect, there will be clauses written into the contracts having to do with performance. And this will clearly negate some of the money that Northrop would have received because they didn't meet certain standards that

would have been stipulated in the contract. More importantly, I think this becomes an issue the next time they go to bid for a project at NASA. NASA is going to look at them with a far more critical eye when they're trying to determine who the contractor will be to build the next large spacecraft or even smaller spacecraft. That said, even these extreme situations are unlikely to make NASA go and look for a new prime contractor this late in the game. So Northrop will continue to build the spacecraft and we'll probably see it through to launch and through to the operations phase, but that doesn't mean that they walk away unscathed. But more important, I think, in this is understanding why this shouldn't have happened. So the way that NASA and other organizations, both public and

private, deal with managing large systems like this, large complex systems, is a methodology known as systems engineering. And what systems engineering is supposed to do is formalize every step of building one of these spacecraft or building a large complex system into discrete, measurable and monitorable steps. And anytime that you see that human error in that people weren't following the systems engineering processes correctly? Or did it break down because the process itself doesn't work? Now, I actually kind of hope that it's the latter rather than the former, because if it's the former, this is just an $800 million forehead slap, right? But if it's the latter, it's something we can fix. latter, it's something we can fix. It's something that we can address and use American ingenuity and innovative capability to really dig down deep and figure out what's broken with systems engineering. You know, we were talking about cost overruns we're seeing throughout the space science program. Almost to a one, with the exception of InSight, all of these have been projects that are over

a billion dollars, meaning that they are flagship class or large mission class projects. And this has been going on for a long time. Back in the mid-2000s, NASA instituted a number of changes to their cost and schedule estimation process, to their gateway process, which has to do with how you move through the systems engineering regime, we're supposed to eliminate all of these cost and schedule overruns. And for the most part, it has in the small and medium class missions. But in these large missions, we still clearly have not got it figured out. Do you think that it's ever I mean, it's hard to say whether it's possible or not, but it seems that I mean, you are asking people to estimate with incredible accuracy doing things that have just never been done before. And maybe that does push the envelope of what is predictable or accommodatable, even in the area of systems engineering. Ultimately, when it's all said and done, generally, it's just like Hubble.

People don't sit and dwell on the money spent. They enjoy the data that's there. And it becomes then worth, like Hubble has been one of the most successful science missions that NASA has ever launched. People don't sit and fume, at least very few people do that. It costs $11 billion ultimately to make it happen. Do you see that as just a necessary cost of doing business? I don't. But the corollary to that is I presented two possible explanations for what happened. There's actually a third. And the third is that systems engineering works just fine. And we know exactly how to predict the risk for these kinds of things to any degree of

accuracy that we want to. But the problem is to account for that risk costs money. And if you give an honest assessment of what the cost is to mitigate all of the risk, the cost would be so high that you would never get a mission start. So there is an incentive to not be entirely honest with stakeholders, say Congress, about what the full costs probably will be with the hopes that when things go wrong, Congress will fall into the sunk cost fallacy, continue to fund the program, and you end up with the mission and it's wildly successful and everybody forgets the cost. I think that's rewarding bad behavior. I think what we need to do is have an honest conversation about what we're willing to spend on these to make sure that they succeed if that's what we want to do. Otherwise, the conversation is we just have to accept that these costs are going to overrun unexpectedly, or we have to accept that these missions may not always work.

Yeah, like if you had presented to the astrophysics community back in 2003, saying, look, you can do James Webb, it'll cost $10 billion, and it'll take 15 years, and you get maybe two small missions in the meantime, would they have still prioritized that mission as high as they did? Right. That's an interesting question. And it's different in astrophysics than it is for any of the other three space science branches, because this is a platform. JWST is a platform, the same as Hubble was, the same as WFIRST will be, assuming it's ever built. This is a platform that can be used by the vast majority of the astrophysics community. You know, unlike, say, you know, we mentioned MSL, the Curiosity rover earlier. That's really only an asset that can be used by the Mars science community specifically and not even that entire community. Right. If you're doing interactions with the Mars atmosphere and the solar wind, Curiosity doesn't do a whole lot for you.

atmosphere and the solar wind, Curiosity doesn't do a whole lot for you. James Webb addresses a huge panoply of the portfolio of astrophysics. Tons and tons and tons of people can apply for time on JWST in a way that you don't really apply for time on, say, Curiosity. The story is not over. We'll keep our fingers crossed that that big whale doesn't make any more big waves before it starts delivering some of this great science. million more per year for the next couple of years, which is, again, not great, but it's not an inconceivable amount to put in. I mean, as I was kind of jokingly put it on Twitter, that's roughly what they're throwing to the mobile launch tower every year that wasn't asked for or proposed. So it's in the terms of mobile launch tower units of cost, this is about a 0.8 or so per year. So it's doable. But again, as all the reasons Jason pointed out,

this is to say the least, a suboptimal situation that we find ourselves in. Another word of warning, as SLS and Orion, which are two massive projects in the human spaceflight side of the house, approach their phase D work, which is the testing spaceflight side of the house approach their phase D work, which is the testing and integration part of the project, which is usually when you encounter cost

overruns. I strongly suspect that these projects are going to overrun as well, but the overruns there will be much higher than even what we're seeing on JWST. And unlike space science, where you've got a whole other group of projects that you can push off to find money for the cost overruns, that doesn't really exist in human spaceflight. They'll have to go looking for money elsewhere in the agency if those projects overrun significantly. It's difficult for me to imagine that they won't, and it's something we're going to have to address in the future. A chilling vision of things to come. Thank you, Jason. But it's true. Yeah. And that's obviously this is what occupies a lot of our time

when we're not doing this show, for example, like we worry about. Let's go to that other sector that dwarfs the civil space sector that you teased us with a little bit, Casey. And give us an introduction to your excellent guest. Well, Dr. Brian Whedon is the Director of Program Planning at the Secure World Foundation, which is a nonprofit that focuses on issues like national defense and space situational awareness and other policy issues relating to global integration of space domain. His PhD is in public policy and public administration from George Washington University. I believe Scott Pace served on his dissertation committee, may have been the chair of that committee.

So Scott Pace now is the National Space Council's executive secretary. So Dr. Brian Whedon knows a lot about these types of issues. He also served in the Air Force back in the day as well. So he's been on kind of both sides of this policy and space operations side in national security space. Really interesting, incredibly well versed in these areas. from, what we can expect going forward, and all the variety of issues floating out there that are far more nuanced than I think a lot of the public discussion has been. So it was a really fun conversation. And I guess we can just go to it right now. Yeah, let's hear Casey Dreyer talking with Dr. Brian Whedon, not long before this conversation that the three of us are having.

Dr. Whedon, thank you so much for joining us here at the Space Policy Edition podcast. Let's talk about Space Force. Broad, big picture, thousand mile view, whatever you want to call it. What did the president announce exactly in terms of a Space Force? And what is it going to look like? Well, both of those are sort of difficult to answer. going to look like? Well, both of those are sort of difficult to answer. The really big issue is how to organize U.S. national security space. And national security space includes both the military space activities and the intelligence space activity. This is not a new issue. It's been debated at least as far back as the 2001 Rumsfeld Commission report, which looked at this issue of organization of space.

