US Space Force

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Space Force officials take secrecy to new heights ahead of key rocket launch

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The Vulcan rocket checks off several important boxes for the Space Force. First, it relies entirely on US-made rocket engines. The Atlas V rocket it is replacing uses Russian-built main engines, and given the chilled relations between the two powers, US officials have long desired to stop using Russian engines to power the Pentagon’s satellites into orbit. Second, ULA says the Vulcan rocket will eventually provide a heavy-lift launch capability at a lower cost than the company’s now-retired Delta IV Heavy rocket.

Third, Vulcan provides the Space Force with an alternative to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, which have been the only rockets in their class available to the military since the last national security mission was launched on an Atlas V rocket one year ago.

Col. Jim Horne, mission director for the USSF-106 launch, said this flight marks a “pretty historic point in our program’s history. We officially end our reliance on Russian-made main engines with this launch, and we continue to maintain our assured access to space with at least two independent rocket service companies that we can leverage to get our capabilities on orbit.”

What’s onboard?

The Space Force has only acknowledged one of the satellites aboard the USSF-106 mission, but there are more payloads cocooned inside the Vulcan rocket’s fairing.

The $250 million mission that officials are willing to talk about is named Navigation Technology Satellite-3, or NTS-3. This experimental spacecraft will test new satellite navigation technologies that may eventually find their way on next-generation GPS satellites. A key focus for engineers who designed and will operate the NTS-3 satellite is to look at ways of overcoming GPS jamming and spoofing, which can degrade satellite navigation signals used by military forces, commercial airliners, and civilian drivers.

“We’re going to be doing, we anticipate, over 100 different experiments,” said Joanna Hinks, senior research aerospace engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s space vehicles directorate, which manages the NTS-3 mission. “Some of the major areas we’re looking at—we have an electronically steerable phased array antenna so that we can deliver higher power to get through interference to the location that it’s needed.”

Arlen Biersgreen, then-program manager for the NTS-3 satellite mission at the Air Force Research Laboratory, presents a one-third scale model of the NTS-3 spacecraft to an audience in 2022. Credit: US Air Force/Andrea Rael

GPS jamming is especially a problem in and near war zones. Investigators probing the crash of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 last December determined GPS jamming, likely by Russian military forces attempting to counter a Ukrainian drone strike, interfered with the aircraft’s navigation as it approached its destination in the Russian republic of Chechnya. Azerbaijani government officials blamed a Russian surface-to-air missile for damaging the aircraft, ultimately leading to a crash in nearby Kazakhstan that killed 38 people.

“We have a number of different advanced signals that we’ve designed,” Hinks said. “One of those is the Chimera anti-spoofing signal… to protect civil users from spoofing that’s affecting so many aircraft worldwide today, as well as ships.”

The NTS-3 spacecraft, developed by L3Harris and Northrop Grumman, only takes up a fraction of the Vulcan rocket’s capacity. The satellite weighs less than 3,000 pounds (about 1,250 kilograms), about a quarter of what this version of the Vulcan rocket can deliver to geosynchronous orbit.

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The military’s squad of satellite trackers is now routinely going on alert

Features, military space, raj agrawal, Science, Space, space debris, space operations command, US Space Force / /

“I hope this blows your mind because it blows my mind.”

A Long March 3B rocket carrying a new Chinese Beidou navigation satellite lifts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on May 17, 2023. Credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images

This is Part 2 of our interview with Col. Raj Agrawal, the former commander of the Space Force’s Space Mission Delta 2.

If it seems like there’s a satellite launch almost every day, the numbers will back you up.

The US Space Force’s Mission Delta 2 is a unit that reports to Space Operations Command, with the job of sorting out the nearly 50,000 trackable objects humans have launched into orbit.

Dozens of satellites are being launched each week, primarily by SpaceX to continue deploying the Starlink broadband network. The US military has advance notice of these launches—most of them originate from Space Force property—and knows exactly where they’re going and what they’re doing.

That’s usually not the case when China or Russia (and occasionally Iran or North Korea) launches something into orbit. With rare exceptions, like human spaceflight missions, Chinese and Russian officials don’t publish any specifics about what their rockets are carrying or what altitude they’re going to.

That creates a problem for military operators tasked with monitoring traffic in orbit and breeds anxiety among US forces responsible for making sure potential adversaries don’t gain an edge in space. Will this launch deploy something that can destroy or disable a US satellite? Will this new satellite have a new capability to surveil allied forces on the ground or at sea?

Of course, this is precisely the point of keeping launch details under wraps. The US government doesn’t publish orbital data on its most sensitive satellites, such as spy craft collecting intelligence on foreign governments.

But you can’t hide in low-Earth orbit, a region extending hundreds of miles into space. Col. Raj Agrawal, who commanded Mission Delta 2 until earlier this month, knows this all too well. Agrawal handed over command to Col. Barry Croker as planned after a two-year tour of duty at Mission Delta 2.

Col. Raj Agrawal, then-Mission Delta 2 commander, delivers remarks to audience members during the Mission Delta 2 redesignation ceremony in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on October 31, 2024. Credit: US Space Force

Some space enthusiasts have made a hobby of tracking US and foreign military satellites as they fly overhead, stringing together a series of observations over time to create fairly precise estimates of an object’s altitude and inclination.

Commercial companies are also getting in on the game of space domain awareness. But most are based in the United States or allied nations and have close partnerships with the US government. Therefore, they only release information on satellites owned by China and Russia. This is how Ars learned of interesting maneuvers underway with a Chinese refueling satellite and suspected Russian satellite killers.

Theoretically, there’s nothing to stop a Chinese company, for example, from taking a similar tack on revealing classified maneuvers conducted by US military satellites.

The Space Force has an array of sensors scattered around the world to detect and track satellites and space debris. The 18th and 19th Space Defense Squadrons, which were both under Agrawal’s command at Mission Delta 2, are the units responsible for this work.

Preparing for the worst

One of the most dynamic times in the life of a Space Force satellite tracker is when China or Russia launches something new, according to Agrawal. His command pulls together open source information, such as airspace and maritime warning notices, to know when a launch might be scheduled.

This is not unlike how outside observers, like hobbyist trackers and space reporters, get a heads-up that something is about to happen. These notices tell you when a launch might occur, where it will take off from, and which direction it will go. What’s different for the Space Force is access to top-secret intelligence that might clue military officials in on what the rocket is actually carrying. China, in particular, often declares that its satellites are experimental, when Western analysts believe they are designed to support military activities.

That’s when US forces swing into action. Sometimes, military forces go on alert. Commanders develop plans to detect, track, and target the objects associated with a new launch, just in case they are “hostile,” Agrawal said.

We asked Agrawal to take us through the process his team uses to prepare for and respond to one of these unannounced, or “non-cooperative,” launches. This portion of our interview is published below, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Ars: Let’s say there’s a Russian or Chinese launch. How do you find out there’s a launch coming? Do you watch for NOTAMs (Notices to Airmen), like I do, and try to go from there?

Agrawal: I think the conversation starts the same way that it probably starts with you and any other technology-interested American. We begin with what’s available. We certainly have insight through intelligence means to be able to get ahead of some of that, but we’re using a lot of the same sources to refine our understanding of what may happen, and then we have access to other intel.

The good thing is that the Space Force is a part of the Intelligence Community. We’re plugged into an entire Intelligence Community focused on anything that might be of national security interest. So we’re able to get ahead. Maybe we can narrow down NOTAMs; maybe we can anticipate behavior. Maybe we have other activities going on in other domains or on the Internet, the cyber domain, and so on, that begin to tip off activity.

Certainly, we’ve begun to understand patterns of behavior. But no matter what, it’s not the same level of understanding as those who just cooperate and work together as allies and friends. And if there’s a launch that does occur, we’re not communicating with that launch control center. We’re certainly not communicating with the folks that are determining whether or not the launch will be safe, if it’ll be nominal, how many payloads are going to deploy, where they’re going to deploy to.

I certainly understand why a nation might feel that they want to protect that. But when you’re fielding into LEO [low-Earth orbit] in particular, you’re not really going to hide there. You’re really just creating uncertainty, and now we’re having to deal with that uncertainty. We eventually know where everything is, but in that meantime, you’re creating a lot of risk for all the other nations and organizations that have fielded capability in LEO as well.

Find, fix, track, target

Ars: Can you take me through what it’s like for you and your team during one of these launches? When one comes to your attention, through a NOTAM or something else, how do you prepare for it? What are you looking for as you get ready for it? How often are you surprised by something with one of these launches?

Agrawal: Those are good questions. Some of it, I’ll be more philosophical on, and others I can be specific on. But on a routine basis, our formation is briefed on all of the launches we’re aware of, to varying degrees, with the varying levels of confidence, and at what classifications have we derived that information.

In fact, we also have a weekly briefing where we go into depth on how we have planned against some of what we believe to be potentially higher threats. How many organizations are involved in that mission plan? Those mission plans are done at a very tactical level by captains and NCOs [non-commissioned officers] that are part of the combat squadrons that are most often presented to US Space Command…

That integrated mission planning involves not just Mission Delta 2 forces but also presented forces by our intelligence delta [Space Force units are called deltas], by our missile warning and missile tracking delta, by our SATCOM [satellite communications] delta, and so on—from what we think is on the launch pad, what we think might be deployed, what those capabilities are. But also what might be held at risk as a result of those deployments, not just in terms of maneuver but also what might these even experimental—advertised “experimental”—capabilities be capable of, and what harm might be caused, and how do we mission-plan against those potential unprofessional or hostile behaviors?

As you can imagine, that’s a very sophisticated mission plan for some of these launches based on what we know about them. Certainly, I can’t, in this environment, confirm or deny any of the specific launches… because I get access to more fidelity and more confidence on those launches, the timing and what’s on them, but the precursor for the vast majority of all these launches is that mission plan.

That happens at a very tactical level. That is now posturing the force. And it’s a joint force. It’s not just us, Space Force forces, but it’s other services’ capabilities as well that are posturing to respond to that. And the truth is that we even have partners, other nations, other agencies, intel agencies, that have capability that have now postured against some of these launches to now be committed to understanding, did we anticipate this properly? Did we not?

And then, what are our branch plans in case it behaves in a way that we didn’t anticipate? How do we react to it? What do we need to task, posture, notify, and so on to then get observations, find, fix, track, target? So we’re fulfilling the preponderance of what we call the kill chain, for what we consider to be a non-cooperative launch, with a hope that it behaves peacefully but anticipating that it’ll behave in a way that’s unprofessional or hostile… We have multiple chat rooms at multiple classifications that are communicating in terms of “All right, is it launching the way we expected it to, or did it deviate? If it deviated, whose forces are now at risk as a result of that?”

A spectator takes photos before the launch of the Long March 7A rocket carrying the ChinaSat 3B satellite from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China on May 20, 2025. Credit: Meng Zhongde/VCG via Getty Images

Now, we even have down to the fidelity of what forces on the ground or on the ocean may not have capability… because of maneuvers or protective measures that the US Space Force has to take in order to deviate from its mission because of that behavior. The conversation, the way it was five years ago and the way it is today, is very, very different in terms of just a launch because now that launch, in many cases, is presenting a risk to the joint force.

We’re acting like a joint force. So that Marine, that sailor, that special operator on the ground who was expecting that capability now is notified in advance of losing that capability, and we have measures in place to mitigate those outages. And if not, then we let them know that “Hey, you’re not going to have the space capability for some period of time. We’ll let you know when we’re back. You have to go back to legacy operations for some period of time until we’re back into nominal configuration.”

I hope this blows your mind because it blows my mind in the way that we now do even just launch processing. It’s very different than what we used to do.

Ars: So you’re communicating as a team in advance of a launch and communicating down to the tactical level, saying that this launch is happening, this is what it may be doing, so watch out?

Agrawal: Yeah. It’s not as simple as a ballistic missile warning attack, where it’s duck and cover. Now, it’s “Hey, we’ve anticipated the things that could occur that could affect your ability to do your mission as a result of this particular launch with its expected payload, and what we believe it may do.” So it’s not just a general warning. It’s a very scoped warning.

As that launch continues, we’re able to then communicate more specifically on which forces may lose what, at what time, and for how long. And it’s getting better and better as the rest of the US Space Force, as they present capability trained to that level of understanding as well… We train this together. We operate together and we communicate together so that the tactical user—sometimes it’s us at US Space Force, but many times it’s somebody on the surface of the Earth that has to understand how their environment, their capability, has changed as a result of what’s happening in, to, and from space.

Ars: The types of launches where you don’t know exactly what’s coming are getting more common now. Is it normal for you to be on this alert posture for all of the launches out of China or Russia?

Agrawal: Yeah. You see it now. The launch manifest is just ridiculous, never mind the ones we know about. The ones that we have to reach out into the intelligence world and learn about, that’s getting ridiculous, too. We don’t have to have this whole machine postured this way for cooperative launches. So the amount of energy we’re expending for a non-cooperative launch is immense. We can do it. We can keep doing it, but you’re just putting us on alert… and you’re putting us in a position where we’re getting ready for bad behavior with the entire general force, as opposed to a cooperative launch, where we can anticipate. If there’s an anomaly, we can anticipate those and work through them. But we’re working through it with friends, and we’re communicating.

We’re not having to put tactical warfighters on alert every time … but for those payloads that we have more concern about. But still, it’s a very different approach, and that’s why we are actively working with as many nations as possible in Mission Delta 2 to get folks to sign on with Space Command’s space situational awareness sharing agreements, to go at space operations as friends, as allies, as partners, working together. So that way, we’re not posturing for something higher-end as a result of the launch, but we’re doing this together. So, with every nation we can, we’re getting out there—South America, Africa, every nation that will meet with us, we want to meet with them and help them get on the path with US Space Command to share data, to work as friends, and use space responsibly.”

