Tag Archive for: Space domain awareness

The future of the Combined Space Operations initiative

As space becomes more contested, Australia should play a key role with its partners in the Combined Space Operations (CSpO) initiative to safeguard the space domain.

Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States signed the CSpO initiative in 2014. It has since grown to 10 partners, adding New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Norway.

In 2022 the partners released the CSpO Vision 2031 statement, outlining its mission to improve cooperation, coordination and interoperability to ensure freedom of action in space, enhance mission assurance and prevent conflict.

Now in its second decade, CSpO in its efforts and activities must respond to the contestation and congestion of space.

Australia and its allies confront a more challenging security outlook across all five domains of conflict. The space domain is now seen as an operational domain in its own right, rather than merely an enabling adjunct for the traditional air, sea and land domains.

The role of the initiative will become only more important new challenges emerge.

The space domain is contested as adversary states develop a full suite of counterspace (such as anti-satellite, or ASAT) capabilities to deny, degrade and disrupt access to vital space support systems which support joint and integrated military operations and the function of economies and societies.

Space is also increasingly congested as more states and non-state actors deploy large constellations of satellites across multiple orbits and space debris grows. This makes avoiding collision a key challenge.

The first objective of the vision 2031 statement is to prevent conflict, including conflict ‘extending to or originating in space.’ The starting point for this must be space domain awareness, which is an area where Australia plays a key role.

Australia occupies an ideal location for monitoring important regions of space, including low-earth orbit (LEO) and geosynchronous orbit (GEO). Australia hosts several space-domain awareness sensors. For example, the 2023 announcement of a Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC) at Exmouth in Western Australia, expected to be operational by 2026, will enable space surveillance out to GEO, an orbit used for satellite communications.

The collaboration that Australia and its CSpO partners undertake on space domain awareness allows the sharing of strategic and tactical intelligence across multiple classification levels. Information can be shared in real time via national headquarters for joint operations—for example between HQ Joint Operations Command near Canberra and the Combined Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

But it also demands a robust, and interoperable space infrastructure, and the ability to ensure continued access to space support. This requires encouragement of commonality in space systems, including resilient satellite architectures and responsive space access.

The development of proliferated LEO (pLEO) satellite mega-constellations enhances space resilience by embracing a ‘small, cheap and many’ solution and avoiding large, complex and expensive satellites in GEO. CSpO partners can work together to develop such pLEO architectures to deploy lower-cost small satellites across multiple orbits and offer services in areas such as satellite communications, satellite relay, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and other specialised tasks.

Australia has redefined its JP-9102 Advanced Satellite Communications project away from ‘large, few and expensive’ satellites in GEO towards a distributed multi-orbit architecture. So CSpO collaboration on new approaches to satellite networks is an obvious step forward that could benefit all members. This would harmonise partners’ efforts, enhance information sharing through common capabilities in space and reduce a concerns of a lack of Australian government support for space initiatives.

Space mission assurance would also benefit from development of responsive space access using Australia’s advantageous geographical location for launch and returns. The north of the continent is close to the equator, maximising the energy boost from the Earth’s rotation for payloads launched from locations such as northern Queensland. The result is lower launch cost.

Additionally, launch sites in southern Australia are good for sun-synchronous and polar orbits often used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites. Australia could support launch requirements for CSpO members. For example, Australia and the US already cooperate through the Technology Safeguards Agreement on launches and returns, signed in October 2023.

Finally, CSpO states need to confront challenges posed by adversary counterspace threats, including through development of credible space control capabilities to defend vital space capabilities. The National Defence Strategy and Integrated Investment Program allude to this challenge, but the practical aspects of space control needs to be realised. It would be an opportunity for CSpO, perhaps through AUKUS Pillar 2, to start putting capability substance behind the declared requirement for such a role.

Power of persistence: Australian technology addresses challenge of space monitoring

Knowing what is going on in orbit is getting harder—yet hardly less necessary. But new technologies are emerging to cope with the challenge, including some that have come from Australian civilian research.

One example is the satellite-transmission monitoring system of Australia’s Quasar Satellite Technologies, which derived from work done by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Another is FireOPAL, a passive sensor system that my company, Lockheed Martin Australia, has helped develop by building on initial progress by Curtin University in Perth.

Satellites look down at the earth in peace and war to watch over the scene or to scrutinise part of it. Some inspect other satellites and may try to disrupt them. Some are designed for communications, including military communications. So, countries need to know what each other’s satellites are up to.