At the moment, let's say roughly 90% of the military space activities are run by the U.S. Air Force. And the vast majority of the intelligence activities are run by the National Reconnaissance Office. Over the last 20 years, there have been growing concerns about, particularly the military side, and perhaps the Air Force not doing as much with it as they should, and that is what's prompted this debate. Well, let's actually back up a little bit, and maybe just for the benefit of our listeners, and particularly those outside the US, what is the distinction between civil space and national security space? Because you already kind of subdivided national security into military and intelligence. What do we know? What's public about what kinds of activities those are? of activities those are? This is a debate that goes back to the very beginning of the space age. If you look at some of the early internal discussions that happened during the Eisenhower administration, they were talking about this new era of activity in space and what might be

possible. And they talked about a whole range of potential benefits, everything from science and exploration to military benefits. But the one that was the highest national priority was intelligence. There was a real demand for the United States to be able to see what the Soviet Union was doing, particularly in how it was building up its strategic forces, bombers and later missiles, and also nuclear weapons program. The ability to use satellites for intelligence, taking pictures is the most common way to do that, was one of, if not the highest national priorities for the Eisenhower administration. So right from the very beginning, that prompted a huge amount of effort in the U.S. to develop those capabilities. But at the same time, they saw through Sputnik

the ability of space to serve as a proxy for a prestige battle between the United States and the Soviet Union with the public and the media. So the Eisenhower administration also said, we're going to have this intelligence and then later a military space program that's largely going to be secret behind closed doors. But then we're also going to have this more public facing civil space program, which became NASA. And that is going to focus on the science and it's going to focus on the exploration and the things we can use publicly to kind of show that our system,

the capitalist American democracy, is a better system of government than the Soviet communist system. That's sort of where this bifurcation started. It's not always clear exactly what is purely civil and purely national security. Some of the technologies overlap. Even in the NASA program, there have been a lot of military astronauts that have been involved. And the shuttle program itself, the national security community played a huge role in the design of the shuttle. So that clear separation between the two programs has not always been as black and white as we sometimes think about it. But in general, the U.S. has separated things into civil space, which again is mostly the science

and the exploration, and then the national security space, which is more of the military intelligence uses. And that comes from, I mean, that is more of the military intelligence uses. And that comes from, I mean, that is reflected in how they budget, the two of them. We have NASA is in discretionary non-defense spending accounts, and then obviously defense spending accounts. And do we know how much is spent for national security space? Is that public knowledge and how that's budgeted? Yeah, roughly. So the biggest chunk of the national spending unclassified is in the Air

Forces budget. That is somewhere around $10 or $11 billion a year. Now, there's a classified, the Black budget on top of that, that is not disclosed publicly. But a few years ago, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter did say that the total top line national security space spending, which includes classified funding, was somewhere around $21, $22 billion a year. So more than NASA. A little bit more than NASA. Yes. And just to be clear, this is all robotics, effectively. There's no humans involved in national security space missions.

Correct. Not even like a hypothetical, theoretical thing, right? They just don't have the technology or capability or interest even to do that? Well, early on in the dawn of the space program, there was quite a bit of interest in human military space missions. There was a program called Dinosaur that would be a manned hypersonic glide vehicle. There was also one called MOL for manned orbiting laboratory. Basically, it was a space station that was built around a very high-powered telescope that could do imagery of the Earth. And the thinking was that if you had a human in there that was helping do target selection, and, for example, avoiding clouds, that might make it more efficient than just a pure robotic telescope.

Turns out, adding humans to the system made it much more complex and made it much more expensive. You know, it's not great having somebody floating around, touching things, causing vibrations when you have a very sensitive instrument you're trying to zoom in on a very particular part of the world. So ultimately, that didn't pan out. And today, all of the military national security stuff is robotic. Broadly, what types of missions, when we say national security, let's start with Air Force because that's particularly salient here, just broad categories, what types of things are they interested in? What are we talking about in terms of what they're trying to do in space? Sure. The military currently breaks down its space activities in a couple different categories.

One of them is what they call force enhancement, and that is space capabilities or services that enhance military capabilities and activities on Earth. Probably the biggest example of that at the Earth orbit run by the Air Force that provide a navigation timing signal that can be used to determine where you are. And the military uses that not only to navigate and to coordinate its activities, but also to do guidance for precision munitions, which has become a very big part of modern warfare. Other aspects of the force enhancement are the things like satellite communications or weather capabilities, the ability of satellites to do weather that then helps in planning military missions.

The other big category basically involves flying things through space to get back to Earth. And the big one historically here has been ballistic missiles. We have three different delivery vehicles, three different weapons. We have submarines, we have bombers, and then we have intercontinental ballistic missiles. Those ICBMs have been part of the Air Force for decades. And the Air Force historically had put them under space, seeing as how those things fly through space to get to where they're going. So there's another category which has to do with access to space.

And so this involves mostly space launch, because for the military, it needs to be able to have access to space to put up its satellites in case one gets destroyed or one has a malfunction, they need to be able to replace them. So space lift is a really big important thing. And then the final category, which has been talked about, but really hasn't been done, and that's force application. And so that would be something in space that could be used to apply force and attack something on the ground. That has been talked about in the past, but as of yet, hasn't really emerged as something

the Air Force or any military really in the world is actually doing. Okay, so we have this broad set of categories. What is not happening that having a space force would enable or in essence, why do we need a space force if the Air Force seems to be capable of doing all these things already? There's a lot of answers to that. There is not like one agreement on, you know, this is exactly the one reason why. And we should say that this isn't this has been pushed in Congress, but this was defeated in the Senate in previous years to steps towards something like this. So this is not a consensus in Congress already. stuff, Congress did direct a study of the various options for a reorganization of space, a space force, a space corps, other options. And that is currently being done by the Deputy Secretary of Defense Shanahan and is due to

be complete in August. Congress did direct a study on this, but they have not directed, go do this, right? Because there are, there's a lot of options once you get into the weeds on this. So, so back to the, why are people calling for a Space Force or what, why is this a big topic right now? I would say the, the, the, the biggest answer is that there are those people who believe the Air Force is not doing a good job in terms of shepherding this capability. And that largely stems from the belief that the Air Force prioritizes the air part of its mission over the space part of its mission, because the space part is so much smaller. And just culturally, the Air Force is all about airplanes. People have

accused the Air Force of prioritizing funding for air missions and air programs over space missions, particularly in the last several years, we've had the sequestration and the budget caps that they've said, okay, with the limited money we're going to have, we're going to put to work the air programs. There's been concerns about the Air Force not putting in effort to develop what they call a space cadre. That would be a, you know, a set of military officers and enlisted who are space professionals. That's all they do. You know, entire professional focus is just on learning about all things space. So there's concerns about that. And then finally,

there are concerns about the coordination of different parts of the NASA Space Program. So for example, the Air Force will go build a satellite, like GPS, as I mentioned, they're currently building the third generation of those satellites. But those satellites are not very useful unless there are also GPS receivers that are put into every ship, every airplane, every bomb, every infantry unit on the ground that can make use of that actual signal. Those programs are oftentimes run by the other parts of the Air Force or the Army or the Marines or the Navy. And so there's been problems where they've had the satellites go up into orbit and are functioning

fine, but it takes five more years to roll out the actual end user equipment to make use of those satellite stuff. That has been a problem. And then finally, the last big problem, and probably the one that is politically the most salient, and that's the growing threats to space activities. Since the early 2000s, Russia and China have been engaged in a series of research and development efforts to develop counterspace or anti-satellite capabilities. efforts to develop counter space or anti-satellite capabilities. There's examples of them testing everything from ground launch ballistic missiles to potentially even

orbital satellites that can get close to other satellites in space, direct energy laser weapons, jamming systems, cyber capabilities, pretty much the whole suite. There are concerns that many people believe the Air Force is not doing enough to re-architect and rethink how it does the space mission to respond to those

threats. So when you say that space is a relatively small part of the Air Force, just for context, how big is the Air Force itself? How do you even compare those two, that subdivision with the rest of the Air Force? The current Air Force budget request is something somewhere around $150 billion a year. Roughly 10% of that is the portion of their budget that is for space. And if we look at the personnel size, if I recall, I think the Air Force is somewhere around 315, 320,000 people. Air Force Space Command is roughly 40,000. Just in terms of numbers, budget and people, the space mission is about 10% the size, people, the space mission is about 10% the size, or roughly, of the overall Air Force.