A Long March 3B carrier rocket carrying the Shijian 21 satellite lifts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on October 24, 2021. Credit: Li Jieyi/VCG via Getty Images

Ars: How long does it take you to sort out and get a track on all of the objects for an uncooperative launch?

Agrawal: That question is a tough one to answer. We can move very, very quickly, but there are times when we have made a determination of what we think something is, what it is and where it’s going, and intent; there might be some lag to get it into a public catalog due to a number of factors, to include decisions being made by combatant commanders, because, again, our primary objective is not the public-facing catalog. The primary objective is, do we have a risk or not?

If we have a risk, let’s understand, let’s figure out to what degree do we think we have to manage this within the Department of Defense. And to what degree do we believe, “Oh, no, this can go in the public catalog. This is a predictable elset (element set)”? What we focus on with (the public catalog) are things that help with predictability, with spaceflight safety, with security, spaceflight security. So you sometimes might see a lag there, but that’s because we’re wrestling with the security aspect of the degree to which we need to manage this internally before we believe it’s predictable. But once we believe it’s predictable, we put it in the catalog, and we put it on space-track.org. There’s some nuance in there that isn’t relative to technology or process but more on national security.

On the flip side, what used to take hours and days is now getting down to seconds and minutes. We’ve overhauled—not 100 percent, but to a large degree—and got high-speed satellite communications from sensors to the centers of SDA (Space Domain Awareness) processing. We’re getting higher-end processing. We’re now duplicating the ability to process, duplicating that capability across multiple units. So what used to just be human labor intensive, and also kind of dial-up speed of transmission, we’ve now gone to high-speed transport. You’re seeing a lot of innovation occur, and a lot of data fusion occur, that’s getting us to seconds and minutes.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Ars spoke with the military’s chief orbital traffic cop—here’s what we learned

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“We have some 2,000 or 2,200 objects that I call the ‘red order of battle.'”

Col. Raj Agrawal participates in a change of command ceremony to mark his departure from Mission Delta 2 at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. Col. Barry Croker became the new commander of Mission Delta 2 on July 3.

For two years, Col. Raj Agrawal commanded the US military unit responsible for tracking nearly 50,000 human-made objects whipping through space. In this role, he was keeper of the orbital catalog and led teams tasked with discerning whether other countries’ satellites, mainly China and Russia, are peaceful or present a military threat to US forces.

This job is becoming more important as the Space Force prepares for the possibility of orbital warfare.

Ars visited with Agrawal in the final weeks of his two-year tour of duty as commander of Mission Delta 2, a military unit at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. Mission Delta 2 collects and fuses data from a network of sensors “to identify, characterize, and exploit opportunities and mitigate vulnerabilities” in orbit, according to a Space Force fact sheet.

This involves operating radars and telescopes, analyzing intelligence information, and “mapping the geocentric space terrain” to “deliver a combat-ready common operational picture” to military commanders. Agrawal’s job has long existed in one form or another, but the job description is different today. Instead of just keeping up with where things are in space—a job challenging enough—military officials now wrestle with distinguishing which objects might have a nefarious purpose.

From teacher to commander

Agrawal’s time at Mission Delta 2 ended on July 3. His next assignment will be as Space Force chair at the National Defense University. This marks a return to education for Agrawal, who served as a Texas schoolteacher for eight years before receiving his commission as an Air Force officer in 2001.

“Teaching is, I think, at the heart of everything I do,” Agrawal said. 

He taught music and math at Trimble Technical High School, an inner city vocational school in Fort Worth. “Most of my students were in broken homes and unfortunate circumstances,” Agrawal said. “I went to church with those kids and those families, and a lot of times, I was the one bringing them home and taking them to school. What was [satisfying] about that was a lot of those students ended up living very fulfilling lives.”

Agrawal felt a calling for higher service and signed up to join the Air Force. Given his background in music, he initially auditioned for and was accepted into the Air Force Band. But someone urged him to apply for Officer Candidate School, and Agrawal got in. “I ended up on a very different path.”

Agrawal was initially accepted into the ICBM career field, but that changed after the September 11 attacks. “That was a time with anyone with a name like mine had a hard time,” he said. “It took a little bit of time to get my security clearance.”

Instead, the Air Force assigned him to work in space operations. Agrawal quickly became an instructor in space situational awareness, did a tour at the National Reconnaissance Office, then found himself working at the Pentagon in 2019 as the Defense Department prepared to set up the Space Force as a new military service. Agrawal was tasked with leading a team of 100 people to draft the first Space Force budget.

Then, he received the call to report to Peterson Space Force Base to take command of what is now Mission Delta 2, the inheritor of decades of Air Force experience cataloging everything in orbit down to the size of a softball. The catalog was stable and predictable, lingering below 10,000 trackable objects until 2007. That’s when China tested an anti-satellite missile, shattering an old Chinese spacecraft into more than 3,500 pieces large enough to be routinely detected by the US military’s Space Surveillance Network.

This graph from the European Space Agency shows the growing number of trackable objects in orbit. Credit: European Space Agency

Two years later, an Iridium communications satellite collided with a defunct Russian spacecraft, adding thousands more debris fragments to low-Earth orbit. A rapid uptick in the pace of launches since then has added to the problem, further congesting busy orbital traffic lanes a hundred miles above the Earth. Today, the orbital catalog numbers roughly 48,000 objects.

“This compiled data, known as the space catalog, is distributed across the military, intelligence community, commercial space entities, and to the public, free of charge,” officials wrote in a fact sheet describing Mission Delta 2’s role at Space Operations Command. Deltas are Space Force military units roughly equivalent to a wing or group command in the Air Force.

The room where it happens

The good news is that the US military is getting better at tracking things in space. A network of modern radars and telescopes on the ground and in space can now spot objects as small as a golf ball. Space is big, but these objects routinely pass close to one another. At speeds of nearly 5 miles per second, an impact will be catastrophic.

But there’s a new problem. Today, the US military must not only screen for accidental collisions but also guard against an attack on US satellites in orbit. Space is militarized, a fact illustrated by growing fleets of satellites—primarily American, Chinese, and Russian—capable of approaching another country’s assets in orbit, and in some cases, disable or destroy them. This has raised fears at the Pentagon that an adversary could take out US satellites critical for missile warning, navigation, and communications, with severe consequences impacting military operations and daily civilian life.

This new reality compelled the creation of the Space Force in 2019, beginning a yearslong process of migrating existing Air Force units into the new service. Now, the Pentagon is posturing for orbital warfare by investing in new technologies and reorganizing the military’s command structure.

Today, the Space Force is responsible for predicting when objects in orbit will come close to one another. This is called a conjunction in the parlance of orbital mechanics. The US military routinely issues conjunction warnings to commercial and foreign satellite operators to give them an opportunity to move their satellites out of harm’s way. These notices also go to NASA if there’s a chance of a close call with the International Space Station (ISS).

The first Trump administration approved a new policy to transfer responsibility for these collision warnings to the Department of Commerce, allowing the military to focus on national security objectives.

But the White House’s budget request for next year would cancel the Commerce Department’s initiative to take over collision warnings. Our discussion with Agrawal occurred before the details of the White House budget were made public last month, and his comments reflect official Space Force policy at the time of the interview. “In uniform, we align to policy,” Agrawal wrote on his LinkedIn account. “We inform policy decisions, but once they’re made, we align our support accordingly.”

US Space Force officials show the 18th Space Defense Squadron’s operations floor to officials from the German Space Situational Awareness Centre during an “Operator Exchange” event at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on April 7, 2022. Credit: US Space Force/Tech. Sgt. Luke Kitterman

Since our interview, analysts have also noticed an uptick in interesting Russian activity in space and tracked a suspected Chinese satellite refueling mission in geosynchronous orbit.

Let’s rewind the tape to 2007, the time of China’s game-changing anti-satellite test. Gen. Chance Saltzman, today the Space Force’s Chief of Space Operations, was a lieutenant colonel in command of the Air Force’s 614th Space Operations Squadron at the time. He was on duty when Air Force operators first realized China had tested an anti-satellite missile. Saltzman has called the moment a “pivot point” in space operations. “For those of us that are neck-deep in the business, we did have to think differently from that day on,” Saltzman said in 2023.

Agrawal was in the room, too. “I was on the crew that needed to count the pieces,” he told Ars. “I didn’t know the significance of what was happening until after many years, but the Chinese had clearly changed the nature of the space environment.”

The 2007 anti-satellite test also clearly changed the trajectory of Agrawal’s career. We present part of our discussion with Agrawal below, and we’ll share the rest of the conversation tomorrow. The text has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Ars: The Space Force’s role in monitoring activities in space has changed a lot in the last few years. Can you tell me about these changes, and what’s the difference between what you used to call Space Situational Awareness, and what is now called Space Domain Awareness?

Agrawal: We just finished our fifth year as a Space Force, so as a result of standing up a military service focused on space, we shifted our activities to focus on what the joint force requires for combat space power. We’ve been doing space operations for going on seven decades. I think a lot of folks think that it was a rebranding, as opposed to a different focus for space operations, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. Compared to Space Domain Awareness (SDA), Space Situational Awareness (SSA) is kind of the knowledge we produce with all these sensors, and anybody can do space situational awareness. You have academia doing that. You’ve got commercial, international partners, and so on. But Space Domain Awareness, Gen. [John “Jay”] Raymond coined the term a couple years before we stood up the Space Force, and he was trying to get after, how do we create a domain focused on operational outcomes? That’s all we could say at the time. We couldn’t say war-fighting domain at the time because of the way of our policy, but our policy shifted to being able to talk about space as a place where, not that we want to wage war, but that we can achieve objectives, and do that with military objectives in mind.

We used to talk about detect, characterize, attribute, predict. And then Gen. [Chance] Saltzman added target onto the construct for Space Domain Awareness, so that we’re very much in the conversation of what it means to do a space-enabled attack and being able to achieve objectives in, from, and to space, and using Space Domain Awareness as a vehicle to do those things. So, with Mission Delta 2, what he did is he took the sustainment part of acquisition, software development, cyber defense, intelligence related to Space Domain Awareness, and then all the things that we were doing in Space Domain Awareness already, put all that together under one command … and called us Mission Delta 2. So, the 18th Space Defense Squadron … that used to kind of be the center of the world for Space Domain Awareness, maybe the only unit that you could say was really doing SDA, where everyone else was kind of doing SSA. When I came into command a couple years ago, and we face now a real threat to having space superiority in the space domain, I disaggregated what we were doing just in the 18th and spread out through a couple of other units … So, that way everyone’s got kind of majors and minors, but we can quickly move a mission in case we get tested in terms of cyber defense or other kinds of vulnerabilities.

This multi-exposure image depicts a satellite-filled sky over Alberta. Credit: Alan Dyer/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

We can’t see the space domain, so it’s not like the air domain and sea domain and land domain, where you can kind of see where everything is, and you might have radars, but ultimately it’s a human that’s verifying whether or not a target or a threat is where it is. For the space domain, we’re doing all that through radars, telescopes, and computers, so the reality we create for everyone is essentially their reality. So, if there’s a gap, if there’s a delay, if there are some signs that we can’t see, that reality is what is created by us, and that is effectively the reality for everyone else, even if there is some other version of reality in space. So, we’re getting better and better at fielding capability to see the complexity, the number of objects, and then translating that into what’s useful for us—because we don’t need to see everything all the time—but what’s useful for us for military operations to achieve military objectives, and so we’ve shifted our focus just to that.

We’re trying to get to where commercial spaceflight safety is managed by the Office of Space Commerce, so they’re training side by side with us to kind of offload that mission and take that on. We’re doing up to a million notifications a day for conjunction assessments, sometimes as low as 600,000. But last year, we did 263 million conjunction notifications. So, we want to get to where the authorities are rightly lined, where civil or commercial notifications are done by an organization that’s not focused on joint war-fighting, and we focus on the things that we want to focus on.

Ars: Thank you for that overview. It helps me see the canvas for everything else we’re going to talk about. So, today, you’re not only tracking new satellites coming over the horizon from a recent launch or watching out for possible collisions, you’re now trying to see where things are going in space and maybe even try to determine intent, right?

Agrawal: Yeah, so the integrated mission delta has helped us have intel analysts and professionals as part of our formation. Their mission is SDA as much as ours is, but they’re using an intel lens. They’re looking at predictive intelligence, right? I don’t want to give away tradecraft, but what they’re focused on is not necessarily where a thing is. It used to be that all we cared about was position and vector, right? As long as you knew an object’s position and the direction they were going, you knew their orbit. You had predictive understanding of what their element set would be, and you only had to do sampling to get a sense of … Is it kind of where we thought it was going to be? … If it was far enough off of its element set, then we would put more energy, more sampling of that particular object, and then effectively re-catalog it.

Now, it’s a different model. We’re looking at state vectors, and we’re looking at anticipatory modeling, where we have some 2,000 or 2,200 objects that I call the “red order of battle”—that are high-interest objects that we anticipate will do things that are not predicted, that are not element set in nature, but that will follow some type of national interest. So, our intel apparatus gets after what things could potentially be a risk, and what things to continue to understand better, and what things we have to be ready to hold at risk. All of that’s happening through all the organizations, certainly within this delta, but in partnership and in support of other capabilities and deltas that are getting after their parts of space superiority.

Hostile or friendly?

Ars: Can you give some examples of these red order of battle objects?

