That's the message from the thinking man's Marine, General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told a U.S. Chamber of Commerce confab in Washington yesterday that the Defense Department may lose its edge in space because of a policy that has led to slow development of costly satellites.
Cartwright did not mention any Defense satellite program by name, but made it clear that Defense needs to find a less expensive and quicker way to develop and deploy space systems. The U.S. faces diminishing returns on what he called "exquisite" satellites that are so expensive that the department can only afford to launch one or two, and then have to wait another five years to start the process again.
Defense needs to shifts its satellite focus away from "the next cutting edge trinket" to cheaper satellites that it can launch in numbers that will give the United States the advantage of scale over an exquisite design, Cartwright said. Unless Defense changes its approach to space systems, it will "lose a significant national security advantage."
Cartwright also warned that lengthy development periods for satellite systems means they are obsolete by the time they get to the launch pad. I wonder if the Air Force folks managing the $16 billion Transformational Communications Satellite system, for which the launch date has slipped to 2019 from 2016 in the past few months and from an original launch date of 2011, paid any attention to Cartwright's speech.
Cartwright said the collision of an operational Iridium satellite on Feb. 10 with a defunct Russian satellite that generated a huge mass of space debris also means Defense needs better "space situational awareness" systems that can detect and track in a matter of seconds the thousands of items in orbit.
Ray Williamson, executive director of Secure World Foundation, which advocates the secure use of space for all countries, said the satellite accident demands development of a civil space traffic control system modeled on civil aviation control systems that would provide the kind of awareness Cartwright called for.
Williamson said that a civil space situational awareness system could have been used to warn the Iridium operations managers of the danger of collision and allow them to take evasive action. "In the absence of reliable ways to clear debris from orbit, it will be increasingly important to follow all active satellites to prevent future preventable collisions," he said.
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