Is the idea then that they take what the Air Force already does and just call it the Space Force? Is that the essence of where we are? I mean, we seem to have, we have some congressional action. The study is happening right now, but also we had movement in the House to create a space core within the Air Force, I believe. And then you have the president saying that he wants a separate but equal, maybe unfortunate phrasing there, separate but equal sixth branch of the military itself. Are those contradictory or are those consistent with each other broadly? I think there is a lot of agreement on the problems that I just described. And in fact, Or are those consistent with each other broadly? issue is there are many different ways to reorganize things to try and solve this issue.

A space force, as President Trump described it, is one option. Another option would be a space corps, which would be akin to the Marine Corps. So it would still be part of the Department of the Air Force. It would still rely on the Air Force for a lot of its administrative overhead and support functions. But like the Marine Corps and the Department of the Navy, the Space Corps would have its own self-contained budget, its own self-contained command structure, its own self-contained recruiting and promotion structure, and weapons systems, and its own cultural identity. There's yet a third option, and that would be something called a space guard.

And that would be akin to the Coast Guard, where you have an entity that in peacetime has a safety and a law enforcement function, just like the Coast Guard does, you know, on 4th of July when they're out monitoring boaters and looking for safety checks or rescuing people that have been trapped in an over-capsized boat, but then in wartime can turn into a military organization and go off and do military missions. So that's even more, that's even third option. And there are probably many more gradations between those. So as of yet, there really isn't any agreement on which option we should go with and how to get there. And that's what the Shanahan study is supposed to answer.

What should the end goal be? And then what is the process for getting there? So was the president's directive premature in that sense? It seems I think it took a lot of people by surprise and a lot of particularly just people in the media and even our members at the Planetary Society. This seemed to come out of nowhere. And so how does that fit into the current process that's happening? I actually had made a small wager with some of my colleagues that he wouldn't mention the Space Force. So those of us that have been tracking the issue, it wasn't that big of a surprise that it came up because the president has talked about it beforehand. My sense is that he had been briefed on all this. He'd probably been briefed on the status of the Shanahan study because they

did an interim report a few months ago. And for whatever reason, it appears he has latched onto this idea of a Space Force as what he wants to do. And there was some reporting done a few days after he made the announcement that suggested he actually had given the DOD a heads up saying that, by the way, I'm going to make an announcement at the Space Force just prior to the event. For those that hadn't been really closely following, it probably was kind of a shock, but it wasn't entirely a shock. I think what actually, well, sorry, I'll take it back. What did come as a bit of a shock was he is directing that the answer should be a completely separate space force, even though we have not yet done the study or thought through why that's the best option. That, I think, was a bit of a surprise to most people.

Looking at that as the option, what are kind of the general downsides of having a force versus the Corps versus a Guard? I mean, it sounds like you're basically taking existing programs, if I understand this correctly, moving them into kind of a parallel bureaucratic structure along with the Air Force, the Army, the Navy. Navy. And by having that bureaucratic structure, it allows them to, you know, argue for their own agenda, to command and have full control over their own budget, and to really focus exclusively on these problems that you outlined. Is that basically the benefits? Are there downsides to doing that as opposed to being within the Air Force? So let me preface it by saying that I am not supportive of the Space Force idea, even though I do think we do need to do some reorganization and fix a lot of those challenges that you just addressed. Tell us why you don't like it.

So the biggest problem in my mind is that it is a massive bureaucratic overhaul. And those things always take longer and require a heck of a lot more effort and cost a lot more money than they appear to do on paper. My concern is that we're going to spend a lot of our time and effort on the reorganization that then might allow us to address some of the problems that you just mentioned, instead of reorganizing, instead of, sorry, instead of just addressing those problems now. And if the problems, particularly with the space threats, are as acute and pressing as many in the Air Force and Congress have said, spending the next few years doing the bureaucratic shuffle to create

a separate force to then start working on addressing the re-architecting and the resilience of base capabilities, to me seems not as good of solution as just focusing on those now. The other big challenge is, you know, you mentioned bringing together the Army, Navy, Marine stuff. That actually is not a given. So far, all Congress has talked about is the Air Force component of space stuff. I have not seen anyone publicly proposing that we merge all of the different parts, the different services doing on space into one separate thing. And then you finally also have the NRO, right? The NRO was off doing a lot of the intelligence space stuff. And the question is, what do we do with them?

National Reconnaissance Office, they were created in the early 1960s to lead the intelligence space efforts. This is mostly involving things like spy satellites taking images or these days, you know, doing also signals intelligence for space. Much of that is handled by the National Reconnaissance Office, the NRO. And so there's a big question also out there about what do we do about that? Is that pulled into this reorganization or not? Because even though from a mission standpoint, they've historically been a little bit separate, in the last 10 years or so, a lot of the NRO capabilities have been increasingly being used by the military to fight wars. being used by the military to fight wars instead of being something separate that is just done at a very strategic level for arms control verification or, you know, intelligence reports that go to the president. They're now starting to use some of those same capabilities to actually support, you know, military operations going on in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere.

So there's, I think, an important question as to whether or not that gets wrapped into this as well. Finally, I would say the other big question is just size. Once I said the Air Force Space Command is currently about 40,000 people. Out of that, there are probably less than 10,000 actual officers and enlisted professionals who operate satellites and do space things. The rest are contractors and Air Force civilians and sort of experts and advisors. That is a really small core of people to go off and turn into a completely separate piece of the Department of Defense, just the administrative functions and all the overhead you have to add on to that to make it function, in my mind, would be a huge waste. So then that leads to the question of, well, is there really any intent here to radically expand the size of the Space Force and the space budget to maybe, I mean, the people pushing this within Congress. So far, I've publicly said that this reorganization is not going to entail adding a lot more people

or a lot more budget, which then makes me kind of wonder, is that really the case? And just to be clear, the president can't snap his fingers and make the Space Force, just the implementation beside the point. This will require an act of Congress to actually happen if it happens this way, correct? The president has the power to direct the Department of Defense to begin the process and do all the planning. But for it actually to happen, Congress is going to have to make legislative changes to Title 10, which is the law that covers the military and how the military is organized and lays out authorities. And they're going to have to make some budget changes.