Agrawal: I think you know about Shijian-20 (a “tech demo” satellite that has evaded inspection by US satellites) and Shijian-24C (which the Space Force says demonstrated “dogfighting” in space), things that are advertised as scientific in nature, but clearly demonstrate capability that is not friendly, and certainly are behaving in ways that are unprofessional. In any other domain, we would consider them hostile, but in space, we try to be a lot more nuanced in terms of how we characterize behavior, but still, when something’s behaving in a way that isn’t pre-planned, isn’t pre-coordinated, and potentially causes hazard, harm, or contest with friendly forces, we now get in a situation where we have to talk about is that behavior hostile or not? Is that escalatory or not? Space Command is charged with those authorities, so they work through the legal apparatus in terms of what the definition of a hostile act is and when something behaves in a way that we consider to be of national security interest.

We present all the capability to be able to do all that, and we have to be as cognizant on the service side as the combatant commanders are, so that our intel analysts are informing the forces and the training resources to be able to anticipate the behavior. We’re not simply recognizing it when it happens, but studying nations in the way they behave in all the other domains, in the way that they set policy, in the way that they challenge norms in other international arenas like the UN and various treaties, and so on. The biggest predictor, for us, of hazardous behaviors is when nations don’t coordinate with the international community on activities that are going to occur—launches, maneuvers, and fielding of large constellations, megaconstellations.

A stack of Starlink satellites in space right before deployment

Starlink satellites. Credit: Starlink

There are nearly 8,000 Starlink satellites in orbit today. SpaceX adds dozens of satellites to the constellation each week. Credit: SpaceX

As you know, we work very closely with Starlink, and they’re very, very responsible. They coordinate and flight plan. They use the kind of things that other constellations are starting to use … changes in those elsets (element sets), for lack of a better term, state vectors, we’re on top of that. We’re pre-coordinating that. We’re doing that weeks or months in advance. We’re doing that in real-time in cooperation with these organizations to make sure that space remains safe, secure, accessible, profitable even, for industry. When you have nations, where they’re launching over their population, where they’re creating uncertainty for the rest of the world, there’s nothing else we can do with it other than treat that as potentially hostile behavior. So, it does take a lot more of our resources, a lot more of our interest, and it puts [us] in a situation where we’re posturing the whole joint force to have to deal with that kind of uncertainty, as opposed to cooperative launches with international partners, with allies, with commercial, civil, and academia, where we’re doing that as friends, and we’re doing that in cooperation. If something goes wrong, we’re handling that as friends, and we’re not having to involve the rest of the security apparatus to get after that problem.

Ars: You mentioned that SpaceX shares Starlink orbit information with your team. Is it the same story with Amazon for the Kuiper constellation?

Agrawal: Yeah, it is. The good thing is that all the US and allied commercial entities, so far, have been super cooperative with Mission Delta 2 in particular, to be able to plan out, to talk about challenges, to even change the way they do business, learning more about what we are asking of them in order to be safe. The Office of Space Commerce, obviously, is now in that conversation as well. They’re learning that trade and ideally taking on more of that responsibility. Certainly, the evolution of technology has helped quite a bit, where you have launches that are self-monitored, that are able to maintain their own safety, as opposed to requiring an entire apparatus of what was the US Air Force often having to expend a tremendous amount of resources to provide for the safety of any launch. Now, technology has gotten to a point where a lot of that is self-monitored, self-reported, and you’ll see commercial entities blow up their own rockets no matter what’s onboard if they see that it’s going to cause harm to a population, and so on. So, yeah, we’re getting a lot of cooperation from other nations, allies, partners, close friends that are also sharing and cooperating in the interest of making sure that space remains sustainable and secure.

“We’ve made ourselves responsible”

Ars: One of the great ironies is that after you figure out the positions and tracks of Chinese or Russian satellites or constellations, you’re giving that data right back to them in the form of conjunction and collision notices, right?

Agrawal: We’ve made ourselves responsible. I don’t know that there’s any organization holding us accountable to that. We believe it’s in our interests, in the US’s interests, to provide for a safe, accessible, secure space domain. So, whatever we can do to help other nations also be safe, we’re doing it certainly for their sake, but we’re doing it as much for our sake, too. We want the space domain to be safe and predictable. We do have an apparatus set up in partnership with the State Department, and with a tremendous amount of oversight from the State Department, and through US Space Command to provide for spaceflight safety notifications to China and Russia. We send notes directly to offices within those nations. Most of the time they don’t respond. Russia, I don’t recall, hasn’t responded at all in the past couple of years. China has responded a couple of times to those notifications. And we hope that, through small measures like that, we can demonstrate our commitment to getting to a predictable and safe space environment.

A model of a Chinese satellite refueling spacecraft on display during the 13th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition on October 1, 2021, in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province of China. Credit: Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Ars:  What does China say in response to these notices?

Agrawal: Most of the time it’s copy or acknowledged. I can only recall two instances where they’ve responded. But we did see some hope earlier this year and last year, where they wanted to open up technical exchanges with us and some of their [experts] to talk about spaceflight safety, and what measures they could take to open up those kinds of conversations, and what they could do to get a more secure, safer pace of operations. That, at some point, got delayed because of the holiday that they were going through, and then those conversations just halted, or at least progress on getting those conversations going halted. But we hope that there’ll be an opportunity again in the future where they will open up those doors again and have those kinds of conversations because, again, transparency will get us to a place where we can be predictable, and we can all benefit from orbital regimes, as opposed to using them exploitively. LEO is just one of those places where you’re not going to hide activity there, so you just are creating risk, uncertainty, and potential escalation by launching into LEO and not communicating throughout that whole process.

Ars:  Do you have any numbers on how many of these conjunction notices go to China and Russia? I’m just trying to get an idea of what proportion go to potential adversaries.

Agrawal: A lot. I don’t know the degree of how many thousands go to them, but on a regular basis, I’m dealing with debris notifications from Russian and Chinese ASAT (anti-satellite) testing. That has put the ISS at risk a number of times. We’ve had maneuvers occur in recent history as a result of Chinese rocket body debris. Debris can’t maneuver, and unfortunately, we’ve gotten into situations with particularly those two nations that talk about wanting to have safer operations, but continue to conduct debris-causing tests. We’re going to be dealing with that for generations, and we are going to have to design capability to maneuver around those debris clouds as just a function of operating in space. So, we’ve got to get to a point where we’re not doing that kind of testing in orbit.

Ars: Would it be accurate to say you send these notices to China and Russia daily?

Agrawal: Yeah, absolutely. That’s accurate. These debris clouds are in LEO, so as you can imagine, as those debris clouds go around the Earth every 90 minutes, we’re dealing with conjunctions. There are some parts of orbits that are just unusable as a result of that unsafe ASAT test.

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Ars spoke with the military’s chief orbital traffic cop—here’s what we learned Read More »

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What exactly is Golden Dome? This Space Force general owes Trump an answer.

golden dome, military space, missile defense, Science, Space, space policy, US Space Force / /

“Basically, I’ve been given 60 days to come up with the objective architecture.”

Gen. Michael Guetlein, overseeing the development of the Golden Dome missile defense system, looks on as President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House on May 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. Credit: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

The newly installed head of the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense shield, a monumental undertaking projected to cost $175 billion over the next three years, knows the clock is ticking to show President Donald Trump some results before the end of his term in the White House.

“We are going to try to craft a schedule to have incremental demonstrations every six months because we are on a short timeline,” said Gen. Michael Guetlein, who was confirmed by the Senate last week to become the military’s Golden Dome czar.

Speaking on Tuesday, his second day on the job leading the Golden Dome initiative, Guetlein said his team will “move out with a sense of urgency and move out with incremental wins” as the military races to meet Trump’s timeline.

Guetlein discussed his new job with retired Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, the first chief of the Space Force, at an event in Washington, DC, hosted by the Space Foundation.

Analysts and retired military officials doubt the Pentagon can achieve all of Trump’s Golden Dome promises by the end of 2028. It’s not yet clear what the Pentagon can finish in three years, but Guetlein said Thursday his team will deliver “a capability” on that schedule. “We’ve got to exploit anything and everything we’ve possibly got,” he said, echoing a tenet of Space Force policy to “exploit what we have, buy what we can, and build what we must.”

This means the Space Force will lean heavily on commercial companies, research labs, academia, and, in the case of Canada, international partners to build the Golden Dome.

“Golden Dome for America requires a whole-of-nation response to deter and, if necessary, to defeat attacks against the United States,” the Defense Department said in a statement Tuesday. “We have the technological foundation, national talent, and decisive leadership to advance our nation’s defenses. We are proud to stand behind Gen. Mike Guetlein as he takes the helm of this national imperative.”

President Trump signed an executive order in January calling for the development of a layered missile defense shield to protect the US homeland. He initially called the project the Iron Dome for America, named for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. But Israel’s Iron Dome, which has proven effective against missile attacks from Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, only has to defend an area the size of New Jersey. The Pentagon’s system, now named Golden Dome, will ostensibly cover the entire United States.

Lay of the land

Advocates for the Golden Dome point to recent events to justify the program. These include Russia’s first use of an intermediate-range ballistic missile against Ukraine last year, and Ukraine’s successful drone attack on a Russian airbase last month. Waves of Iranian missile and drone attacks on Israel have tested the mettle of that country’s Iron Dome.

In the January 27 executive order, the White House said the military’s plan must defend against many types of aerial threats, including ballistic, hypersonic, and advanced cruise missiles, plus “other next-generation aerial attacks,” a category that appears to include drones and shorter-range unguided missiles.

This will require a network of sensors on the ground and in space, including heat-seeking sensors and radars to track incoming aerial threats, and interceptors based on the ground, at sea, and in space capable of destroying missiles at any point in flight—boost phase, midcourse, and during final approach to a target.

This illustration shows how the Missile Defense Agency’s HBTSS satellites can track hypersonic missiles as they glide and maneuver through the atmosphere, evading detection by conventional missile-tracking spacecraft, such as the Space Force’s DSP and SBIRS satellites. Credit: Northrop Grumman

The good news for backers of the Golden Dome program is that the Pentagon and commercial industry were developing most of these elements before Trump’s executive order. The Space Development Agency (SDA) launched a batch of prototype missile-tracking and data-relay satellites in 2023, pathfinders for a constellation of hundreds of spacecraft in low-Earth orbit that will begin launching later this year.

In some cases, the military has already fielded Golden Dome components in combat. The Army has operated the Patriot missile system since the 1980s and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors for more than 15 years to defend against lower-level threats like small rockets, aircraft, and drones. The Navy’s Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System uses sea-launched interceptors to target longer-range missiles in space.

The Missile Defense Agency manages the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) program, which consists of operational silo-launched missile interceptors based in Alaska and California that could be used to defend against a limited missile strike from a rogue state like North Korea.

GMD has cost approximately $70 billion to date and has worked a little more than half the time the military has tested it against a missile target. On the plus side, GMD has achieved four straight successful intercepts in tests since 2014. But despite its immense cost, GMD is antiquated and would not be effective against a large volley of missiles coming from another nuclear superpower, like China.

Golden Dome will bring all of these systems together, and add more to the mix in order to “double down on the protection of the homeland and protect our American citizens,” Guetlein said.

What’s next?

Guetlein identified several short-term priorities for what is officially called the “Office of Golden Dome for America.” One of them is to begin bringing together the military’s existing missile detection and tracking assets, ground- and sea-based interceptors, and the communication pathways, or “comm pipes,” to connect all the pieces in a sophisticated command-and-control network.

“That includes the sensors, that includes the shooters, as well as the comm pipes,” Guetlein said. “How do we bring all that to bear simultaneously in protection of the homeland, while utilizing the capabilities that are already there and not trying to re-create them?”

The Pentagon said in a statement Tuesday that Guetlein’s office will devise an “objective architecture” for the missile defense shield and “socialize” it by late September. This presumably means sharing some information about the architecture with Congress and the public. So far, Space Force officials have hesitated to provide any specifics, at least in public statements and congressional hearings. They often prefer to describe Golden Dome as a “system of systems” instead of something entirely new.

“Basically, I’ve been given 60 days to come up with the objective architecture. I owe that back to the Deputy Secretary of Defense in 60 days,” Guetlein said. “So, in 60 days, I’ll be able to talk in depth about, ‘Hey, this is our vision for what we want to get after for Golden Dome.'”

Although the major pieces of a layered anti-missile system like Golden Dome may appear obvious to anyone with a casual familiarity with missile defense and space—we just named a few of these elements above—the Trump administration has not published any document describing what the Pentagon might actually achieve in the next three years.

Despite the lack of detail, Congress voted to approve $25 billion as a down payment for Golden Dome in the Trump-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill” signed into law July 4. The bulk of the Golden Dome-related budget is earmarked for procurement of more Patriot and THAAD missile batteries, an increase in funding for SDA’s missile-tracking satellites, ballistic missile defense command-and-control networks, and development of “long-range kill chains” for combat targeting.

Two of the US Army’s THAAD missile batteries are seen deployed in Israel in this 2019 photo. Credit: US Army/Staff Sgt. Cory Payne

So, most of the funding allocated to Golden Dome over the next year will go toward bolstering programs already in the Pentagon’s portfolio. But the military will tie them all together with an integrated command-and-control system that can sense an adversarial missile launch, plot its trajectory, and then generate a targeting solution and send it to an interceptor on the ground or in space to eliminate the threat.

Eventually, military leaders want satellites to handle all of these tasks autonomously in space and do it fast enough for US or allied forces to respond to an imminent threat.

