Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in remarks carried by Russian news agencies that Moscow has halted all information exchanges with Washington after previously suspending its participation in the last remaining nuclear arms pact with the U.S.

Along with the data about the current state of the countries’ nuclear forces routinely released every six months in compliance with the treaty, the parties also have exchanged advance warnings about test launches. Such notices have been an essential element of strategic stability for decades, allowing Russia and the United States to correctly interpret each other’s moves and make sure that neither country mistakes a test launch for a missile attack.

The termination of missile test warnings marks yet another attempt by Moscow to discourage the West from ramping up its support for Ukraine by pointing to Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal. In recent days, President Vladimir Putin announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to the territory of Moscow’s ally Belarus.

Last month, Putin suspended the New START treaty, saying Russia can’t accept U.S. inspections of its nuclear sites under the agreement at a time when Washington and its NATO allies have openly declared Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine as their goal. Moscow emphasized that it wasn’t withdrawing from the pact altogether and would continue to respect the caps on nuclear weapons the treaty set.

The Foreign Ministry initially said Moscow would keep notifying the U.S. about planned test launches of its ballistic missiles, but Ryabkov’s statement reflected an abrupt change of course.

“There will be no notifications at all,” he said in remarks reported by Russian news agencies when asked if Moscow would also stop issuing notices about planned missile tests. “All notifications, all kinds of notifications, all activities under the treaty. will be suspended and will not be conducted regardless of what position the U.S. may take.”

Ryabkov’s announcement followed U.S. officials’ statement that Moscow and Washington have stopped sharing biannual nuclear weapons data that were envisioned by the New START treaty. Officials at the White House, Pentagon and State Department said the U.S. had offered to continue providing this information to Russia even after Putin suspended its participation in the treaty, but Moscow told Washington it would not be sharing its own data.

The New START, signed in 2010 by then-Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers. The agreement envisages sweeping on-site inspections to verify compliance.

The inspections have been put on hold since 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Discussions on resuming them were supposed to have taken place in November 2022, but Russia abruptly called them off, citing U.S. support for Ukraine.

As part of the Russian drills that began Wednesday, Yars mobile missile launchers will maneuver across three regions of Siberia, Russia’s Defense Ministry said. The movements will involve measures to conceal the deployment from foreign satellites and other intelligence assets, the ministry said.

The Defense Ministry didn’t say how long the drills would last or mention plans for any practice launches. The Yars is a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of about 11,000 kilometers (over 6,800 miles). It forms the backbone of Russia’s strategic missile forces.

A Defense Ministry video shows trucks carrying the missiles driving from a base to go on patrol. The maneuvers involve about 300 vehicles and 3,000 troops in eastern Siberia, according to the ministry.

The exercise took place days after Putin announced a plan to deploy the tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, Russia’s neighbor and ally. Such weapons are intended for use on the battlefield and have a relatively short range and a much lower yield compared with the long-range strategic missiles fitted with nuclear warheads that are capable of obliterating whole cities.

Putin’s decision on the tactical weapons followed his repeated warnings that Moscow was ready to use “all available means” — a reference to its nuclear arsenal — to fend off attacks on Russian territory.

Ryabkov said Wednesday that Putin’s move followed the failure by Kyiv’s allies to heed previous “serious signals” from Moscow because of what he described as the “fundamental irresponsibility of Western elites before their people and international security.”

“Now they will have to deal with changing realities,” he said, adding: “We hope that NATO officials will adequately assess the seriousness of the situation.”

Russian officials have issued a barrage of hawkish statements since their troops entered Ukraine, warning that the continuing Western support for Kyiv raised the threat of a nuclear conflict.

In remarks published Tuesday, Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, which Putin chairs, sternly warned the U.S. and its allies against harboring hopes for Russia’s defeat in Ukraine.

Patrushev alleged that some American politicians believe the U.S. could launch a preventative missile strike on Russia to which Moscow would be unable to respond, a purported belief that he described as “short-sighted stupidity, which is very dangerous.”

“Russia is patient and isn’t trying to scare anyone with its military superiority, but it has unique modern weapons capable of destroying any adversary, including the United States, in case of a threat to its existence,” Patrushev said.

The announcement immediately reverberated through social media, with celebrities and mainstream news outlets mocking what seemed to be yet another instance of the Trump administration pilfering pop culture for a military organization that — at least to some — has always seemed more like a joke than a serious policy endeavor.