How often does that change? What kind of precedent would this be if this goes forward with the sixth branch? I mean, the last time a lot of people are making analogies to the creation of the Air Force, which happened in the late 1940s, where it started out as the Army Air Corps. So it started out as something that was part of the Army. And then there was a decision to make it a completely separate branch of the service. part of the army. And then there was a decision to make it a completely separate branch of the service. That or perhaps the creation of the Marine Corps, those are really the two kind of precedents for this sort of thing. Well, I'll take that back. There is one other one, and that's the creation of Cyber Command. There has been a similar debate going on the last 10, 15 years or so about what to do with military and intelligence cyber activities. For the longest 10, 15 years or so about what to do with military and intelligence cyber activities. For the longest time, a lot of this was done by the National Security Agency, the NSA,

which did both protecting America from cyber attacks, but also conducting offensive activities to go gather intelligence. Then there was a need for the military to do its own offensive cyber capabilities or operations for military operations. And so that has been a whole big debate going on the last decade or so. And they actually have created not a separate service, but they have created a separate warfighting command called U.S. Cyber Command that is doing the military cyber operations. So not common. No, absolutely not common. That's one more wrinkle we haven't really talked about yet is the military actually has two independent chains of command. They have one chain of command who's responsible for what they call the OT&E functions, and that's the operate, train,

and equip functions. This is what the Air Force and the Navy and the Army and the Marines do. and the Marines do. They are responsible for procuring capabilities, planes, tanks, ships, training people to operate those capabilities, and then having them ready to go. There's a whole separate chain of command, which is the warfighting chain of command. This is largely done what they call air's responsibility A aors so we have u.s central command we have u.s pacific command or say nowadays it's u.s indo-pacific command we have u.s southern command basically they've broken up the world into regions and there is a a warfighting command that is responsible for all the military operations actually going on in that region. So for example, US CENTCOM, Central Command, is responsible for what's been going on in

Iraq and Afghanistan because geographically those fall under CENTCOM. The way the system is supposed to work is the warfighter, whether that's CENTCOM or PACOM or UCOM, they develop a plan of how they're going to handle military operations in their area. And that also comes with a list of capabilities they need. And then they turn around to the services, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, and they say, we need you guys to basically build and put together these capabilities. That then leads the Army, the Air Force, Navy, Marines to go and procure ships and tanks and planes and create squadrons and brigades and training programs and all that stuff so that they can actually have those capabilities. that they can actually have those capabilities. Then when something like Afghanistan happens, the CENTCOM commander says, I need X number of fighter squadrons and X number of brigade combat teams and other things. And those are all sent to him or her and used in that operation.

Meanwhile, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines are back doing sustainment, recruiting, more acquisitions, and kind of keeping things up. So in the space world, the Air Force has historically been, as we've been talking about, the biggest part of that OT&E function. So they're the ones acquiring, procuring satellite systems, training people, standing up squadrons to fly and operate them. And it's been U.S. Strategic Command, U.S. STRATCOM,

that has been the warfighter for space. And they're the ones responsible for conducting military space operations. There is a whole separate debate going on about whether or not space should still be part of U.S. Strategic Command, who also is responsible for doing nuclear warfighting. There is a move underway, and it's actually part of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, to create what they call a subunified command under STRATCOM called U.S. Space Command that would actually now be the warfighter for space. And this itself is sort of a back-to-the-future sort of a thing because we actually had a U.S. Space Command from 1985 up until the early 2000s

that was responsible for military space operations and warfighting. That in the early 2000s was subsumed into STRATCOM. So now there's talk about pulling that out again. And again, the link would be the Space Force or Corps or guard or whatever it wants to be, would be responsible for that operate, train, equip function. And then the U.S. Space Force would be the ones, or sorry, the U.S. Space Command would be the ones that are actually the warfighters out using that for military activities. That is just like a dizzying amount of bureaucratic consequence. I mean, it's just like the integration and balance, I guess, that has kind of functionally evolved over the last 70 years in terms of national defense. I mean, these things don't turn on a dime, I think is obvious, no matter what happens.

So we're in this study period. I think the point here fundamentally for listeners is nothing is happening yet. Is that correct? This is studying. They're studying the issue. Even though the Pentagon is directed to do the work to prep for it, they can't do anything without an act of Congress. But there already seems to be at least some sort of reaction, or is there any reaction from our international, our allies or adversaries? Does this actually cause more issues in terms of threats into space by organizing or at least talking about more focused Space Force activities?

Yes, as I've been talking about, and there are lots more levels and details of this I've not gotten into. you with a lot of different parts and a lot of different pieces to it that largely are not acknowledged or addressed by the way this is covered and just understood by everyone except the very small core of people who spend a lot of time thinking about this. That's partly why I and at least a few others are hesitant to just leap into making these big changes. Because, you know, as you pointed out, this is very complicated and there's lots of moving parts. Now, when President Trump gave this directive, I mean, he has the power to direct the Pentagon to do this. And so the Pentagon has now been ordered to start planning for creating a separate space force. My guess is what's gonna happen is

they're going to put together that plan and then they're going to go to Congress and say, we need the following changes to the authorities and Title 10 and the budget to do what the president has ordered. That is not gonna happen until the FY20 planning cycle at the earliest. The way things are supposed to happen, the government operates on a fiscal year that starts 1 October. So 1 October of 2018 is the beginning of the 2019 fiscal year. Congress

is already debating that at the moment. There's not enough time to get all the Space Force stuff that the president wants to do into the 19 planning cycle. What is most likely to happen is that in February of next year, the Department of Defense, when they present their FY20 budget proposal. That's where they will make their requests for what they want to see happen. And then we'll spend the next spring and summer debating that. And then Congress, at the earliest,

they could probably pass something would be next fall when they pass the FY20 budget and the AA. Now, you also asked about what the international impact of this is. On one level, it's not hugely bad. A technical term, yeah. A technical term. The last several years, many more countries have been increasingly aware of and concerned about the growing threats to space and the proliferation of counter space capabilities. My organization put a report out earlier this year, around the same time as a similar report put out by the Center for Strategic International Studies, CSIS, one of the big think tanks here in town, on this proliferation of global counterfeits capabilities. That is not really a surprise. And many more countries are thinking about or conducting military space

activities, mostly on the intelligence side. But there is a problem, I think, in the perception of this. The event where the president made this announcement was supposed to be about space traffic management, which is this very big, in my mind, consequential policy decision that had been underway for the last several years and was finally being decided. And that was not about military and air security. That was about safety on orbit and protecting satellites and protecting astronauts and helping ensure future commercial development of space. But it's been entirely overshadowed by the Space Force because of, you know, President Trump made it a very big deal and it got picked up by the media and all the politics surrounding that. And I think that has been a problem because, you know,

countries like Russia and China are now using that to show that, well, look, the Space Force, that means the U.S. is trying to weaponize space. It's trying to dominate space. It's not a responsible actor. They're sort of using that to turn the international discussion against the U.S. interests. And I think that's a problem. the US interests. And I think that's a problem. Just the idea of taking action to focus more on perceived external threats, does that itself induce those external threats to be more salient or more relevant? That is always a possibility. In this case, I don't think the cause and effect is working that way. There has been an arms race going on, not necessarily