“We know how to get data,” a retired senior military official recently told Ars. “The question is, how do you fuse that data in real time with the characteristics of a fire control system, which means real-time feedback of all this data, filtering that data, filtering out sensors that aren’t helping as much as other ones, and then using that to actually command and control against a large-scale attack of diverse threats.

“I feel like those are still two different things,” said the official, who spoke on background with Ars. “It’s one thing to have all the data and be able to process it. It’s another thing to be able to put it into an active, real-time fire control system.”

Trump introduced Guetlein, the Space Force’s former vice chief of space operations, as his nominee for director of the Golden Dome program in an Oval Office event on May 20. At the time, Trump announced the government had “officially selected an architecture” for Golden Dome. That appears to still be the work in front of Guetlein and his team, which is set to grow with new hiring but will remain “small and flat,” the general said Tuesday.

Guetlein has a compelling résumé to lead Golden Dome. Before becoming the second-ranking officer in the Space Force, he served as head of Space Systems Command, which is responsible for most of the service’s acquisition and procurement activities. His prior assignments included stints as deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, program executive at the Missile Defense Agency, program manager for the military’s missile warning satellites, and corporate fellow at SpaceX.

Weapons in space

Guetlein identified command and control and the development of space-based interceptors as two of the most pressing technical challenges for Golden Dome. He believes the command-and-control problem can be “overcome in pretty short order.”

“I think the real technical challenge will be building the space-based interceptor,” Guetlein said. “That technology exists. I believe we have proven every element of the physics that we can make it work. What we have not proven is, first, can I do it economically, and then second, can I do it at scale? Can I build enough satellites to get after the threat? Can I expand the industrial base fast enough to build those satellites? Do I have enough raw materials, etc.?”

This is the challenge that ultimately killed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars” program proposed by former President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s as a way to counter the threat of a nuclear missile attack from the Soviet Union. The first concept for SDI called for 10,000 interceptors to be launched into Earth orbit. This was pared down to 4,600, then finally to fewer than 1,000 before the cancellation of the space-based element in 1993.

Thirty years ago, the United States lacked the technology and industrial capacity to build and launch so many satellites. It’s a different story today. SpaceX has launched more than 9,000 Starlink communications satellites in six years, and Amazon recently kicked off the deployment of more than 3,200 Internet satellites of its own.

Space-based interceptors are a key tenet of Trump’s executive order on Golden Dome. Specifically, the order calls for space-based interceptors capable of striking a ballistic missile during its boost phase shortly after launch. These interceptors would essentially be small satellites positioned in low-Earth orbit, likely a few hundred miles above the planet, circling the world every 90 minutes ready for commands to prevent nuclear Armageddon.

A Standard Missile 3 Block IIA launches from the Aegis Ashore Missile Defense Test Complex at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii, on December 10, 2018, during a test to intercept an intermediate-range ballistic missile target in space. Credit: Mark Wright/DOD

Reuters reported Tuesday that the Defense Department, which reportedly favored SpaceX to play a central role in Golden Dome, is now looking to other companies, including Amazon Kuiper and other big defense contractors. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has fallen out of favor with the Trump administration, but the company’s production line continues to churn out spacecraft for the National Reconnaissance Office’s global constellation of spy satellites. And it’s clear the cheapest and most reliable way to launch Golden Dome interceptors into orbit will be using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

How many space-based interceptors?

“I would envision that there would be certainly more than 1,000 of those in orbit in different orbital planes,” said retired Air Force Gen. Henry “Trey” Obering III, a senior executive advisor at Booz Allen Hamilton and former commander of the Missile Defense Agency. “You could optimize those orbital planes against the Russian threat or Chinese threat, or both, or all the above, between Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia.”

In an interview with Ars, Obering suggested the interceptors could be modest in size and mass, somewhat smaller than SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, and could launch 100 or 200 at a time on a rocket like SpaceX’s Falcon 9. None of this capability existed in the Reagan era.

Taking all of that into account, it’s understandable why Guetlein and others believe Golden Dome is doable.

But major questions remain unanswered about its ultimate cost and the realism of Trump’s three-year schedule. Some former defense officials have questioned the technical viability of using space-based interceptors to target a missile during its boost phase, within the first few minutes of launch.

It’s true that there are also real emerging threats, such as hypersonic missiles and drones, that the US military is currently ill-equipped to defend against.

“The strategic threats are diversifying, and then the actors are diversifying,” the former military space official told Ars. “It’s no longer just Russia. It’s China now, and to a lesser extent, North Korea and potentially Iran. We’ll see where that goes. So, when you put that all together, our ability to deter and convince a potential adversary, or at least make them really uncertain about how successful they could be with a strike, is degraded compared to what it used to be.”

The official said the Trump administration teed up the Golden Dome executive order without adequately explaining the reasons for it. That’s a political failing that could come back to bite the program. The lack of clarity didn’t stop Congress from approving this year’s $25 billion down payment, but there are more key decision points ahead.

“I’m a little disappointed no one’s really defined the problem very well,” the retired military official said. “It definitely started out as a solution without a problem statement, like, ‘I need an Iron Dome, just like Israel.’ But I feel like the entire effort would benefit from a better problem statement.”

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

What exactly is Golden Dome? This Space Force general owes Trump an answer. Read More »

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It’s hunting season in orbit as Russia’s killer satellites mystify skywatchers

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“Once more, we play our dangerous game—a game of chess—against our old adversary.”

In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state media agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin gives a speech during the Victory Day military parade at Red Square in central Moscow on May 9, 2025. Credit: Yacheslav Prokofyev/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Russia is a waning space power, but President Vladimir Putin has made sure he still has a saber to rattle in orbit.

This has become more evident in recent weeks, when we saw a pair of rocket launches carrying top-secret military payloads, the release of a mysterious object from a Russian mothership in orbit, and a sequence of complex formation-flying maneuvers with a trio of satellites nearly 400 miles up.

In isolation, each of these things would catch the attention of Western analysts. Taken together, the frenzy of maneuvers represents one of the most significant surges in Russian military space activity since the end of the Cold War. What’s more, all of this is happening as Russia lags further behind the United States and China in everything from rockets to satellite manufacturing. Russian efforts to develop a reusable rocket, field a new human-rated spacecraft to replace the venerable Soyuz, and launch a megaconstellation akin to SpaceX’s Starlink are going nowhere fast.

Russia has completed just eight launches to orbit so far this year, compared to 101 orbital attempts by US launch providers and 36 from China. This puts Russia on pace for the fewest number of orbital launch attempts since 1961, the year Soviet citizen Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space.

For the better part of three decades, Russia’s space program could rely on money from Western governments and commercial companies to build rockets, launch satellites, and ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The money tap dried up after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia also lost access to Ukrainian-made components to go into their launch vehicles and satellites.

Chasing a Keyhole

Amid this retrenchment, Russia is targeting what’s left of its capacity for innovation in space toward pestering the US military. US intelligence officials last year said they believed Russia was pursuing a project to place a nuclear weapon in space. The detonation of a nuclear bomb in orbit could muck up the space environment for years, indiscriminately disabling countless satellites, whether they’re military or civilian.

Russia denied that it planned to launch a satellite with a nuclear weapon, but the country’s representative in the United Nations vetoed a Security Council resolution last year that would have reaffirmed a nearly 50-year-old ban on placing weapons of mass destruction into orbit.

While Russia hasn’t actually put a nuclear bomb into orbit yet, it’s making progress in fielding other kinds of anti-satellite systems. Russia destroyed one of its own satellites with a ground-launched missile in 2021, and high above us today, Russian spacecraft are stalking American spy satellites and keeping US military officials on their toes with a rapid march toward weaponizing space.

The world’s two other space powers, the United States and China, are developing their own “counter-space” weapons. But the US and Chinese militaries have largely focused on using their growing fleets of satellites as force multipliers in the terrestrial domain, enabling precision strikes, high-speed communications, and targeting for air, land, and naval forces. That is starting to change, with US Space Force commanders now openly discussing their own ambitions for offensive and defensive counter-space weapons.

Three of Russia’s eight orbital launches this year have carried payloads that could be categorized as potential anti-satellite weapons, or at least prototypes testing novel technologies that could lead to one. (For context, three of Russia’s other launches this year have gone to the International Space Station, and two launched conventional military communications or navigation satellites.)

One of these mystery payloads launched on May 23, when a Soyuz rocket boosted a satellite into a nearly 300-mile-high orbit perfectly aligned with the path of a US spy satellite owned by the National Reconnaissance Office. The new Russian satellite, designated Kosmos 2588, launched into the same orbital plane as an American satellite known to the public as USA 338, which is widely believed to be a bus-sized KH-11, or Keyhole-class, optical surveillance satellite.

A conceptual drawing of a KH-11 spy satellite, with internal views, based on likely design similarities to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: Giuseppe De Chiara/CC BY-SA 3.0

The governments of Russia and the United States use the Kosmos and USA monikers as cover names for their military satellites.

While their exact design and capabilities are classified, Keyhole satellites are believed to provide the sharpest images of any spy satellite in orbit. They monitor airfields, naval ports, missile plants, and other strategic sites across the globe. In the zeitgeist of geopolitics, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are the likeliest targets for the NRO’s Keyhole satellites. To put it succinctly, Keyhole satellites are some of the US government’s most prized assets in space.

Therefore, it’s not surprising to assume a potential military adversary might want to learn more about them or be in a position to disable or destroy them in the event of war.

Orbital ballet

A quick refresher on orbital mechanics is necessary here. Satellites orbit the Earth in flat planes fixed in inertial space. It’s not a perfect interpretation, but it’s easiest to understand this concept by imagining the background of stars in the sky as a reference map. In the short term, the position of a satellite’s orbit will remain unchanged on this reference map without any perturbation. For something in low-Earth orbit, Earth’s rotation presents a different part of the world to the satellite each time it loops around the planet.

It takes a lot of fuel to make changes to a satellite’s orbital plane, so if you want to send a satellite to rendezvous with another spacecraft already in orbit, it’s best to wait until our planet’s rotation brings the launch site directly under the orbital plane of the target. This happens twice per day for a satellite in low-Earth orbit.

That’s exactly what Russia is doing with a military program named Nivelir. In English, Nivelir translates to “dumpy level”—an optical instrument used by builders and surveyors.

The launch of Kosmos 2588 in May was precisely timed for the moment Earth’s rotation brought the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia underneath the orbital plane of the NRO’s USA 338 Keyhole satellite. Launches to the ISS follow the same roadmap, with crew and cargo vehicles lifting off at exactly the right time—to the second—to intersect with the space station’s orbital plane.

Since 2019, Russia has launched four satellites into bespoke orbits to shadow NRO spy satellites. None of these Russian Nivelir spacecraft have gotten close to their NRO counterparts. The satellites have routinely passed dozens of miles from one another, but the similarities in their orbits would allow Russia’s spacecraft to get a lot closer—and theoretically make physical contact with the American satellite. The Nivelir satellites have even maneuvered to keep up with their NRO targets when US ground controllers have made small adjustments to their orbits.

“This ensures that the orbital planes do not drift apart,” wrote Marco Langbroek, a Dutch archaeologist and university lecturer on space situational awareness. Langbroek runs a website cataloguing military space activity.

This is no accident

There’s reason to believe that the Russian satellites shadowing the NRO in orbit might be more than inspectors or stalkers. Just a couple of weeks ago, another Nivelir satellite named Kosmos 2558 released an unknown object into an orbit that closely mirrors that of an NRO spy satellite named USA 326.

We’ve seen this before. An older Nivelir satellite, Kosmos 2542, released a sub-satellite shortly after launching in 2019 into the same orbital plane as the NRO’s USA 245 satellite, likely a KH-11 platform similar to the USA 338 satellite now being shadowed by Kosmos 2588.

After making multiple passes near the USA 245 spacecraft, Kosmos 2542’s sub-satellite backed off and fired a mysterious projectile in 2020 at a speed fast enough to damage or destroy any target in its sights. US military officials interpreted this as a test of an anti-satellite weapon.

Now, another Russian satellite is behaving in the same way, with a mothership opening up to release a smaller object that could in turn reveal its own surprise inside like a Matryoshka nesting doll. This time, however, the doll is unnesting nearly three years after launch. With Kosmos 2542, this all unfolded within months of arriving in space.

The NRO’s USA 326 satellite launched in February 2022 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. It is believed to be an advanced electro-optical reconnaissance satellite, although the circumstances of its launch suggest a design different from the NRO’s classic Keyhole spy satellites. Credit: SpaceX

In just the last several days, the smaller craft deployed by Kosmos 2558—designated “Object C”—lowered its altitude to reach an orbit in resonance with USA 326, bringing it within 60 miles (100 kilometers) of the NRO satellite every few days.

While US officials are worried about Russian anti-satellite weapons, or ASATs, the behavior of Russia’s Nivelir satellites is puzzling. It’s clear that Russia is deliberately launching these satellites to get close to American spy craft in orbit, a retired senior US military space official told Ars on background.

“If you’re going to launch a LEO [low-Earth orbit] satellite into the exact same plane as another satellite, you’re doing that on purpose,” said the official, who served in numerous leadership positions in the military’s space programs. “Inclination is one thing. We put a bunch of things into Sun-synchronous orbits, but you have a nearly boundless number of planes you can put those into—360 degrees—and then you can go down to probably the quarter-degree and still be differentiated as being a different plane. When you plane-match underneath that, you’re doing that on purpose.”

But why?

What’s not as obvious is why Russia is doing this. Lobbing an anti-satellite, or counter-space, weapon into the same orbital plane as its potential target ties Russia’s hands. Also, a preemptive strike on an American satellite worth $1 billion or more could be seen as an act of war.