They need to know which satellites are in which orbits, how they have changed course and how many minutes ago they did that. What are they transmitting? Is that a foreign satellite moving close to one of ours, maybe to jam it, or is it a piece of orbital debris? Is it already jamming?

Since the first satellite rose into space in 1957, more than 6740 launches have placed another 20,000 into Earth’s orbit. At least 10,000 are functioning, and thousands more will come online over the next few years with the construction of mega-constellations. In addition, 40,000 pieces of debris of significant size are in orbit.

The traditional way to monitor all this is to point telescopes, radars and passive radio antennas at limited parts of the sky, assembling a mosaic of pictures, or to point the sensors at particular orbital objects, whether satellites or debris. But there are only so many such sensors, and the number of satellites and pieces of debris is rising.

Also, military satellite operators are getting better at executing surreptitious manoeuvres, so a satellite that had formerly been tracked on a certain orbit might now, unknown to the tracking country, be heading somewhere else. Additionally, a technique of near-constant manoeuvring is an emerging challenge for operators.

Altogether, risks are rising that surveillance systems, pressed to keep watch on the most important targets, will miss critical events in space involving other satellites, such as a manoeuvre, break-up or malfunction. Indeed, orbital objects are sometimes not known at all until they are discovered incidentally in surveillance that wasn’t targeting them.

Australian companies are stepping up with novel solutions. With advanced antenna technology, Quasar Satellite’s technology continuously surveils radio-frequency signals not from a single point but across a broad swathe of space—for monitoring as well as communications. The technology goes back to CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope installed in Western Australia for scientific research.

FireOPAL stares at the sky optically. Its origin was Curtin University technology for watching the larger sections of the sky to detect atmospheric entries by meteorites. The university and Lockheed Martin Australia have adapted it to track satellites.

The key point is that sensors such as FireOPAL don’t need to be tasked with pointing at a particular spot in the sky, spending time looking there while things are happening elsewhere; they look across a wide field of view.

At the 2024 Australian Meteorological and Oceanography Society conference, a report published by defence systems integrator Peraton and Lockheed Martin Australia demonstrated that persistent wide field of view, untasked optical observation by FireOPAL could reduce the interval between successive observations of a space object to seconds. This is a remarkable and potentially disruptive advancement, because it shifts the paradigm from tasking sensors and observations to an always-on approach.

When processed through a Peraton space-domain awareness system, data from FireOPAL can detect a satellite’s manoeuvre within 60 to 120 seconds. This compares with traditional detection-to-processing speeds that can be hours or even days. This allows those watching on-orbit activities—civil space agencies and defence organisations—to make operational responses faster—for example, avoiding the risk of a collision, or countering a foreign satellite’s potentially hostile approach to a friendly one.

More work is needed to overcome the challenge of proliferating space objects. The mission systems that control and make sense of the data need adaptation. They need to be able to receive information from supplementary sources to fill gaps in collection. Open mission systems that can plug and play with diverse data sets are critical.

These sources would include broad sensor mixes such as radars, which can see through bad weather and at night as well as day. Australian companies such as Quasar Satellite offer radio-frequency monitoring capabilities that can track the position of a satellite through its emissions. Another Australian champion is Silentium Defence, which provides space domain awareness observations with passive radars.

Both companies are viable options for adding to the sensor mix.

Australia stands to play a larger role in space-domain awareness through its security alliances and such advantages as geography and skilled workforce. It can further benefit by harnessing emerging commercial developments in the sector.

Space operations in the deep black of xGEO

With the prospect of increasing human activity on and around the Moon in coming decades, there is growing defence interest in monitoring activity and operating in new regions of the space domain. Australia needs a policy discussion to evaluate how it can play a broader role beyond the orbit of geostationary satellites, a volume of space known as xGEO.

In particular, Australia should assess the benefits of being an active contributor in building a space economy and in ensuring space security and sustainability beyond the near-Earth region. It would do this with allies.

The discussion should be part of AUKUS Pillar 2, in preparation for the 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS) and Integrated Investment Program (IIP). It should also inform broader civil and defence space cooperation with the United States and other partners.

The region of space as far as geostationary orbit (GEO), 36,500km above the equator, has been closely monitored for decades. But now space domain awareness (SDA) is increasingly looking at xGEO, which goes to the Moon and a little beyond to include all the Earth-Moon LaGrange points—places where gravitation from the two bodies is balanced and where spacecraft can loiter. (See the accompanying infographic.)