in space, but in terms of developing counter space capabilities for at least the last decade, if not close to 20 years. What essentially has happened is the United States, as I was talking about earlier with the force enhancement discussion, has very closely integrated a lot of space capabilities into its military capabilities. And space is really the reason why the US military has the global reach and the global power that it has to go anywhere in the world and do what needs to be done to protect national security. It's really hard to find an operation in Afghanistan or something happened in Iraq or the broader counterterrorism efforts around the world that does not involve space to some degree, whether it's satellite communications or it's satellite imagery or electronic intelligence

or GPS for precision munitions, you know, they're used every day. So if you are a potential adversary of the United States and you think at some point in the future, you might have a conflict with the U.S., the number one thing you have to figure out to do is how do you neutralize or blunt the U.S. space capabilities? Because that is what enables us to operate in your backyard. So to use two very specific examples, if you're China and you're concerned about the East or South China Sea or Taiwan and being able to do what you want to do as China in there without interference from the U.S., it's our satellites and our space capabilities that would allow us to operate in that theater. The same thing if you're Russia and you're looking at the Baltics or you're

looking at Eastern Europe and NATO and you're trying to neutralize that, it's largely the U.S. space presence that helps enable that. So Russia and China have strong incentives for developing capabilities to deny, degrade, defeat U.S. satellites and space capabilities. And it's clear they've been investing significant resources in developing those for at least the last 10 years, if not 15 or 20. So I don't think the US moving to the Space Force is going to make Russia and China more focused on that. But I do think it is going to hurt the international perception of what's going on. Because for better or for worse, Russia and China have been better at making the marketing pitch for why the U.S. is the bad guy. And they are just focused solely on peaceful uses and not actually doing anything bad in space. But in your mind, when you hear that word militarization of space, does Space Force or anything that we are looking at now, does it advance your understanding of that term?

Or is it unrelated to how you would conceive of that? Space has already been militarized since the very beginning. mentioned, when the Eisenhower administration was coming up with what the U.S. should do in space, a huge part of what it decided we should be doing is military and national security activities. And as we discussed already, the military budget for space is a little bit bigger than NASA's budget for space. And aside from the Apollo program, I'm pretty sure it's been that way throughout the last 60 years. So space is already militarized. I think the question really comes down to the rhetoric evolved around this term, space is a war fighting domain. That's something that's also kind of come out of the public in the last year and a half or so that has caused some consternation and I think in my

mind quite some confusion. People imagine kind of the Star Wars thing where you've got ship pilot ships flying around through space and firing at each other and space battle cruisers blasting it out or you know space marines jumping and invading space stations and stuff. That is not what the U.S. military is talking about when it says space is now a warfighting domain. What it's saying is back to what I was talking about with space being part of military operations on earth. When the US right now conducts military operations on earth, it uses space capabilities. For the last 15 years or so, the U.S. has been fighting adversaries, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Iraq insurgents, that for the most part haven't had space capabilities.

They haven't had a space program. So the U.S. has been able to use those space capabilities without having to worry about the adversary doing anything about it. Now, with the shift towards what the Pentagon has described as a return to great power competition and the focus on potential future conflicts with near-peer adversaries like Russia or China, those adversaries do have the ability to do something about those space capabilities. What the U. the US military is trying to say is that in a future conflict with an adversary like Russia or like China, the military is going to have to think about how the adversary might attack US space capabilities and what it needs

to do about that. That's a very big question. There's lots of different ways to deal with that. The Obama administration was focused on this thing called resilience, which is making it so that, you know, it's harder to attack U.S. satellites. And even if they are attacked, you know, their capabilities degrade gracefully and they don't just, you know, get wiped out in an instant. Now that's shifted a little bit to this term called defendable. There's a lot of debates about whether defending space assets includes preemptive self-defense and potentially things that could be perceived as offense. But keep in mind, the single biggest threat at the moment to satellites is jamming and

interference and a lot of cyber capabilities. That is what we're seeing going on in Ukraine and elsewhere that is actively being used. To date, no one has actually aggressively blown up a satellite of someone else's. So the jamming is really one of the biggest things U.S. military is concerned about. This is sort of the backdrop for the Space Force debate. And I think part of the reason it's got such an unsettling feeling on people is that they hear some of the rhetoric about space is a warfighting domain. We need to have more capabilities to deal with that. And then they see the roles of the Space Force. And the assumption is, oh, they're creating a Space Force to go build more weapons in space to go blow up satellites. And that's not necessarily true. The Space Force is about how you do the organization offensive military space capabilities. It may not. Those capabilities may be developed anyways, even without a Space Force. They're sort of separate debates. But

because there's a lot of public discussion about both, they tend to be linked in a lot of people's minds. I'd like to move on to actual space policy directive number three. The reason that the president was there to even talk about Space Force to begin with, with the vice president and the National Space Council. This is an area that you've spent a lot of your time and we're going to link to your list of publications for our listeners on our main web page. But it was all about space situational awareness, Space Policy Directive number three. What situations in space do we need to be aware of? What are we talking about here? Well, we're talking about a lot of things.

Space situation awareness used to be known as space surveillance under, you know, a couple of decades ago. And it's basically knowledge about the space environment and human activities in it. That would include locations of all the space debris that's in earth orbit, all the active satellites, space weather phenomenon coming from the sun, and then using that data to do things like, you know, trying to avoid satellite collisions or warning about major space weather events that could damage satellites or harm astronauts on the space station. Or from the military context, detecting threats to satellites, either natural or human, and then figuring out what to do about it. Is this other object that is coming close to my satellite, is that just a piece of debris I can move out of the way of? Or is that actually an adversary's core of Atlanta satellite weapon that's going to try and actively collide with or destroy my satellite. SSA kind of underpins all of the civil, national security, and commercial activities in space.

Because we've all seen the movie Gravity, right? Whenever two things in orbit collide, we're talking about a significant amount of energy released and a significant potential amount of damage done. Yes, as that movie dramatically showed. You know, so basic orbital mechanics, when you put something into space, if you just loft it up to, let's say, 500 kilometers, it's going to come right back down. In order for it to stay in space,

you need to give it a forward speed that is equivalent to the orbital velocity at that altitude. So in the case of the space station, which is around at 400 kilometers, that's somewhere in the ballpark of seven kilometers a second forward velocity. So if you have a satellite traveling at seven kilometers a second moving forward, and it has a head on collision with something else going seven kilometers a

second, but in the opposite direction, that's 14 kilometers a second. That's a massive amount of energy. So yes, because things in orbit have this forward velocity, when they collide, there's just incredible amounts of energy involved, and it almost always, if both of the things are bigger than, let's say, a marble, it probably means they're both going to get destroyed. Who's tracking this now and to what level are they tracking, particularly, let's say, debris, since we're focused on that at the moment? At the moment, there are something on the order of 1,800 functional satellites in orbit around the Earth. 800 functional satellites in orbit around the earth. There are roughly 22,000 pieces of space debris that are down to roughly 10 centimeters in size, so the size of a softball. And those

include everything from dead satellites, spent rocket stages, all the way down to, you know, bits and fragments and pieces of other satellites. All told, something on the order of 23,000 or so objects bigger than a soft ball that are currently being tracked. That information largely comes from the U.S. Air Force. They operate a global network of ground-based radars, ground-based telescopes, and a couple of satellites that have telescopes on them that are doing periodic spot checks to track a lot of that stuff and then be able to predict where it is in the future. There are other sources of the data. Russia has a pretty good tracking network of its own.