“I find it strange that the Russians are doing that, that they’ve invested their rubles in a co-planar LEO counter-space kind of satellite,” the retired military official said. “And why do I say that? Because when you launch into that plane, you’re basically committed to that plane, which means you only have one potential target ever.”

A ground-based anti-satellite missile, like the one Russia tested against one of its own satellites in 2021, could strike any target in low-Earth orbit.

“So why invest in something that is so locked into a target once you put it up there, when you have the flexibility of a ground launch case that’s probably even cheaper?” this official told Ars. “I’d be advocating for more ground-launched ASATs if I really wanted the flexibility to go after new payloads, because this thing can never go after anything new.”

“The only way to look at it is that they’re sending us messages. You say, ‘Hey, I’m going to just annoy the hell out of you. I’m going to put something right on your tail,'” the official said. “And maybe there’s merit to that, and they like that. It doesn’t make sense from a cost-benefit or an operational flexibility perspective, if you think about it, to lock in on a single target.”

Nevertheless, Russia’s Nivelir satellites have shown they could fire a projectile at another spacecraft in orbit, so US officials don’t dismiss the threat. Slingshot Aerospace, a commercial satellite tracking and analytics firm, went straight to the point in its assessment: “Kosmos 2588 is thought to be a Nivelir military inspection satellite with a suspected kinetic weapon onboard.”

Langbroek agrees, writing that he is concerned that Russia might be positioning “dormant” anti-satellite weapons within striking distance of NRO spy platforms.

“To me, the long, ongoing shadowing of what are some of the most prized US military space assets, their KH-11 Advanced Enhanced Crystal high-resolution optical IMINT (imaging intelligence) satellites, is odd for ‘just’ an inspection mission,” Langbroek wrote.

American pilot Francis Gary Powers, second from right, in a Moscow courtroom during his trial on charges of espionage after his U-2 spy plane was shot down while working for the CIA. Credit: Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images

The US military’s ability to spy over vast swaths of Russian territory has been a thorn in Russia’s side since the height of the Cold War.

“They thought they had the edge and shot down Gary Powers,” the retired official said, referring to the Soviet Union’s shoot-down of an American U-2 spy plane in 1960. “They said, ‘We’re going to keep those Americans from spying on us.’ And then they turn around, and we’ve got spy satellites. They’ve always hated them since the 1960s, so I think there’s still this cultural thing out there: ‘That’s our nemesis. We hate those satellites. We’re just going to fight them.'”

Valley of the dolls

Meanwhile, the US Space Force and outside analysts are tracking a separate trio of Russian satellites engaged in a complex orbital dance with one another. These satellites, numbered Kosmos 2581, 2582, and 2583, launched together on a single rocket in February.

While these three spacecraft aren’t shadowing any US spy satellites, things got interesting when one of the satellites released an unidentified object in March in a similar way to how two of Russia’s Nivelir spacecraft have deployed their own sub-satellites.

Kosmos 2581 and 2582 came as close as 50 meters from one another while flying in tandem, according to an analysis by Bart Hendrickx published in the online journal The Space Review earlier this year. The other member of the trio, Kosmos 2583, released its sub-satellite and maneuvered around it for about a month, then raised its orbit to match that of Kosmos 2581.

Finally, in the last week of June, Kosmos 2582 joined them, and all three satellites began flying close to one another, according to Langbroek, who called the frenzy of activity one of the most complex rendezvous and proximity operations exercises Russia has conducted in decades.

Higher still, two more Russian satellites are up to something interesting after launching on June 19 on Russia’s most powerful rocket. After more than 30 years in development, this was the first flight of Russia’s Angara A5 rocket, with a real functioning military satellite onboard, following four prior test launches with dummy payloads.

The payload Russia’s military chose to launch on the Angara A5 is unusual. The rocket deployed its primary passenger, Kosmos 2589, into a peculiar orbit hugging the equator and ranging between approximately 20,000 (12,500 miles) and 51,000 kilometers (31,700 miles) in altitude.

In this orbit, Kosmos 2589 completes a lap around the Earth about once every 24 hours, giving the satellite a synchronicity that allows it to remain nearly fixed in the sky over the same geographic location. These kinds of geosynchronous, or GEO, orbits are usually circular, with a satellite maintaining the same altitude over the equator.

The orbits of Kosmos 2589 and its companion satellite, illustrated in green and purple, bring the two Russian spacecraft through the geostationary satellite belt twice per day. Credit: COMSPOC

But Kosmos 2589 is changing altitude throughout its day-long orbit. Twice per day, on the way up and back down, Kosmos 2589 briefly passes near a large number of US government and commercial satellites in more conventional geosynchronous orbits but then quickly departs the vicinity. At a minimum, this could give Russian officials the ability to capture close-up views of American spy satellites.

Then, a few days after Kosmos 2589 reached orbit last month, commercial tracking sensors detected a second object nearby. Sound familiar? This new object soon started raising its altitude, and Kosmos 2589 followed suit.

Aiming higher

Could this be the start of an effort to extend the reach of Russian inspectors or anti-satellite weapons into higher orbits after years of mysterious activity at lower altitudes?

Jim Shell, a former NRO project manager and scientist at Air Force Space Command, suggested the two satellites seem positioned to cooperate with one another. “Many interesting scenarios here such as ‘spotter shooter’ among others. Certainly something to keep eyes on!” Shell posted Saturday on X.

COMSPOC, a commercial space situational awareness company, said the unusual orbit of Kosmos 2589 and its companion put the Russian satellites in a position to, at a minimum, spy on Western satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

“This unique orbit, which crosses two key satellite regions daily, may aid in monitoring objects in both GEO and graveyard orbits,” COMSPOC wrote on X. “Its slight 1° inclination could also reduce collision risks. While the satellite’s mission remains unclear, its orbit suggests interesting potential roles.”

Historically, Russia’s military has placed less emphasis on operating in geosynchronous orbit than in low-Earth orbit or other unique perches in space. Due to their positions near the equator, geosynchronous orbits are harder to reach from Russian spaceports because of the country’s high latitude. But Russia’s potential adversaries, like the United States and Europe, rely heavily on geosynchronous satellites.

Other Russian satellites have flown near Western communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit, likely in an attempt to eavesdrop on radio transmissions.

“So it is interesting that they may be doing a GEO inspector,” the retired US military space official told Ars. “I would be curious if that’s what it is. We’ve got to watch. We’ve got to wait and see.”

If you’re a fan of spy techno-thrillers, this all might remind you of the plot from The Hunt for Red October, where a new state-of-the-art Russian submarine leaves its frigid port in Murmansk with orders to test a fictional silent propulsion system that could shake up the balance of power between the Soviet and American navies.

Just replace the unforgiving waters of the North Atlantic Ocean with an environment even more inhospitable: the vacuum of space.

A few minutes into the film, the submarine’s commander, Marko Ramius, played by Sean Connery, announces his orders to the crew. “Once more, we play our dangerous game, a game of chess, against our old adversary—the American Navy.”

Today, nearly 40 years removed from the Cold War, the old adversaries are now scheming against one another in space.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

It’s hunting season in orbit as Russia’s killer satellites mystify skywatchers Read More »

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China jumps ahead in the race to achieve a new kind of reuse in space

china, geosynchronous orbit, military space, orbital refueling, satellite servicing, shijian-21, shijian-25, Space, us space command, US Space Force / /

The SJ-21 and SJ-25 satellites “merged” on July 2 and have remained together since then.

This image from a telescope operated by s2a systems, a Swiss space domain awareness company, shows China’s SJ-21 and SJ-25 satellites flying near one another on June 26. Credit: s2a systems

Two Chinese satellites have rendezvoused with one another more than 20,000 miles above the Earth in what analysts believe is the first high-altitude attempt at orbital refueling.

China’s Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 satellites, known as SJ-21 and SJ-25 for short, likely docked together in geosynchronous orbit sometime last week. This is the conclusion of multiple civilian satellite trackers using open source imagery showing the two satellites coming together, then becoming indistinguishable as a single object.

Chinese officials have released no recent public information on what the two satellites are up to, but they’ve said a bit about their missions in prior statements.

SJ-25, which launched in January, is designed “for the verification of satellite fuel replenishment and life extension service technologies,” according to the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, the Chinese state-owned contractor that developed the satellite. SJ-21 launched in 2021 and docked with a defunct Chinese Beidou navigation satellite in geosynchronous orbit, then towed it to a higher altitude for disposal before returning to the geosynchronous belt. Chinese officials described this demonstration as a test of “space debris mitigation” techniques.

More than meets the eye

These kinds of technologies are dual-use, meaning they have civilian and military applications. For example, a docking in geosynchronous orbit could foretell an emerging capability for China to approach, capture, and disable another country’s satellite. At the same time, the US Space Force is interested in orbital refueling as it seeks out ways to extend the lives of military satellites, which are often limited by finite fuel supplies.

The Space Force sometimes calls this concept dynamic space operations. While some military leaders remain skeptical about the payoff of in-space refueling, the Space Force has an agreement with Astroscale to perform the first refueling of a US military asset in orbit as soon as next year.

China appears to be poised to beat the US Space Force to the punch. The apparent docking of the two satellites last week suggests SJ-21 is the target for SJ-25’s refueling demonstration, and US officials are watching. Two of the Space Force’s inspector satellites, known by the acronym GSSAP, positioned themselves near SJ-21 and SJ-25 to get a closer look.

Retired Space Force Lt. Gen. John Shaw is a vocal proponent of dynamic space operations. Because of this, he’s interested in what happens with SJ-21 and SJ-25. Shaw was deputy commander of US Space Command before his retirement in 2023. In this role, Shaw had some oversight over GSSAP satellites as they roamed geosynchronous orbit.

“The theory behind dynamic space operations stemmed from a kind of operational frustration with our inability to conduct the full range of activities with GSSAP that we wanted to at Space Command, as the warfighter—largely due to the combination of fixed fuel availability and expected satellite lifetime,” Shaw told Ars.

As other countries, mainly China, step up their clandestine activities in orbit, military officials are asking more of the GSSAP satellites.

“It was operationally driven then, a couple years ago, but it’s now manifesting itself in much wider ways than even it did back then, particularly in the face of activities by potential adversaries,” Shaw said. “That’s why I’m more confident and even more zealous about it.”

Geosynchronous orbit is a popular location for military and commercial satellites. At an altitude of some 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers), a satellite’s orbital velocity perfectly matches the speed of Earth’s rotation, meaning a spacecraft has a fixed view of the same region of the planet 24 hours per day. This is useful for satellites providing military forces with secure strategic communications and early warning of missile attacks.

Now, geosynchronous orbit is becoming a proving ground for new kinds of spacecraft to inspect or potentially attack other satellites. Ground-based anti-satellite missiles aren’t as useful in striking targets in high-altitude orbits, and there’s a consensus that, if you were to attack an enemy satellite, it would make more sense to use a weapons platform already in space that could move in and connect with the target without blowing it up and creating a cloud of dangerous space junk.

Keeping watch

The US military’s GSSAP satellites began launching in 2014. They carry enough propellant to maneuver around geosynchronous orbit and approach objects for closer inspection, but there’s a limit to what they can do. Six GSSAP satellites have been launched to date, but the Space Force decommissioned one of them in 2023. Meanwhile, China’s satellite operators are watching the watchers.

“We’ve seen where GSSAP safely and responsibly approaches a Chinese vehicle, and it just quickly maneuvers away,” Shaw said. “We tend to fly our GSSAPs like dirigibles, using relatively slow, minimum energy transfer approaches. The Chinese know that we do that, so it is relatively easy for them to maneuver away today to avoid such an approach.

“If tomorrow they’re able to refuel at will and operate even more dynamically, then the marginal cost of those maneuvers for them becomes even lower, and the challenge for GSSAP becomes even greater,” Shaw said.

Danish Rear Admiral Damgaard Rousøe, Danish Defence Attaché, right, observes space domain awareness data with US Space Force Lt. Col. Mark Natale, left, Joint Commercial Operations cell director, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on September 26, 2024. Credit: US Space Force/Dalton Prejeant

China launched a satellite into geosynchronous orbit in 2016 with a robotic arm that could grab onto another object in space, then sent SJ-21 into orbit four years ago on its “space debris mitigation” mission.

Northrop Grumman launched two satellites in 2019 and 2020 that accomplished the first dockings in geosynchronous orbit. Northrop’s satellites, which it calls Mission Extension Vehicles, took control of two aging commercial communications satellites running low on fuel, maneuvering them to new locations and allowing them to continue operating for several more years. It’s easy to see that this kind of technology could be used for commercial or military purposes.

But these Mission Extension Vehicles don’t have the ability to transfer fluids from one satellite to another. That is the step China is taking with SJ-21 and SJ-25, presumably with hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants, which most satellites use because they combust on contact with one another.

US Space Command’s Joint Commercial Operations cell, which collects unclassified satellite monitoring data to bolster the military’s classified data sources, estimated the SJ-21 and SJ-25 satellites “merged” on July 2 and have remained together since then. The video below, released by s2a systems, shows SJ-25 approaching SJ-21 on June 30.

A time-lapse of yesterday’s SJ-25 / SJ-21 coverage, recorded from 08: 30 to 20: 53 UTC. pic.twitter.com/HUPWBTXZc9

— s2a systems (@s2a_systems) July 1, 2025

The unclassified data does not confirm that the two satellites actually docked, but that is likely what happened. The satellites came together, or merged, on June 13 and June 30 but separated again within a few hours. These may have been practice runs, aborted docking attempts, or sudden maneuvers to avoid the prying eyes of the US military’s GSSAP satellites loitering nearby.

