The Space & Missile Systems Center’s Space Enterprise Consortium has been so successful at providing competitive prototypes, fast, that SMC wants to expand its scope dramatically.

Such smallsat payloads, hosted on commercial satellites, are an important piece of the Army’s evolving concept of Multi-Domain Operations, which seeks to combine efforts on land, the sea, air, space, and cyberspace to defeat sophisticated adversaries such as Russia and China.

Japan plans to host an American Space Situational Awareness (SSA) sensor payload on their QZSS satellites. American and Japanese officials are expected to sign a Memorandum of Understanding by the end of the year.

“The external and internal communication regarding [DoD] smallsat strategy is not consistent and not clear,” Carissa Christensen, CEO of Bryce Space and Technologies, said wryly.

  UPDATED WASHINGTON: US commercial satellite sales to AsiaSat, and the company’s leasing of communications bandwidth to China, are not threats to US national security, say experts — contrary to charges by Republican Senators Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst. Instead, US export control law very deliberately has been crafted to encourage such sales in a… Keep reading →

The fact that the Defense Innovation Unit is even considering the idea of a space station in orbit is a pretty big deal — and an even bigger deal if it grows over time to accommodate a human crew.

“Physics are physics,” says Rick Ambrose, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space. “There are still some things for which a geostationary approach makes more sense. There are other areas that a Low Earth Orbit makes more sense, and everything in between.”

SDA Director Fred Kennedy steps down, amid turmoil within the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin.

The senators’ draft of the annual defense bill puts a new emphasis on technological competition, including industrial policy moves to strengthen US companies.

House appropriators rejected Trump’s plan to put satellite regulation under the Commerce Department and chide Secretary Wilbur Ross for his refusal to testify on the 2020 budget request.