China has some capabilities. Several European countries have a telescope here and a radar there. Actually today, in the last five years, there have been emergence of some commercial companies that are starting to do this. But for the moment, the vast majority of this data is coming from the U.S. Air Force. And this would be something theoretically altered by any space force or core or anything would be, this is part of that, right? This is part of the Air Force's space. Well, sort of. This is why I have experts on this. Well, so there's one more piece of this.

So there is a population of debris objects smaller than 10 centimeters. We think the size between small than 10 centimeters down to like one centimeter, there's probably 600,000, maybe 700,000 of those objects. We know that because NASA and the European Space Agency, they occasionally do statistical sampling using ground-based radars of that small population. So we have kind of a rough estimate of what's up there. But that small stuff at the moment is not being routinely tracked. You can't predict where it's going to be in the future.

And there are some efforts underway to go try and fix that. So what is related to the Space Force? I think the way I would answer that is saying the biggest thing that Space Policy Directive 3 does is it says this mission of SSA is not just a pure military mission, that there are civil equities in this as well. And it directs the Department of Commerce to stand up some capabilities to do

the aspects of SSA that relate to safety and monitoring commercial space activities. And that would happen in addition to the military continuing to do the national security aspects of SSA. I think the best analogy I can make is the GPS. The Global Positioning System is a Department of Defense program that is run by the U.S. Air Force. And it was created to serve military functions. But over the last 30 years, it has also become a very important part of our daily lives. You know, everyone's phone uses GPS for Google Maps. You know, there's, you know, uncount number of objects out there that have some sort of GPS capability in them. The timing signals from GPS are used to help coordinate banking transactions and help coordinate mobile phone

networks. It's just kind of become ubiquitous. So in response to that, in the 1990s, the Clinton administration made a somewhat similar decision where they said GPS is actually a dual use capability. And they gave the Department of Transportation a share in equity of running and managing GPS along with the Department of Defense. Basically saying the Department of Defense is going to handle the military aspects of GPS. And the Department of Transportation is going to start thinking about the civil aspects of GPS and the Department of Transportation is going to start thinking about the civil aspects of GPS. You know, for example, how we use it to help improve air traffic and aircraft landings and safety, among other things.

Back to your question, the Space Force debate might impact who is doing the military SSA function. Is it still the Air Force, or does it become a Space Force or a Space Guard or a Space Corps? But the big change announced in the policy directive was giving the Department of Commerce as a civil agency a say and a role in providing SSA capabilities. Now, what are the advantages of that? You've written about this, actually. I was reading an op-ed you published back, I think, in 2015, essentially arguing for this very thing, to move this outreach or at least front-end consumer side aspect of SSA away from the Department of Defense. So what does that give you? And why is that

useful? Why is that needed right now? The most immediate benefit is in trying to prevent collisions between satellites. In 2009, a U.S. Iridium satellite, which is a U.S. commercial company, collided with a dead Russian military satellite, Cosmos 2521. And that collision produced something on the order of 3,000 pieces of debris bigger than a softball, bigger than 10 centimeters. And that was sort of a wake-up call for much of the space community. After that happened, the U.S. military had a decision to make. They had the tracking data that could have been used to warn about those kinds of collisions. But they were only really concerned about U.S. military satellites and some of the NASA satellites

like the ISS or some of the important earth science satellites colliding. They weren't thinking about everybody else's stuff. In 2010, the US military made a decision to start screening everyone's satellites in the entire world for what they call conjunctions, basically a close approach. So what they do is the US military takes all of their locations and estimates for where all those 23,000 objects are in space, the ones bigger than 10 centimeters, and they project where they're going to be several days into the future. And then they look to see which objects come close to other satellites. And if I happen to be a commercial company, and I've got a satellite, let's say in the geostationary belt, they might send me a notice,

a warning saying, hey, you know, five days from now, this other piece of space debris, or even if it's a satellite, is going to come within two kilometers of your satellite. And then it's up to me to figure out what to do about that. Is it a satellite? Do I call them up? They're a satellite operator. We work out what's going to happen. If it's a piece of space debris, do I alter my satellite's trajectory to reduce the possibility of that collision or not? That's what the Air Force is doing right now, is they're providing this conjunction warning close approach service to everyone in the world. So part of the short-term advantage here is that it's not really the US.S. military's job to be doing that sort of safety mission, particularly for all the companies out there and foreign governments.

Part of the plan would be for the Department of Commerce to take over that mission. And they would now be the ones providing those warnings, the close approach warnings to everyone else, which then would let the military focus on the things that are actual threats. The close approach that is happening because someone is deliberately coming close to my satellite, that's something the military needs to focus on. The close approach because there's a piece of debris that just happens to be coming close to my satellite is not necessarily a military function. So why the Department of Commerce then? And why not transportation? What insight can you offer on that?

That's complicated. Wilbur Ross just really likes space. The basic answer is politics. The Obama administration actually started working on this issue in 2011, after they issued their national space policy in June of 2010. They started working on a whole host of implementation actions, and one of them was space traffic management, which includes SSA. And they worked on it throughout, up until the end of the administration. they were leaning towards giving this mission to the Department of Transportation, and specifically the Office of Commercial Space Transportation,

known by the acronym AST, which sits under FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration. But there were a lot of internal bureaucratic stuff going on. And ultimately, the Obama administration did not make an official policy decision on this. The Trump administration picked up where they left off and several months later, as we saw last month, has made a decision. So there's a few levels to this. From a philosophical standpoint, in general, the Democrats sort of prefer transportation and the Republicans tend to prefer commerce. Both departments have missions to promote and regulate industry. But the feeling is that transportation tends to put regulation a little bit ahead of promotion, and commerce tends to put promotion a little bit ahead of regulation. It is not really surprising that a Republican

administration that has talked about making the American commercial private sector industry great again and promoting it and really boosting it would think about giving this to commerce and not transportation. The other sort of more bureaucratic reason has to do with how both are organized. So I mentioned that the Department of Transportation, they have this Office of Commercial Space Transportation under the FAA. The last 15, 20 years or so, the FAA has not really been so hot on space. They basically have been the ones that have been told to fund some of the civil components of GPS, and they really just haven't done it. Mainly because the FAA cares about air traffic, because the FAA cares about air traffic, and they sort of saw spending on space as a bit of detraction from what they're really interested in. That has kind of hampered AST's ability to really go out and do what needed to be done on this issue.