Now, the SJ-21 and SJ-25 have been flying together for more than five days with no discernible changes detected from ground-based telescopes. Thousands of miles over the equator, the two satellites appear only as dots in the viewfinders of these telescopes positioned around the globe.

What we don’t know

COMSPOC is a Pennsylvania-based company that collects and processes data from commercial satellite tracking sensors. COMSPOC fuses optical telescope imagery with radar tracking and passive radio frequency (RF) data, which uses radio signals to measure exact distances to satellites in space, to get the best possible estimate of a spacecraft’s position.

“With most telescopes… at 1 kilometer or a half a kilometer, somewhere in there, you’re going to start to lose it when they get that close,” said Paul Graziani, COMSPOC’s founder and CEO, in an interview with Ars. “I think it’d be difficult for any telescope, even a really capable one, to get within 100 meters. That seems to be a stretch for telescopes.”

That’s why it’s helpful to add radar and RF data to the mix.

“When you add all of that together, you become much better than the 1-kilometer [precision] that a ‘scope might be,” said Joe Callaro, COMSPOC’s director of operations. “RF tells you if part of that blob is moving and the other part isn’t, and even when they all become one pixel, you can tell things about that.”

Even then, companies like COMSPOC have a degree of uncertainty in their conclusions unless Chinese or US officials make a more definitive statement.

“We are not working with the government,” Callaro told Ars before last week’s apparent docking. “We are not clearing this. The charge that I have for my team is we won’t make assertions as to what’s going on. We will only tell what our software gives us as a solution. We can say, ‘Here are the elements, here’s the visual, but what it means and what it’s doing, we will not assert.’

“We will not say they’re docked because unless they told me, I wouldn’t know that,” Callaro said. “So, we will say they’ve been together for this amount of time, that the mission could have happened, and then they separated, became two, and separated at whatever speed.”

SJ-21’s behavior for the last couple of years suggested it was running empty after undertaking large propulsive maneuvers to capture the Chinese Beidou satellite and move it to a different orbit.

Callaro served as a tactician in the Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center, then joined the Aerospace Corporation before taking the job as operations lead at COMSPOC. He doesn’t buy China’s suggestion that SJ-21 was purely an experiment in collecting space debris.

“That is not how I see that at all,” Callaro said. “The fact that we can calculate all the maneuvers it takes to get out and get back, and the fact that afterwards, it spent a couple of years basically not moving, probably because it was low on fuel, sets up the idea [that there’s more to SJ-21’s mission]. Now, SJ-25 goes out there, and it’s supposed to be a fuel tank, and it’s perfectly aligned with SJ-21 and now we see this happening, tells me that it’s much more a counter-space capability than it is a trash remove. But that’s what they say.”

Unless China makes a public statement on the refueling of SJ-21 by SJ-25, observers won’t know for sure if the servicing demo was successful until the satellites detach. Then, US officials and independent analysts will watch to see if SJ-21 makes any substantial maneuvers, which might indicate the satellite has a full tank of gas for whatever mission Chinese officials send it off to do next.

Listing image: Costfoto/Future Publishing via Getty Images

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

China jumps ahead in the race to achieve a new kind of reuse in space Read More »

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With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military’s top launch provider

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The military’s stable of certified rockets will include Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Vulcan, and New Glenn.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off on June 25, 2024, with a GOES weather satellite for NOAA. Credit: SpaceX

The US Space Force announced Friday it selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin for $13.7 billion in contracts to deliver the Pentagon’s most critical military to orbit into the early 2030s.

These missions will launch the government’s heaviest national security satellites, like the National Reconnaissance Office’s large bus-sized spy platforms, and deploy them into bespoke orbits. These types of launches often demand heavy-lift rockets with long-duration upper stages that can cruise through space for six or more hours.

The contracts awarded Friday are part of the next phase of the military’s space launch program once dominated by United Launch Alliance, the 50-50 joint venture between legacy defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

After racking up a series of successful launches with its Falcon 9 rocket more than a decade ago, SpaceX sued the Air Force for the right to compete with ULA for the military’s most lucrative launch contracts. The Air Force relented in 2015 and allowed SpaceX to bid. Since then, SpaceX has won more than 40 percent of missions the Pentagon has ordered through the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program, creating a relatively stable duopoly for the military’s launch needs.

The Space Force took over the responsibility for launch procurement from the Air Force after its creation in 2019. The next year, the Space Force signed another set of contracts with ULA and SpaceX for missions the military would order from 2020 through 2024. ULA’s new Vulcan rocket initially won 60 percent of these missions—known as NSSL Phase 2—but the Space Force reallocated a handful of launches to SpaceX after ULA encountered delays with Vulcan.

ULA’s Vulcan and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets will launch the remaining 42 Phase 2 missions over the next several years, then move on to Phase 3, which the Space Force announced Friday.

Spreading the wealth

This next round of Space Force launch contracts will flip the script, with SpaceX taking the lion’s share of the missions. The breakdown of the military’s new firm fixed-price launch agreements goes like this:

  • SpaceX will get 28 missions worth approximately $5.9 billion
  • ULA will get 19 missions worth approximately $5.4 billion
  • Blue Origin will get seven missions worth approximately

That equates to a 60-40 split between SpaceX and ULA for the bulk of the missions. Going into the competition, military officials set aside seven additional missions to launch with a third provider, allowing a new player to gain a foothold in the market. The Space Force reserves the right to reapportion missions between the three providers if one of them runs into trouble.

The Pentagon confirmed an unnamed fourth company also submitted a proposal, but wasn’t selected for Phase 3.

Rounded to the nearest million, the contract with SpaceX averages out to $212 million per launch. For ULA, it’s $282 million, and Blue Origin’s price is $341 million per launch. But take these numbers with caution. The contracts include a lot of bells and whistles, pricing them higher than what a commercial customer might pay.

According to the Pentagon, the contracts provide “launch services, mission unique services, mission acceleration, quick reaction/anomaly resolution, special studies, launch service support, fleet surveillance, and early integration studies/mission analysis.”

Essentially, the Space Force is paying a premium to all three launch providers for schedule priority, tailored solutions, and access to data from every flight of each company’s rocket, among other things.

New Glenn lifts off on its debut flight. Credit: Blue Origin

“Winning 60% percent of the missions may sound generous, but the reality is that all SpaceX competitors combined cannot currently deliver the other 40%!,” Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, posted on X. “I hope they succeed, but they aren’t there yet.”

This is true if you look at each company’s flight rate. SpaceX has launched Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets 140 times over the last 365 days. These are the flight-proven rockets SpaceX will use for its share of Space Force missions.

ULA has logged four missions in the same period, but just one with the Vulcan rocket it will use for future Space Force launches. And Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company, launched the heavy-lift New Glenn rocket on its first test flight in January.

“We are proud that we have launched 100 national security space missions and honored to continue serving the nation with our new Vulcan rocket,” said Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO, in a statement.

ULA used the Delta IV and Atlas V rockets for most of the missions it has launched for the Pentagon. The Delta IV rocket family is now retired, and ULA will end production of the Atlas V rocket later this year. Now, ULA’s Vulcan rocket will take over as the company’s sole launch vehicle to serve the Pentagon. ULA aims to eventually ramp up the Vulcan launch cadence to fly up to 25 times per year.

After two successful test flights, the Space Force formally certified the Vulcan rocket last week, clearing the way for ULA to start using it for military missions in the coming months. While SpaceX has a clear advantage in number of launches, schedule assurance, and pricing—and reliability comparable to ULA—Bruno has recently touted the Vulcan rocket’s ability to maneuver over long periods in space as a differentiator.

“This award constitutes the most complex missions required for national security space,” Bruno said in a ULA press release. “Vulcan continues to use the world’s highest energy upper stage: the Centaur V. Centaur V’s unmatched flexibility and extreme endurance enables the most complex orbital insertions continuing to advance our nation’s capabilities in space.”

Blue Origin’s New Glenn must fly at least one more successful mission before the Space Force will certify it for Lane 2 missions. The selection of Blue Origin on Friday suggests military officials believe New Glenn is on track for certification by late 2026.

“Honored to serve additional national security missions in the coming years and contribute to our nation’s assured access to space,” Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, wrote on X. “This is a great endorsement of New Glenn’s capabilities, and we are committed to meeting the heavy lift needs of our US DoD and intelligence agency customers.”

Navigating NSSL

There’s something you must understand about the way the military buys launch services. For this round of competition, the Space Force divided the NSSL program into two lanes.

Friday’s announcement covers Lane 2 for traditional military satellites that operate thousands of miles above the Earth. This bucket includes things like GPS navigation satellites, NRO surveillance and eavesdropping platforms, and strategic communications satellites built to survive a nuclear war. The Space Force has a low tolerance for failure with these missions. Therefore, the military requires rockets be certified before they can launch big-ticket satellites, each of which often cost hundreds of millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars.

The Space Force required all Lane 2 bidders to show their rockets could reach nine “reference orbits” with payloads of a specified mass. Some of the orbits are difficult to reach, requiring technology that only SpaceX and ULA have demonstrated in the United States. Blue Origin plans to do so on a future flight.

This image shows what the Space Force’s fleet of missile warning and missile tracking satellites might look like in 2030, with a mix of platforms in geosynchronous orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and low-Earth orbit. The higher orbits will require launches by “Lane 2” providers. Credit: Space Systems Command

The military projects to order 54 launches in Lane 2 from this year through 2029, with announcements each October of exactly which missions will go to each launch provider. This year, it will be just SpaceX and ULA. The Space Force said Blue Origin won’t be eligible for firm orders until next year. The missions would launch between 2027 and 2032.

“America leads the world in space launch, and through these NSSL Phase 3 Lane 2 contracts, we will ensure continued access to this vital domain,” said Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration. “These awards bolster our ability to launch critical defense satellites while strengthening our industrial base and enhancing operational readiness.”

Lane 1 is primarily for missions to low-Earth orbit. These payloads include tech demos, experimental missions, and the military’s mega-constellation of missile tracking and data relay satellites managed by the Space Development Agency. For Lane 1 missions, the Space Force won’t levy the burdensome certification and oversight requirements it has long employed for national security launches. The Pentagon is willing to accept more risk with Lane 1, encompassing at least 30 missions through the end of the 2020s, in an effort to broaden the military’s portfolio of launch providers and boost competition.

Last June, Space Systems Command chose SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin for eligibility to compete for Lane 1 missions. SpaceX won all nine of the first batch of Lane 1 missions put up for bids. The military recently added Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket and Stoke Space’s Nova rocket to the Lane 1 mix. Neither of those rockets have flown, and they will need at least one successful launch before approval to fly military payloads.

The Space Force has separate contract mechanisms for the military’s smallest satellites, which typically launch on SpaceX rideshare missions or dedicated launches with companies like Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace.

Military leaders like having all these options, and would like even more. If one launch provider or launch site is unavailable due to a technical problem—or, as some military officials now worry, an enemy attack—commanders want multiple backups in their toolkit. Market forces dictate that more competition should also lower prices.

“A robust and resilient space launch architecture is the foundation of both our economic prosperity and our national security,” said US Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman. “National Security Space Launch isn’t just a program; it’s a strategic necessity that delivers the critical space capabilities our warfighters depend on to fight and win.”

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military’s top launch provider Read More »

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With Vulcan’s certification, Space Force is no longer solely reliant on SpaceX

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The US Space Force on Wednesday announced that it has certified United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket to conduct national security missions.

“Assured access to space is a core function of the Space Force and a critical element of national security,” said Brig. Gen. Panzenhagen, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space, in a news release. “Vulcan certification adds launch capacity, resiliency, and flexibility needed by our nation’s most critical space-based systems.”

The formal announcement closes a yearslong process that has seen multiple delays in the development of the Vulcan rocket, as well as two anomalies in recent years that were a further setback to certification.

The first of these, an explosion on a test stand in northern Alabama during the spring of 2023, delayed the first test flight of Vulcan by several months. Then, in October 2024, during the second test flight of the rocket, a nozzle on one of the Vulcan’s two side-mounted boosters failed.

A cumbersome process

This nozzle issue, more than five months ago, compounded the extensive paperwork needed to certify Vulcan for the US Department of Defense’s most sensitive missions. The military has several options for companies to certify their rockets depending on the number of flights completed, which could be two, three, or more. The fewer the flights, the more paperwork and review that must be done. For Vulcan, this process entailed:

  • 52 certification criteria
  • more than 180 discrete tasks
  • 2 certification flight demonstrations
  • 60 payload interface requirement verifications
  • 18 subsystem design and test reviews
  • 114 hardware and software audits

That sounds like a lot of work, but at least the military’s rules and regulations are straightforward and simple to navigate, right? Anyway, the certification process is complete, elevating United Launch Alliance to fly national security missions alongside SpaceX with its fleet of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

With Vulcan’s certification, Space Force is no longer solely reliant on SpaceX Read More »

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What is space war-fighting? The Space Force’s top general has some thoughts.

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Controlling space means “employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities.”

Members of the Space Force render a salute during a change of command ceremony July 2, 2024, as Col. Ramsey Horn took the helm of Space Delta 9, the unit that oversees orbital warfare operations at Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado. Credit: US Space Force / Dalton Prejeant

DENVER—The US Space Force lacks the full range of space weapons China and Russia are adding to their arsenals, and military leaders say it’s time to close the gap.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s chief of space operations, told reporters at the Air & Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium last week that he wants to have more options to present to national leaders if an adversary threatens the US fleet of national security satellites used for surveillance, communication, navigation, missile warning, and perhaps soon, missile defense.