“Can we sue this dork?” tweeted James Gunn, who directed the two “Guardians of the Galaxy” films, which are part of the blockbuster Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Mark Hamill, the actor best known for starring as Luke Skywalker in the “Star Wars” films, fired back a response to Gunn.

“So they grab the ‘Guardians’ from your movies, they use the ‘Force’ from our movies… then they have the gall to just steal their logo from ‘Star Trek’? Let’s file a 3-way joint lawsuit & really nail these larcenous bastards!”

New York Magazine ran a story that began: “Mr. Biden, I beg you: Abolish the Space Force.”

For opponents of the Space Force, however, that may be easier said than done.

President-elect Joe Biden, for his part, has given no indication that he will seek to overturn the creation of the Space Force, said Todd Harrison, an aerospace and budget expert with the Center for International and Strategic Studies.

“It’s fair to say that if the Space Force did not exist right now, the Biden administration probably wouldn’t create it,” he said. “But now that it does exist, I think that they’re going to work with it and try to continue the implementation of it.”

That leaves the new administration with a problem: For much of the public, the Space Force is seen as a vanity project of Trump’s instead of a long-debated military organization necessary to ensure that the Defense Department can counter Russian and Chinese threats.

Trump has bolstered that perception in his own public statements, telling troops during a teleconference last Thanksgiving that “nobody even thought about the Space Force” before him.

“I looked at it, and I said — I said: ‘We’re going to have to come up — we’re going to have to do something,’ ” Trump said Nov. 26. “Because I looked at what China was doing and Russia was doing and others are thinking about doing.”

So how does “Trump’s Space Force” become “America’s Space Force?”

Do or do not — there is no try

The Space Force, as it exists now, is fundamentally a rebranding of the Air Force’s legacy space organizations — specifically the now-defunct Air Force Space Command. The service currently controls about $15 billion in annual spending, commands dozens of military satellites and tracks more than 24,000 objects in space.

Though Trump has often sought to take credit for establishing the Space Force, debate about a separate service branch for space originated in 2017 and was led by a bipartisan duo of lawmakers: Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., who led the House Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee.

The lawmakers criticized the Air Force for overlooking the importance of space, and they proposed the concept of a “Space Corps.”

Its main opponents were Republican lawmakers — mostly in the Senate — who backed the Air Force’s position that removing space operations from the service could erode performance in current missions, such as running the nation’s GPS constellation and detecting the launch of ballistic missiles.

But when Trump ordered the creation of a Space Force in June 2018, both Air Force officials and Republican lawmakers fell in line. In December 2019, Congress established the Space Force through the annual National Defense Authorization Act.

It would take another act of Congress to abolish the Space Force from U.S. law, as well as a massive bureaucratic effort to revert military space organizations back to how they were set up before the Space Force was established, said Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation and a former space operations officer for the Air Force.

All of that would require political capital that the Biden administration is going to need to spend elsewhere, said Weeden, who initially opposed creating a space service. “It’s just not worth it,” he said. “At this point we have spent thousands and thousands of hours and years of effort to create this new bureaucracy in the hope that it will address these challenges. At this point, we have no choice but to see that through. To now go back and spend even more time undoing all this stuff would be even worse.”

Trump has touted the Space Force as a signature achievement of his presidency. But his involvement in standing up of the service has been controversial.

“President Trump’s rhetoric has created a false perception in the public,” Weeden said. “You have people imagining that we’re going to have Marines on Mars and fighters in space and all kinds of crazy stuff. That is not the case.”

Some of those misperceptions have been self-inflicted by the Space Force itself, such as a July advertisement featuring a female guardian wearing a spacesuit and narrating about space exploration.

However, the president has also set out to connect the Space Force with the Trump brand — even going so far as to sell unofficial Space Force hats on his reelection website.

A July article in Time magazine described how the president was given the authority to choose the Space Force’s seal. Days later, he tweeted the seal with no notice to the Defense Department, which reportedly led to a conference call between defense officials and executives from Paramount Pictures concerned about the seal’s similarity to the “Star Trek” logo.

Trump also suggested to military officials that his wife, first lady Melania Trump, could help design uniforms for the new service, Time reported. That plot point was later parodied on the 2020 Netflix comedy series “Space Force,” in which Steve Carrell portrays a bumbling Air Force general who is tapped to lead the new space service.