What's happened in the commerce side is Secretary Ross has ordered that the bits of commerce that are working on space, particularly the Office of Space Commerce, and then there's also part of NOAA, the National Oceanographic Atmosphere Administration, there's a part of that that does licensing of commercial remote sensing satellites. Secretary Ross has directed that those two offices be merged together and moved out from down deep inside of commerce and report directly to him. And I think that has cleared quite a bit of the kind of bureaucratic overhead for doing a lot of the stuff that we think about needs to be done with SSA. That, in my mind, as long as AST is kind of buried down underneath FAA, I think it would be challenging for them to move as fast as needs to be moved and do what needs to be done to take on this kind of new authority. With this new commerce organization that reports directly to the secretary who's taken a personal interest in this, I think it's more likely they're going to get something done. So that is sort of

the bureaucratic answer to why commerce over department transportation. But I will say at this point, it is not decided. The administration has said, we're going to give this to commerce, The administration has said, we're going to give this to Congress, but it requires Congress to change the authorities to actually have it happen. And there's a debate going on in Congress right now over, should it go to commerce or should it go to transportation? In general, the House has said, we're going to give it to commerce. And they just passed a bill out of the House Science Committee a week or so ago to do exactly that. The Senate has not yet introduced any legislation, but the signals are the Senate is going to go say it goes to transportation. Why would that be? Why would the Senate be more pro-transportation than the House? Is it just ideology? I mean, it's not like the Senate is,

I think Ted Cruz sits on the space subcommittee there. It's not necessarily a issue of ideology, it seems like to me. The Senate hasn't introduced legislation yet. They haven't said anything publicly, so we don't really know for sure. The rumor is that they are concerned this is going to lead to a creation of a bigger bureaucracy under the Department of Commerce. a creation of a bigger bureaucracy under the department of commerce they would rather give it to fa ast maybe they think that ast would not need to add as many new people and add as much budget and and develop as big that's the only thing i've heard i honestly don't know whether that's that's true or not i mean it it is it seems like a significant amount of responsibility

in in the house legislation you're referring to I believe they were authorizing something like $20 million per year to commerce to handle SSA. I mean, just thinking about what you were saying, trying to calculate the future positions of 22,000, 23,000 objects in space, and if they collide with each other, seems computationally heavy, to say the least. Not to mention then they want to put it out publicly accessible and for free to the entire world to use and probably be integrating a variety of different data sets. This is a big responsibility. In the way that you were talking about this, particularly with commerce, do you see a potential conflict of interest between commerce, which has, as you said, kind of a more of a pro-promotional,

or at least have a heavily promotional role in terms of promoting U.S. business, with its regulatory oversight? Do you see any potential issues there with trying to provide this information, but also do it in a way that doesn't restrict what they want to do as their goals of growth in U.S. space business? I actually think it kind of makes sense to link those together. Although I do have some concerns about the follow through the implementation. Let's go back and also look at Space Policy Directive 2 that was signed several months ago. That was a directive to basically modernize the way we do the licensing and regulation and oversight of all the commercial space activities. To briefly summarize, at the moment, there are three government agencies that do licensing and

regulation of commercial space. The Outer Space Treaty, Article 6, says states party to the treaty are responsible for authorization and continuing supervision of all their private sector entities operating in activities in space. And they're also liable for those activities. So that has led many countries, including the U.S., to put in place licensing and regulatory practices to provide that authorization and oversight function. At the moment, the U.S. government does that. There's three agencies that do that. NOAA's Office of Commercial Remote Sensing does licensing of commercial remote sensing.

So these are companies like Planet or Digital Globe that are operating imagery satellites. They're licensed by NOAA. The Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, they license all of the spectrum use by commercial satellite companies. So if you are Planet or Digital Globe, you use radio frequencies to communicate with the satellite, you need to get a license as well from the FCC. Also, if you're a company like Intelsat that is providing satellite broadband or satellite TV from geostationary orbit, you need to get a license from the FCC for those. And then finally, the FAAs off the commercial space transportation, FAAST, they license commercial launch and re-entrance. So if you're SpaceX, every time you launch one of your commercial rockets, you need to have a

license from the FAA. There are some problems with that current setup. One is a lot of those existing licensing processes and regulations were put in place 10, 20, 30 or more years ago and really don't take into account some of what's going on right now. So, for example, on the launch side, they basically say you are either an expendable launch vehicle or you're a single stage reusable launch vehicle. are either an expendable launch vehicle or you're a single stage reusable launch vehicle. Well, we're starting to blend those categories a little bit. And there's also restrictions about you essentially need a new license for every single thing you do. And so when a company like SpaceX is saying, hey, we're going to go launch the rockets and then they're going to fly back and land back at the place we launched them, that sort of broke the mold on what was available for existing licensing.

Similar things on remote sensing with companies talking about doing all sorts of new technologies for imagery and remote sensing and video from space. That sort of broke the mold on existing licensing programs for NOAA. But also, there's a whole bunch of new proposed commercial activities, things like satellite inspections and satellite servicing, commercial space stations, even asteroid mining, for which there aren't any existing licensing mechanisms. No one in this government right now has the authority to say, yes, you can go mine that asteroid, or you can go operate that commercial space station, or even that commercial rover on the moon. Space Policy Directive 2

attempts to fix this by basically directing a review of all the existing regulations to modernize them. And it says the Department of Commerce, you are now going to be the default place that everybody else goes to to get a commercial license to cover all those new and innovative things that don't currently have a licensing pathway. doing a lot of the oversight and licensing of the commercial sector is also the same entity that is tracking all the stuff in space and monitoring what's going on in space. I think those are complementary functions and putting them in the same organization could lead to a better, more efficient licensing and oversight. Because at the moment, if the FAA or the FCC or NOAA issues the license, they don't really have any way to monitor to make sure the company's behavior in space is following the conditions of its license. The license is granted before you even launch.

And then once you're launched, it's sort of hands-off. Now, Department of Commerce is going to be able to watch what's going on and be able to say, hey, your license, we told you, this is what you need to do, for example, to dispose of your satellites end of life. You're not doing that. You know, let's make sure this is happening. So that's why I think there's some value in putting these together. And it could work out very well, both for the companies as well as the public good. But there is, I think, a question as to how this implementation is going to go. Right. It's not like there's a proven pathway for this. This is all very new.

Correct. Correct. And also you asked about the cost of this. It actually is probably not going to cost all that much. Tracking 23,000 objects and predicting locations sounds like it's a huge endeavor, but it's actually not. There are commercial companies doing that right now with a half dozen people and they've all bootstrapped the funding for it. It's not something that requires

a huge amount of bureaucracy and overhead because it's largely software and computers. This, I think, is the other advantage of giving civilized commerce a role in this. Historically, upgrading the ability to do SSA means we do a defense acquisitions contract. And those take a very long time and they tend to be very expensive, and the history of the DoD procuring software is pretty bad. Generally, by the time the program concludes and they deliver something, it's already obsolete. They spent the last 10 years trying to come up with it, and the software world moves pretty fast.

10 years trying to come up with it and the software world moves pretty fast. As I mentioned, I think a little while ago, over the last five years or so, we've seen several commercial companies start up that are doing SSA. They're either operating their own telescopes and radars, or they're buying data from people that are operating them. They're doing the data fusion, they're doing the analytics. And in some cases, they're producing stuff that is as good or even a little bit better than what the Department of Defense can do for a lot less money. There is a possibility the Department of Commerce can leverage this commercial innovation and capabilities to do the SSA mission for a lot less money than it would cost if it was going to be done solely by the government. So just to give you a comparison here, at the moment, the Department of Defense spends roughly a billion dollars a year on SSA. I was part of a study done by the Science

Technology Policy Institute about two years ago, we estimated that a civil SSA function, completely independent of the military, could be done for something on the order of a couple tens of millions of dollars a year. Sorry, I was just like letting that sink in. And that independent means having its own tracking stations and data acquisition, or is that still utilizing the military's tracking? That's one of the big questions in this. We did that analysis, assuming that this commercial entity would get all of its data from sources other than the US military. What's in Space Policy Directive 3, however, says that the Department of Commerce will use the DoD catalog and the DoD data as its baseline, and then look to bring in other capabilities, possibly crucial capabilities

in the future. But the directive clearly says that the Department of Defense will maintain the authoritative space catalog, and commerce will basically defer to them. They'll be the front end for any consumers, basically. Correct, correct. Which I have some disagreement with. In my mind, that means we're all still reliant on that DoD catalog, which the software and computer systems

that are maintaining it are woefully out of date. And the military has struggled the last 10, 15 years to upgrade them. They spent over a billion dollars doing so, and it's not gone well. So that I think is the one area I would kind of have a disagreement with Space Policy Directive 3. I would have preferred commerce to kind of go off and start fresh and do its own thing. But I understand the bureaucratic politics that kind of put them down this path. So looking forward with SSA and space situational awareness and orbital debris, what do you think are the most important issues coming down the pike in the next five years that we may see more space policy directives or legislation on.