The US Space Force established the 19th Space Defense Squadron two years ago to undertake SDA within xGEO space.

Within xGEO, Australia already plays a role in supporting the US Artemis project to return a human presence to the Moon. Our contribution is the Australian Space Agency’s Moon to Mars Initiative, looking to grow an Australian role in the space economy and support lunar and Martian exploration.

But more can be done, particularly through expanding a national SDA architecture to support not only activities near Earth but in xGEO, too.

The 2024 National Defence Strategy (NDS) and its accompanying Integrated Investment Program (IIP) maintain recognition of the importance of SDA, which was highlighted in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update and Force Structure Plan. Specifically, the 2024 NDS and IIP support Australia’s role in supporting SDA under Operation Dyurra as part of the US-led Operation Olympic Defender. Specific capability that supports the SDA mission includes the establishment of a Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC) (a project that dates back to the 2016 Defence White Paper), which is to be hosted alongside a US-provided Optical Space Surveillance telescope and C-Band space-surveillance radar at North West Cape on the westernmost point of the continent.

These capabilities will allow Australia to share intelligence on space activities with its partners and others under the 2013 Combined Space Operations (CSpO) initiative, examining objects both visually and using radar out to GEO. Furthermore, a range of commercial space surveillance capabilities, both surface and space-based, complement these Defence-run sensors. Australia has an important role in supporting the SDA efforts of allies, thanks to its southern location, dark skies and mild climate.

However, we should be looking further in anticipation of the next NDS and IIP and prospectively greater interest in space in AUKUS Pillar 2.

A natural complement to ground based sensors for SDA now being established would be for Defence to fully embrace a space-based capability as the next phase of SDA. This would allow more comprehensive SDA between low Earth orbit and GEO and, if positioned correctly in GEO or beyond, could support US requirements for SDA across xGEO. It would be an obvious progression from DARC in Western Australia to develop space surveillance satellites owned and operated by the government or Australian companies. The satellites could also be built by Australian commercial space companies that already provide space-based SDA, such as Sydney-based HEO, and launched by Australian launch vehicles from Australian launch sites. Once positioned, these Australian satellites would be a key part of an expanded SDA capability serving the CSpO.

This should then be complemented by a larger role for Australia in supporting space logistics and mobility to enable more flexible and cost-effective xGEO access. These can be undertaken in direct support of civilian space activities under Artemis through leadership of the Australian Space Agency, but also to support future US Space Force space mobility operations in this region. Australia’s Defence Space Command would take on the role. Both could fully benefit from supporting and using Australia’s commercial space sector in providing the means to undertake this role.

A military role in xGEO is highly contentious. A recent debate between Namrata Goswami and Bleddyn Bowen highlighted opposing views, with Bowen dismissing the Moon’s economic value, and its relevance to traditional military use of force on Earth. He labelled advocates of a xGEO capability for the US Space Force as ‘cislunar militarists’ and suggested that supporting such a capability was premature until a greater understanding of the nature of lunar resources was acquired.

In contrast, Goswami pointed to increasing astro-strategic competition and the importance of ensuring access to space resources to build a space economy beyond GEO. She also notes the potential for counterspace capability based beyond GEO to launch a surprise attack on geosynchronous satellites. It’s notable that absence of xGEO SDA would worsen that risk.

The prospect of warfare in xGEO is probably not likely in the short to medium term. However, space forces must take a long-term view that recognises a future human presence on the Moon is not simply for planting more flags and leaving more footprints but for exploitation of space resources. Competition over those resources is quite possible, and Bowen’s dismissal of such a prospect is unconvincing.

But there is a clear need for ascertaining the economic and astro-strategic value of the Moon to make informed choices on policy. Yet that value, if realised, can only be exploited if lunar resource wealth can be turned into prosperity or critical national capability, ideally in space or where possible on Earth. Resource exploitation on the Moon must be practical for the Moon to be relevant. That, in turn, demands an ability to ensure a sustained human presence on and around the Moon—that is, in xGEO—and to prevent an opponent from denying access to those resources or to the Moon itself.

With this future in mind, there is a real opportunity for Australia to adopt a more forward-looking approach to its Moon to Mars Initiative to take the next step to embrace xGEO SDA. It should also seek to explore ways to provide space logistics and mobility throughout xGEO for both civil and military applications alongside key allies and partners. If the Moon is a basis for a space-based economy, it is vital that Australia alongside its allies have access, and we must lift our gaze beyond GEO to a more ambitious approach to space.