The Space Development Agency (SDA) awarded a contract worth approximately $515 million to California-based Rocket Lab for 18 satellites that will help form the Tranche 2 Transport Layer (T2TL) of its massive low-Earth orbit constellation.
Space
The Space Force held its first-ever “Red Skies” exercise last month—48 years after the first-ever Air Force “Red Flag”—simulating orbital combat and putting Guardians to the test.
Space Force leaders have become increasingly vocal about the need for responsible counterspace capabilities: weapons and operations that can hold enemies' space assets at risk to deter conflict. And it’s not just words—within the past year, the service has activated several units key to the ...
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a retired Air Force brigadier general and ISR pilot, has raised concerns about the service’s budget and the rate at which it is retiring aircraft in the past. Now, he’s hoping a new force design study he pushed for will articulate the ...
After multiple scrubbed launches, the Space Force’s X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle returned to orbit Dec. 28, riding a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, Fla. The launch of the secretive reusable space plane came two weeks after China launched its own mysterious spacecraft, “Shenlong,” ...
The Space Rapid Capabilities Office, charged with quickly delivering cutting-edge, often-classified technologies for the Space Force, has made key progress in its push to modernize the aging system used to control U.S. government satellites, its director revealed last week. Additionally, the secretive organization deployed “threat ...
A new report by the Center for Strategic & International Studies writes that unique phenomena occurring at hypersonic speeds could make hypersonic weapons easier to detect and track on hyperspectral or radiofrequency sensors.
For decades, the Space Force and the Air Force before it have had a tried-and-true method: massive, costly satellites are sent into orbit by launches that have been planned for months. Once there, those satellites mostly stay put in their orbits, preserving as much fuel ...
Military missions in the air, on land, and at sea demand robust, timely weather information. On-orbit space-based environmental monitoring (SBEM) systems are a critical source of this data, but years of underfunding, delayed, curtailed, and canceled modernization programs have left the SBEM enterprise in a ...