What is a major concern for you that you think needs to be addressed as soon as possible? Well, I mean, I would say the first thing is implementation of Space Policy Directive 3 is the most important thing. Now that we have recognized that there are both civil and military equities in this, That's a very important first step, but we have to do the implementation. That means the Department of Commerce is going to have to get the people and the resources to do both all the new licensing things they've been directed to do and all the SSA things they've been directed to do. At the moment, the Department of Commerce, I mentioned earlier that they had two existing offices that are merging together. Well,

those two offices together have less than 10 people and less than $2 million in budget, and are now being asked to basically be the central place for all this commercial licensing and oversight and promotion and SSA. So they're going to have to have some more people and some more budget. And I think you saw that in the SAFE Act that you mentioned earlier, where the House has authorized up to $20 million for this.

Now that's just authorization and that bill passed the committee. It has not passed the whole House. We also would then need the appropriations committees in both the House and the Senate to actually appropriate that money. Carrying through and implementing what's in SPDC, SPD3 is a really big thing. Then I would say the next biggest part is focusing on how commerce is going to develop and leverage sources of data

other than the DOD. DOD is going to be their starting point, but I think the real improvement is going to be when they start pulling in commercial data and algorithms and also doing more international collaboration on this. That's the other thing that commerce may be able to do that the Department of Defense may not have had all the right culture for is the international collaboration on this, because it's an international problem. There's lots of countries out there, as I mentioned earlier, that have radars and telescopes that could contribute to this. There's a hope that if commerce is doing that, they're better able to work with some of those non-U.S. government, non-DOD entities.

And then finally, I would say one of the bigger concerns I have with this is what happens to the public good question? I work for a small NGO. We have some need to access some of this data. And right now, the Air Force provides quite a bit of it for free on a website called spacetrack.org. And there's also a lot of scientific research that's going on studying the space debris population that all requires access to data. One of the concerns of moving towards a more commercial free enterprise sort of model for this data and the SSA services, what happens to the public good people, right? Or a portion of this? What do you do if you can't afford to pay for a license to access that data? How is that taken care of? This is not

a new problem. We deal with this problem in things like weather data or earth remote sensing data, climate data. So if there's ways to solve it, it's just something we need to deal with. One more thing I'll say is debris removal. That is something people have been talking about for at least 15 years. We have this existing population of space debris, studies done by NASA and ESA and other space agencies said, we're going to have to start removing some of that. Otherwise we're going to get more collisions in space. But to date, no one in the US government has really stepped up and said, we're going to go do that. Europe is funding some demonstration missions, but they're fairly small scale. How does the US government deal with debris removal? Do they get some commercial companies to do that? Who pays for it? That

is a really big unanswered question that so far we haven't really dealt with. Dr. Whedon, I want to thank you for joining us today and talking about some of these, I'd say maybe more prosaic, but very important issues in space policy that are really just kind of happening all around us right now. This is a really interesting time for this. And I guess the last thing I want to ask you just to share with our listeners, because we get questions like this a lot, is for people who are really interested in space policy and particularly, let's say, with national security, space policy or SSA, how did you get into this field or what's a pathway that you would recommend for people to pursue in order to be able to

participate in defining this policy, basically, as this new market and new capabilities emerge? My path into this field is probably very non-traditional. My undergraduate education is actually electrical engineering. I did it on an Air Force ROTC scholarship and I went into the Air Force and I didn't do engineering at all. I actually did space operations. And my last job was space surveillance. I worked for the Air Force squadron

that tracks all that stuff in space and does the monitoring. And I worked as an overall analyst there. So that was kind of my first exposure to some of this. I ended up getting out of the Air Force and ended up going to work for Secure World, which is a policy-focused organization. I did my master's degree at the University of North Dakota in space studies, which is not policy-focused. It's very generalized. And then I did a PhD in public

policy and public administration at George Washington University. Started that in 2011 and I finished it at the end of 2016. So I've kind of gone from a technical background to a policy world. What I would say to people coming into the policy profession is go do something that's not policy. Go get a job as an engineer or get a job as a lawyer or get a job as a scientist or something else and get five, 10 years of experience and then think about coming to the policy world. Because the policy professionals I know that are really good, they all have some other hands-on experience to draw from that helps inform their approach to public policy. The other thing I would suggest, in the space world, we tend to throw

around this term policy to mean a catch-all for anything that's not engineering or law. But there actually is a well-defined field of public policy and public administration. And I think it would be good if more people in the space policy world interacted with policy professionals in other domains, because there's literature, there's a lot of conceptual theories. There's a lot I think we could learn from other domains that will help us solve problems in the space world. So along those lines, I would say don't necessarily think you must have a degree in purely space

policy, maybe a degree program in national security policy or in public policy in general or public administration, that then you take those tools and apply the space that could also be very useful. Dr. Brian Whedon, thank you so much again for joining us and hope to have you on again next time when we have a couple more surprise national space policy announcements. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. So I want to thank Dr. Brian Whedon once again. That was a really interesting interview for me. And one of the reasons why we bring in these outside experts, because again, these fields of national security and space situational awareness are so deep and important. And they're really a much broader and kind of parallel area of policy in addition to civil space and science in space.

So it's a lot to talk about there and a lot more, obviously, we could have talked about, but we'll have to do a part two, I think, some other time. And if you have your own thoughts out of that great conversation, you can share them with us, your thoughts, your questions, at planetaryradio, at planetary.org. We'll make sure that those go to Casey and to Jason Callahan, and anything else that you might have to say about these monthly Space Policy Edition programs. When you visit planetary.org to check out the links that we'll have there that are related to today's program, including stuff related to the James Webb Space Telescope, why don't you mosey over to planetary.org slash membership and join us at the Planetary Society. You'll

become part of this program, all of Planetary Radio, everything that the Planetary Society has underway, including and very prominently, its excellent leadership in space policy in Washington, D.C. Guys, thank you very much.

I look forward to talking to you on the first Friday in August. Talk to you then. Sounds good, guys. Try and stay cool. We're to talking to you on the first Friday in August. Talk to you then. Sounds good, guys. Try and stay cool. We're in the middle of a heat wave here in D.C., so. Good luck with that. Yeah, thanks.

That's why you always have to wear your heavy wool suits when you go to meetings. That's right. That's right. That's Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, and Jason Callahan, the Space Policy Advisor to the Society. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, hoping that you will join us for the weekly Planetary Radio series that brings you other terrific people. And do join us on that first Friday in August for the next Space Policy Edition.

Thanks for listening.