The Air Force can’t regulate civilian satellites. The White House wants the Commerce Department to do it. But Democrats say FAA.

Air Force Space Command’s ‘Unified Data Library’ combining DoD and commercial SSA data will be open to allied governments.

Industry officials say there remain strong pockets of resistance to any new regulations, especially among aggressive space startups.

Navy Research Lab’s LARADO (Laser-sheet Anomaly Resolution and Debris Observation) project conjures images of a Wild West cattle drive, and in a way that is apropos as space scientists have long been attempting to wrangle better estimates of the population of on-orbit debris.

Let’s not get too carried away. “We’ve got to earn our way to cislunar,” Will Roper said with a chuckle. “We’ve got to prove we can do LEO and GEO well.” Still, “this isn’t too far fetched.”

JMS was supposed to revolutionize how the US tracks objects in space. Its billion-dollar bust means the Air Force must revive SPADOC, a widely reviled vestige of the 1980s.

After years of missed deadlines, cost overruns and underperformance the Air Force has split the requirements for the troubled Joint Mission System program’s Increment 3, dividing them between the Coalition Space Operations Center and the National Space Defense Center. In a separate but apparently related action, the Air Force has also partnered with the nation’s spy satellite builder to create a new Space Situational Awareness satellite.

WASHINGTON: Yesterday was what we’ll call Space Day for the Trump Administration, with perhaps the most national attention ever paid to military and intelligence space in public by the senior officials of a White House and the military. Here’s a summary of the news from the meeting of the reborn Space Council and a later… Keep reading →

                CORRECTED: Raytheon Builds VIIRS WASHINGTON: The Trump Administration’s new Space Council should tackle the thorny interagency problem of how much the Air Force will do to provide weather data to the US government, says the chairman of the House subcommittee that deals with space policy. More than… Keep reading →

CORRECTED: NPOI Remains In Use For SSA GEOINT: Think about technology to identify suicide bombers and high value targets who’ve been blown to bits without using DNA. The Intelligence Community’s version of DARPA, IARPA, is doing just that with a program designed to use proteins from hair and keratin (which makes up much of the… Keep reading →