In prepared remarks, Saltzman outlined in new detail why the Space Force should be able to go on the offense in an era of orbital warfare. Later, in a roundtable meeting with reporters, he briefly touched on the how.

The Space Force’s top general has discussed the concept of “space superiority” before. This is analogous to air superiority—think of how US and allied air forces dominated the skies in wartime over the last 30 years in places like Iraq, the Balkans, and Afghanistan.

In order to achieve space superiority, US forces must first control the space domain by “employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities through disruption, degradation, and even destruction, if necessary,” Saltzman said.

Kinetic? Imagine a missile or some other projectile smashing into an enemy satellite. Non-kinetic? This category involves jamming, cyberattacks, and directed-energy weapons, like lasers or microwave signals, that could disable spacecraft in orbit.

“It includes things like orbital warfare and electromagnetic warfare,” Saltzman said. These capabilities could be used offensively or defensively. In December, Ars reported on the military’s growing willingness to talk publicly about offensive space weapons, something US officials long considered taboo for fear of sparking a cosmic arms race.

Officials took this a step further at last week’s warfare symposium in Colorado. Saltzman said China and Russia, which military leaders consider America’s foremost strategic competitors, are moving ahead of the United States with technologies and techniques to attack satellites in orbit.

This new ocean

For the first time in more than a century, warfare is entering a new physical realm. By one popular measure, the era of air warfare began in 1911, when an Italian pilot threw bombs out of his airplane over Libya during the Italo-Turkish War. Some historians might trace airborne warfare to earlier conflicts, when reconnaissance balloons offered eagle-eyed views of battlefields and troop movements. Land and sea combat began in ancient times.

“None of us were alive when the other domains started being contested,” Saltzman said. “It was just natural. It was just a part of the way things work.”

Five years since it became a new military service, the Space Force is in an early stage of defining what orbital warfare actually means. First, military leaders had to stop considering space as a benign environment, where threats from the harsh environment of space reign supreme.

Artist’s illustration of a satellite’s destruction in space. Credit: Aerospace Corporation

“That shift from benign environment to a war-fighting domain, that was pretty abrupt,” Saltzman said. “We had to mature language. We had to understand what was the right way to talk about that progression. So as a Space Force dedicated to it, we’ve been progressing our vocabulary. We’ve been saying, ‘This is what we want to focus on.'”

“We realized, you know what, defending is one thing, but look at this architecture (from China). They’re going to hold our forces at risk. Who’s responsible for that? And clearly the answer is the Space Force,” Saltzman said. “We say, ‘OK, we’ve got to start to solve for that problem.'”

“Well, how do militaries talk about that? We talk about conducting operations, and that includes offense and defense,” he continued. “So it’s more of a maturation of the role and the responsibilities that a new service has, just developing the vocabulary, developing the doctrine, operational concepts, and now the equipment and the training. It’s just part of the process.”

Of course, this will all cost money. Congress approved a $29 billion budget for the Space Force in 2024, about $4 billion more than NASA received but just 3.5 percent of the Pentagon’s overall budget. Frank Kendall, secretary of the Air Force under President Biden, said last year that the Space Force’s budget is “going to need to double or triple over time” to fund everything the military needs to do in space.

The six types of space weapons

Saltzman said the Space Force categorizes adversarial space weapons in six categories—three that are space-based and three that are ground-based.

“You have directed-energy, like lasers, you have RF (radio frequency) jamming capabilities, and you have kinetic, something that you’re trying to destroy physically,” Saltzman said. These three types of weapons could be positioned on the ground or in space, getting to Saltzman’s list of six categories.

“We’re seeing in our adversary developmental capabilities, they’re pursuing all of those,” Saltzman said. “We’re not pursuing all of those yet.”

But Saltzman argued that maybe the United States should. “There are good reasons to have all those categories,” he said. Targeting an enemy satellite in low-Earth orbit, just a few hundred miles above the planet, requires a different set of weapons than a satellite parked more than 22,000 miles up—roughly 36,000 kilometers—in geosynchronous orbit.

China is at the pinnacle of the US military’s threat pyramid, followed by Russia and less sophisticated regional powers like North Korea and Iran.

“Really, what’s most concerning… is the mix of weapons,” Saltzman said. “They are pursuing the broadest mix of weapons, which means they’re going to hold a vast array of targets at risk if we can’t defeat them. So our focus out of the gate has been on resiliency of our architectures. Make the targeting as hard on the adversary as possible.”

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the chief of Space Operations, speaks at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium on March 3, 2025. Credit: Jud McCrehin / Air & Space Forces Association

About a decade ago, the military recognized an imperative to transition to a new generation of satellites. Where they could, Pentagon officials replaced or complemented their fleets of a few large multibillion-dollar satellites with constellations of many more cheaper, relatively expendable satellites. If an adversary took out just one of the military’s legacy satellites, commanders would feel the pain. But the destruction of multiple smaller satellites in the newer constellations wouldn’t have any meaningful effect.

That’s one of the reasons the military’s Space Development Agency has started launching a network of small missile-tracking satellites in low-Earth orbit, and it’s why the Pentagon is so interested in using services offered by SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation. The Space Force is looking at ways to revamp its architecture for space-based navigation by potentially augmenting or replacing existing GPS satellites with an array of positioning platforms in different orbits.

“If you can disaggregate your missions from a few satellites to many satellites, you change the targeting calculus,” Saltzman said. “If you can make things maneuverable, then it’s harder to target, so that is the initial effort that we invested heavily on in the last few years to make us more resilient.”

Now, Saltzman said, the Space Force must go beyond reshaping how it designs its satellites and constellations to respond to potential threats. These new options include more potent offensive and defensive weapons. He declined to offer specifics, but some options are better than others.

The cost of destruction

“Generally in a military setting, you don’t say, ‘Hey, here’s all the weapons, and here’s how I’m going to use them, so get ready,'” Saltzman said. “That’s not to our advantage… but I will generally [say] that I am far more enamored by systems that deny, disrupt, [and] degrade. There’s a lot of room to leverage systems focused on those ‘D words.’ The destroy word comes at a cost in terms of debris.”

A high-speed impact between an interceptor weapon and an enemy satellite would spread thousands of pieces of shrapnel across busy orbital traffic lanes, putting US and allied spacecraft at risk.

“We may get pushed into a corner where we need to execute some of those options, but I’m really focused on weapons that deny, disrupt, degrade,” Saltzman said.

This tenet of environmental stewardship isn’t usually part of the decision-making process for commanders in other military branches, like the Air Force or the Navy. “I tell my air-breathing friends all the time: When you shoot an airplane down, it falls out of your domain,” Saltzman said.

China now operates more than 1,000 satellites, and more than a third of these are dedicated to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. China’s satellites can collect high-resolution spy imagery and relay the data to terrestrial forces for military targeting. The Chinese “space-enabled targeting architecture” is “pretty impressive,” Saltzman said.

This slide from a presentation by Space Systems Command illustrates a few of the counter-space weapons fielded by China and Russia. Credit: Space Systems Command

“We have a responsibility not only to defend the assets in space but to protect the war-fighter from space-enabled attack,” said Lt. Gen. Doug Schiess, a senior official at US Space Command. “What China has done with an increasing launch pace is put up intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance satellites that can then target our naval forces, our land forces, and our air forces at much greater distance. They’ve essentially built a huge kill chain, or kill web, if you will, to be able to target our forces much earlier.”

China’s aerospace forces have either deployed or are developing direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles, co-orbital satellites, electronic warfare platforms like mobile jammers, and directed-energy, or laser, systems, according to a Pentagon report on China’s military and security advancements. These weapons can reach targets from low-Earth orbit all the way up to geosynchronous orbit.

In his role as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Saltzman advises the White House on military matters. Like most military commanders, he said he wants to offer his superiors as many options as possible. “The more weapons mix we have, the more options we can offer the president,” Saltzman said.

The US military has already demonstrated it can shoot down a satellite with a ground-based interceptor, and the Space Force is poised to field new ground-based satellite jammers in the coming months. The former head of the Space Force, Gen. Jay Raymond, told lawmakers in 2021 that the military was developing directed-energy weapons to assure dominance in space, although he declined to discuss details in an unclassified hearing.

So the Pentagon is working on at least three of the six space weapons categories identified by Saltzman. China and Russia appear to have the edge in space-based weapons, at least for now.

In the last several years, Russia has tested a satellite that can fire a projectile capable of destroying another spacecraft in orbit, an example of a space-based kinetic weapon. Last year, news leaked that US intelligence officials are concerned about Russian plans to put a nuclear weapon in orbit. China launched a satellite named Shijian-17 in 2016 with a robotic arm that could be used to grapple and capture other satellites in space. Then, in 2021, China launched Shijian-21, which docked with a defunct Chinese satellite to take over its maneuvering and move it to a different orbit.

There’s no evidence that the US Space Force has demonstrated kinetic space-based anti-satellite weapons, and Pentagon officials have roundly criticized the possibility of Russia placing a nuclear weapon in space. But the US military might soon develop space-based interceptors as part of the Trump administration’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield. These interceptors might also be useful in countering enemy satellites during conflict.

The Sodium Guidestar at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Starfire Optical Range in New Mexico. Researchers with AFRL’s Directed Energy Directorate use the Guidestar laser for real-time, high-fidelity tracking and imaging of satellites too faint for conventional adaptive optical imaging systems. Credit: US Air Force

The Air Force used a robotic arm on a 2007 technology demonstration mission to snag free-flying satellites out of orbit, but this was part of a controlled experiment with a spacecraft designed for robotic capture. Several companies, such as Maxar and Northrop Grumman, are developing robotic arms that could grapple “non-cooperative” satellites in orbit.

While the destruction of an enemy satellite is likely to be the Space Force’s last option in a war, military commanders would like to be able to choose to do so. Schiess said the military “continues to have gaps” in this area.

“With destroy, we need that capability, just like any other domain needs that capability, but we have to make sure that we do that with responsibility because the space domain is so important,” Schiess said.

Matching the rhetoric of today

The Space Force’s fresh candor about orbital warfare should be self-evident, according to Saltzman. “Why would you have a military space service if not to execute space control?”

This new comfort speaking about space weapons comes as the Trump administration strikes a more bellicose tone in foreign policy and national security. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s secretary of defense, has pledged to reinforce a “warrior ethos” in the US armed services.

Space Force officials are doing their best to match Hegseth’s rhetoric.

“Every guardian is a war-fighter, regardless of your functional specialty, and every guardian contributes to Space Force readiness,” Saltzman said. Guardian is the military’s term for a member of the Space Force, comparable to airmen, sailors, soldiers, and marines. “Whether you built the gun, pointed the gun, or pulled the trigger, you are a part of combat capability.”

Echoing Hegseth, the senior enlisted member of the Space Force, Chief Master Sgt. John Bentivegna, said he’s focused on developing a “war-fighter ethos” within the service. This involves training on scenarios of orbital warfare, even before the Space Force fields any next-generation weapons systems.

“As Gen. Saltzman is advocating for the money and the resources to get the kit, the culture, the space-minded war-fighter, that work has been going on and continues today,” Bentivegna said.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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The US military is now talking openly about going on the attack in space

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Mastalir said China is “copying the US playbook” with the way it integrates satellites into more conventional military operations on land, in the air, and at sea. “Their specific goals are to be able to track and target US high-value assets at the time and place of their choosing,” Mastalir said.

China’s strategy, known as Anti-Access/Area Denial, or A2AD, is centered on preventing US forces from accessing international waters extending hundreds or thousands of miles from mainland China. Some of the islands occupied by China within the last 15 years are closer to the Philippines, another treaty ally, than to China itself.

The A2AD strategy first “extended to the first island chain (bounded by the Philippines), and now the second island chain (extending to the US territory of Guam), and eventually all the way to the West Coast of California,” Mastalir said.

US officials say China has based anti-ship, anti-air, and anti-ballistic weapons in the region, and many of these systems rely on satellite tracking and targeting. Mastalir said his priority at Indo-Pacific Command, headquartered in Hawaii, is to defend US and allied satellites, or “blue assets,” and challenge “red assets” to break the Chinese military’s “long-range kill chains and protect the joint force from space-enabled attack.”

What this means is the Space Force wants to have the ability to disable or destroy the satellites China would use to provide communication, command, tracking, navigation, or surveillance support during an attack against the US or its allies.

Buildings and structures are seen on October 25, 2022, on an artificial island built by China on Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands of the South China Sea. China has progressively asserted its claim of ownership over disputed islands in the region. Credit: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

Mastalir said he believes China’s space-based capabilities are “sufficient” to achieve the country’s military ambitions, whatever they are. “The sophistication of their sensors is certainly continuing to increase—the interconnectedness, the interoperability. They’re a pacing challenge for a reason,” he said.

“We’re seeing all signs point to being able to target US aircraft carriers… high-value assets in the air like tankers, AWACS (Airborne Warning And Control System),” Mastalir said. “This is a strategy to keep the US from intervening, and that’s what their space architecture is.”

That’s not acceptable to Pentagon officials, so Space Force personnel are now training for orbital warfare. Just don’t expect to know the specifics of any of these weapons systems any time soon.

“The details of that? No, you’re not going to get that from any war-fighting organization—’let me tell you precisely how I intend to attack an adversary so that they can respond and counter that’—those aren’t discussions we’re going to have,” Saltzman said. “We’re still going to protect some of those (details), but broadly, from an operational concept, we are going to be ready to contest space.”