“One of the biggest things we have to overcome is that there’s a Netflix series making fun of the Space Force,” said Mandy Smithberger, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project for Government Oversight. “If the public has been thinking about it all, the reputation of the Space Force — in public imagination — is one of incompetence.”

Harrison, of the Center for International and Strategic Studies, said Biden could take a more hands-off approach with the Space Force, allowing it to normalize itself with time and giving service officials the opportunity to lead the conversation.

“Just by not making a big show of interfering with it, that may help depoliticize it,” he said.

“But I personally think that might not be enough,” he added. “The way the Space Force was presented to the general public has not been healthy. It has not helped educate people about what the military does in space. It has caused more people to become confused about what the Space Force does versus what NASA does.”

To boldly go …

If the Space Force is going to win over the broader public, it needs to make some changes, experts agreed.

First, the Space Force should clarify exactly what the service is going to do and not do in space. “For example, the Space Force isn’t going to have people on the moon. The Space Force is talking about satellites in Earth orbit or cislunar space that can get better awareness of activities in cislunar space,” Weeden said.

Beyond that, the Space Force must lead a broader public discussion about how far the U.S. military should be willing to go to deter attacks against its space-based assets, he added.

Service officials have been clear about the threat posed to the United States as adversaries focus on testing technologies meant to disrupt or destroy U.S. satellites. Most recently, in December, Russia conducted its second direct-ascent anti-satellite missile test of 2020.

However, the amount of money the Space Force plans to invest in its offensive counterspace capabilities is less clear, given the classification of those programs.

“Overclassification is a huge problem. We can’t communicate what we have. We can’t communicate the problem,” Weeden said. “We can’t deter if we can’t talk about this stuff. Yet despite multiple [four-star generals] saying [declassification] is a top priority, I haven’t seen anything change.”

Harrison and Weeden agreed the service needs to reestablish the firewall between civil and military space, as the line between NASA and the Space Force has been blurred by Trump and some of his top politicians.

“If you carefully read the actual policy documents, it makes that [distinction] clear. It’s just that nobody ever reads those except for wonks like me. Most people only really see what Trump says,” Weeden said. “Substantively, most of what’s going on is good. The change mostly needs to be in the public rhetoric and discussion about what we’re doing.”

Harrison pointed to the December announcement of NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins transferring to the Space Force while in orbit at the International Space Station. While many military personnel have worked as astronauts, they do so in a civilian capacity.

“That really confuses the message” Harrison said.

Officials such as Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, the chief of space operations, are trying to set the record straight on the Space Force’s purpose and the importance of the military’s operations in space, Weeden said.

“I think there’s a realization amongst nations that access to space is no longer a given,” Raymond said in a Nov. 25 Defense Department news story. “We’ve got to make sure that we stay ahead of this growing threat.”

Still, “no one can contradict Trump. So when they do make clarifications it’s sotto voce or through channels that are less apparent than Trump’s original comments,” Weeden said.

To give Space Force a communications strategy that prioritizes its own needs, Harrison said the service should stand up its own public affairs and legislative liaison offices instead of conducting those activities through the Air Force, as it currently does.

“They’ve got to learn from the Marine Corps there, that they are part of the Department of the Air Force but they are not run by the Air Force,” Harrison said. “They’ve got to have the ability to develop their own independent messages as a military service. That would help a lot with their public image.”

Never give up. Never surrender.

The transition of personnel, equipment and funding to the Space Force is still a work in progress, but several major changes are planned for this year.

Chief Master Sgt. Roger Towberman, the service’s top enlisted adviser, told Military.com the service is working to solidify much-anticipated cultural touchstones, such as the Space Force song, dress uniform and rank structure.

“It’s about listening to everyone,” he said in an interview. “We feel we can craft a service narrative that both honors military traditions and speaks to the things that we want them to speak to: the essence of our service, the future of our service.”

By the end of 2021, the size of the Space Force will have tripled from about 2,400 active-duty members to about 6,400 people, Raymond said in December. Some of those personnel, he said, could be the first space operators transferring into the Space Force from the Army or Navy.

The Space Force also intends to stand up a new space acquisitions organization, called Space Systems Command, in 2021. SSC will be home to Space and Missile Systems Center, the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, and the Space Development Agency — as well as, potentially, other space procurement organizations from the Army and Navy.

That’s something Harrison said he’ll be keeping an eye on this year.