A new administration

The Space Force will likely receive new policy directives after President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. The Trump transition team hasn’t identified any changes coming for the Space Force, but a list of policy proposals known as Project 2025 may offer some clues.

Published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 calls for the Pentagon to pivot the Space Force from a mostly defensive posture toward offensive weapons systems. Christopher Miller, who served as acting secretary of defense in the first Trump administration, authored the military section of Project 2025.

Miller wrote that the Space Force should “reestablish offensive capabilities to guarantee a favorable balance of forces, efficiently manage the full deterrence spectrum, and seriously complicate enemy calculations of a successful first strike against US space assets.”

Trump disavowed Project 2025 during the campaign, but since the election, he has nominated several of the policy agenda’s authors and contributors to key administration posts.

Saltzman met with Trump last month while attending a launch of SpaceX’s Starship rocket in Texas, but he said the encounter was incidental. Saltzman was already there for discussions with SpaceX officials, and Trump’s travel plans only became known the day before the launch.

The conversation with Trump at the Starship launch didn’t touch on any policy details, according to Saltzman. He added that the Space Force hasn’t yet had any formal discussions with the Trump transition team.

Regardless of the direction Trump takes with the Space Force, Saltzman said the service is already thinking about what to do to maintain what the Pentagon now calls “space superiority”—a twist on the term air superiority, which might have seemed equally as fanciful at the dawn of military aviation more than a century ago.

“That’s the reason we’re the Space Force,” Saltzman said. “So administration to administration, that’s still going to be true. Now, it’s just about resourcing and the discussions about what we want to do and when we want to do it, and we’re ready to have those discussions.”

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The key moment came 38 minutes after Starship roared off the launch pad

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SpaceX wasn’t able to catch the Super Heavy booster, but Starship is on the cusp of orbital flight.

The sixth flight of Starship lifts off from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site at Boca Chica Beach, Texas. Credit: SpaceX.

SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket Tuesday, proving for the first time that the stainless steel ship can maneuver in space and paving the way for an even larger, upgraded vehicle slated to debut on the next test flight.

The only hiccup was an abortive attempt to catch the rocket’s Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in South Texas, something SpaceX achieved on the previous flight on October 13. The Starship upper stage flew halfway around the world, reaching an altitude of 118 miles (190 kilometers) before plunging through the atmosphere for a pinpoint slow-speed splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The sixth flight of the world’s largest launcher—standing 398 feet (121.3 meters) tall—began with a lumbering liftoff from SpaceX’s Starbase facility near the US-Mexico border at 4 pm CST (22: 00 UTC) Tuesday. The rocket headed east over the Gulf of Mexico, propelled by 33 Raptor engines clustered on the bottom of its Super Heavy first stage.

A few miles away, President-elect Donald Trump joined SpaceX founder Elon Musk to witness the launch. The SpaceX boss became one of Trump’s closest allies in this year’s presidential election, giving the world’s richest man extraordinary influence in US space policy. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was there, too, among other lawmakers. Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top commander in the US Space Force, stood nearby, chatting with Trump and other VIPs.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, President-elect Donald Trump, and Gen. Chance Saltzman of the US Space Force watch the sixth launch of Starship Tuesday. Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

From their viewing platform, they watched Starship climb into a clear autumn sky. At full power, the 33 Raptors chugged more than 40,000 pounds of super-cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen per second. The engines generated 16.7 million pounds of thrust, 60 percent more than the Soviet N1, the second-largest rocket in history.

Eight minutes later, the rocket’s upper stage, itself also known as Starship, was in space, completing the program’s fourth straight near-flawless launch. The first two test flights faltered before reaching their planned trajectory.

A brief but crucial demo

As exciting as it was, we’ve seen all that before. One of the most important new things engineers wanted to test on this flight occurred about 38 minutes after liftoff.

That’s when Starship reignited one of its six Raptor engines for a brief burn to make a slight adjustment to its flight path. The burn lasted only a few seconds, and the impulse was small—just a 48 mph (77 km/hour) change in velocity, or delta-V—but it demonstrated that the ship can safely deorbit itself on future missions.

With this achievement, Starship will likely soon be cleared to travel into orbit around Earth and deploy Starlink Internet satellites or conduct in-space refueling experiments, two of the near-term objectives on SpaceX’s Starship development roadmap.

Launching Starlinks aboard Starship will allow SpaceX to expand the capacity and reach of its commercial consumer broadband network, which, in turn, provides revenue for Musk to reinvest into Starship. Orbital refueling enables Starship voyages beyond low-Earth orbit, fulfilling SpaceX’s multibillion-dollar contract with NASA to provide a human-rated Moon lander for the agency’s Artemis program. Likewise, transferring cryogenic propellants in orbit is a prerequisite for sending Starships to Mars, making real Musk’s dream of creating a settlement on the red planet.

Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX

Until now, SpaceX has intentionally launched Starships to speeds just shy of the blistering velocities needed to maintain orbit. Engineers wanted to test the Raptor’s ability to reignite in space on the third Starship test flight in March, but the ship lost control of its orientation, and SpaceX canceled the engine firing.

Before going for a full orbital flight, officials needed to confirm that Starship could steer itself back into the atmosphere for reentry, ensuring it wouldn’t present any risk to the public with an unguided descent over a populated area. After Tuesday, SpaceX can check this off its to-do list.

“Congrats to SpaceX on Starship’s sixth test flight,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson posted on X. “Exciting to see the Raptor engine restart in space—major progress towards orbital flight. Starship’s success is Artemis’ success. Together, we will return humanity to the Moon & set our sights on Mars.”

While it lacks the pizzazz of a fiery launch or landing, the engine relight unlocks a new phase of Starship development. SpaceX has now proven that the rocket is capable of reaching space with a fair measure of reliability. Next, engineers will fine-tune how to reliably recover the booster and the ship and learn how to use them.

Acid test

SpaceX appears well on its way to doing this. While SpaceX didn’t catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower’s mechanical arms Tuesday, engineers have shown they can do it. The challenge of catching Starship itself back at the launch pad is more daunting. The ship starts its reentry thousands of miles from Starbase, traveling approximately 17,000 mph (27,000 km/hour), and must thread the gap between the tower’s catch arms within a matter of inches.

The good news is that SpaceX has now twice proven it can bring Starship back to a precision splashdown in the Indian Ocean. In October, the ship settled into the sea in darkness. SpaceX moved the launch time for Tuesday’s flight to the late afternoon, setting up for splashdown shortly after sunrise northwest of Australia.

The shift in time paid off with some stunning new visuals. Cameras mounted on the outside of Starship beamed dazzling live views back to SpaceX through the Starlink network, showing a now-familiar glow of plasma encasing the spacecraft as it plowed deeper into the atmosphere. But this time, daylight revealed the ship’s flaps moving to control its belly-first descent toward the ocean. After passing through a deck of low clouds, Starship reignited its Raptor engines and tilted from horizontal to vertical, making contact with the water tail-first within view of a floating buoy and a nearby aircraft in position to observe the moment.

Here’s a replay of the spacecraft’s splashdown around 65 minutes after launch.

Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting sixth flight test of Starship! pic.twitter.com/bf98Va9qmL

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 19, 2024

The ship made it through reentry despite flying with a substandard heat shield. Starship’s thermal protection system is made up of thousands of ceramic tiles to protect the ship from temperatures as high as 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius).

Kate Tice, a SpaceX engineer hosting the company’s live broadcast of the mission, said teams at Starbase removed 2,100 heat shield tiles from Starship ahead of Tuesday’s launch. Their removal exposed wider swaths of the ship’s stainless steel skin to super-heated plasma, and SpaceX teams were eager to see how well the spacecraft held up during reentry. In the language of flight testing, this approach is called exploring the corners of the envelope, where engineers evaluate how a new airplane or rocket performs in extreme conditions.

“Don’t be surprised if we see some wackadoodle stuff happen here,” Tice said. There was nothing of the sort. One of the ship’s flaps appeared to suffer some heating damage, but it remained intact and functional, and the harm looked to be less substantial than damage seen on previous flights.

Many of the removed tiles came from the sides of Starship where SpaceX plans to place catch fittings on future vehicles. These are the hardware protuberances that will catch on the top side of the launch tower’s mechanical arms, similar to fittings used on the Super Heavy booster.

“The next flight, we want to better understand where we can install catch hardware, not necessarily to actually do the catch but to see how that hardware holds up in those spots,” Tice said. “Today’s flight will help inform ‘does the stainless steel hold up like we think it may, based on experiments that we conducted on Flight 5?'”

Musk wrote on his social media platform X that SpaceX could try to bring Starship back to Starbase for a catch on the eighth test flight, which is likely to occur in the first half of 2025.

“We will do one more ocean landing of the ship,” Musk said. “If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower.”

The heat shield, Musk added, is a focal point of SpaceX’s attention. The delicate heat-absorbing tiles used on the belly of the space shuttle proved vexing to NASA technicians. Early in the shuttle’s development, NASA had trouble keeping tiles adhered to the shuttle’s aluminum skin. Each of the shuttle tiles was custom-machined to fit on a specific location on the orbiter, complicating refurbishment between flights. Starship’s tiles are all hexagonal in shape and agnostic to where technicians place them on the vehicle.

“The biggest technology challenge remaining for Starship is a fully & immediately reusable heat shield,” Musk wrote on X. “Being able to land the ship, refill propellant & launch right away with no refurbishment or laborious inspection. That is the acid test.”

This photo of the Starship vehicle for Flight 6, numbered Ship 31, shows exposed portions of the vehicle’s stainless steel skin after tile removal. Credit: SpaceX

There were no details available Tuesday night on what caused the Super Heavy booster to divert from its planned catch on the launch tower. After detaching from the Starship upper stage less than three minutes into the flight, the booster reversed course to begin the journey back to Starbase.

Then SpaceX’s flight director announced the rocket would fly itself into the Gulf rather than back to the launch site: “Booster offshore divert.”

The booster finished its descent with a seemingly perfect landing burn using a subset of its Raptor engines. As expected after the water landing, the booster—itself 233 feet (71 meters) tall—toppled and broke apart in a dramatic fireball visible to onshore spectators.

In an update posted to its website after the launch, SpaceX said automated health checks of hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered the aborted catch attempt. The company did not say what system failed the health check. As a safety measure, SpaceX must send a manual command for the booster to come back to land in order to prevent a malfunction from endangering people or property.

Turning it up to 11

There will be plenty more opportunities for more booster catches in the coming months as SpaceX ramps up its launch cadence at Starbase. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, hinted at the scale of the company’s ambitions last week.

“We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” she said at the Barron Investment Conference.

The next batch of test flights will use an improved version of Starship designated Block 2, or V2. Starship Block 2 comes with larger propellant tanks, redesigned forward flaps, and a better heat shield.

The new-generation Starship will hold more than 11 million pounds of fuel and oxidizer, about a million pounds more than the capacity of Starship Block 1. The booster and ship will produce more thrust, and Block 2 will measure 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall, stretching the height of the full stack by a little more than 10 feet.

Put together, these modifications should give Starship the ability to heave a payload of up to 220,000 pounds (100 metric tons) into low-Earth orbit, about twice the carrying capacity of the first-generation ship. Further down the line, SpaceX plans to introduce Starship Block 3 to again double the ship’s payload capacity.

Just as importantly, these changes are designed to make it easier for SpaceX to recover and reuse the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage. SpaceX’s goal of fielding a fully reusable launcher builds on the partial reuse SpaceX pioneered with its Falcon 9 rocket. This should dramatically bring down launch costs, according to SpaceX’s vision.

With Tuesday’s flight, it’s clear Starship works. Now it’s time to see what it can do.

Updated with additional details, quotes, and images.

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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US Space Force warns of “mind-boggling” build-up of Chinese capabilities

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Both Russia and China have tested satellites with capabilities that include grappling hooks to pull other satellites out of orbit and “kinetic kill vehicles” that can target satellites and long-range ballistic missiles in space.

In May, a senior US defense department official told a House Armed Services Committee hearing that Russia was developing an “indiscriminate” nuclear weapon designed to be sent into space, while in September, China made a third secretive test of an unmanned space plane that could be used to disrupt satellites.

The US is far ahead of its European allies in developing military space capabilities, but it wanted to “lay the foundations” for the continent’s space forces, Saltzman said. Last year UK Air Marshal Paul Godfrey was appointed to oversee allied partnerships with NATO with the US Space Force—one of the first times that a high-ranking allied pilot had joined the US military.

But Saltzman warned against a rush to build up space forces across the continent.

“It is resource-intensive to separate out and stand up a new service. Even … in America where we think we have more resources, we underestimated what it was going to take,” he said.

The US Space Force, which monitors more than 46,000 objects in orbit, has about 10,000 personnel but is the smallest department of the US military. Its officers are known as “guardians.”

The costs of building up space defense capabilities mean the US is heavily reliant on private companies, raising concerns about the power of billionaires in a sector where regulation remains minimal.

SpaceX, led by prominent Trump backer Elon Musk, is increasingly working with US military and intelligence through its Starshield arm, which is developing low Earth orbit satellites that track missiles and support intelligence gathering.

This month, SpaceX was awarded a $734 million contract to provide space launch services for US defense and intelligence agencies.

Despite concerns about Musk’s erratic behavior and reports that the billionaire has had regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Saltzman said he had no concerns about US government collaboration with SpaceX.

“I’m very comfortable that they’ll execute those [contracts] exactly the way they’re designed. All of the dealings I’ve had with SpaceX have been very professional,” he said.

Additional reporting by Kathrin Hille in Taipei.

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