“They need to make sure they don’t leave any organizations or any programs in those other services that are clearly without a doubt building space systems,” he said. The Space Force should also “continue to transfer all of the budget accounts, including the [military personnel] accounts, from the Air Force. Because if you don’t control your own budget, then you’re not a real service.”

To keep the development of several new space systems on track — such as the Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared constellation of missile warning satellites — Harrison said the Space Force budget will likely continue to grow, although perhaps not as rapidly as under the Trump administration.

However, the Biden administration should also keep pressure on the Space Force to minimize bureaucratic overhead and prevent duplication with other services, said Smithberger, of the Project for Government Oversight.

“The amount of money going to the Space Force should be low and slow as they prove they can be responsible stewards,” she said. “I think if we send a lot of money to that service, we would be increasing program risk unnecessarily.”

In mid-June, the Space and Missile Systems Center announced that it would award ride-share contracts to six firms by using funding meant to bolster companies made financially vulnerable by the coronavirus pandemic.

However, the government in early July reversed course, recalling the $116 million designated for small launch providers because of “additional small business needs that were generated,” such as other government loan programs, said Will Roper, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics.

“My hope is that whenever there’s new [Defense Production Act] Title 3 funding or when resource frees up due to other efforts not executing as planned, that those [contracts] are the first to go back into the hopper,” Roper told reporters Tuesday.

“If I were asked today to put in one new Title 3 initiative, it’s small launch because I think it’s going to be an amazing industry base for this country, and if properly influenced, my military mission can be highly disruptive in future war fighting, especially if satellites can be put up in a very responsive way that changes the calculus for holding space assets at risk.”

In the June announcement, SMC stated that Aevum, Astra, X-BOW, Rocket Lab USA, Space Vector and VOX Space would each receive sole-source contracts for two ride-share missions to be conducted over the next 24 months. But it may no longer be possible for the companies to get all $116 million originally set aside for those contracts, Roper acknowledged.

“I don’t know if that much will free up,” he said. “We have had quite a few come in lower than initially estimated. So it’s possible that a resource will be freed, and whatever it is, we can scale some effort in small launch.”

With venture capital drying up due to worldwide economic instability caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Pentagon leaders have been vocal about the impact on the emerging small launch industry, which they see as a critical capability that could allow the Space Force to launch small satellites more cheaply and rapidly.

In April, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord labeled it — along with shipbuilding and aviation — as one of the three sectors the Defense Department was most concerned could be permanently impacted.

“Much of the industry have limited flight capability or are in the critical transition from development to flight, and this funding restriction may prevent or delay these systems,” Col. Rob Bongiovi, director of SMC Launch Enterprise Systems Directorate, told C4ISRNET in April. “The Space and Missile Systems Center is evaluating the impacts to the small launch industrial base to consider actions to enable a robust U.S. launch industrial base.”

Nathan Strout in Washington contributed to this report.

After strong ground winds at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida caused the postponement of the launch mission on Saturday, the Atlas V finally blasted off a day later at 9:14 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

The Boeing-made X-37B is an unmanned, reusable spacecraft that takes off vertically and lands horizontally on a runway. The U.S. Air Force, which owns two X-37B vehicles, has historically been reticent to comment on the capabilities of the X-37B and what it does during its extended time in space, aside from hosting scientific experiments.

“We’ve learned a lot from the X-37,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. John Raymond told a small group of reporters ahead of the launch. “One of the things that we’ve learned is the value of reusability, and I think as a Space Force there’s a couple things that we’re really going to value, and reusability is one of those and autonomy is another one.”

A live video stream of the launch showed the Atlas V lifting off into space and the separation of the rocket’s first stage from the Centaur upper stage. However, the live stream cut out afterward due to the extreme secrecy surrounding the capabilities of the X-37B, said ULA CEO Tory Bruno.

“It’s a classified mission, and what is classified about it is the details of the vehicle itself, the mission it will do on orbit and where it will do that,” he said. “Therefore we have to stop the live broadcast so that we do not make it easy for adversaries to figure those things out by having that much data about the flight and deployment.”

Sunday’s launch marked the start of the X-37B’s sixth mission, which will involve more experiments than any previous mission thanks to a new service module added to the aft of the vehicle.

Raymond called the module “a trailer … behind the truck that provides added capacity for experiments,” but he didn’t elaborate on the size of the module or how the X-37 was modified to incorporate that upgrade.

Earlier this month, the Air Force disclosed a number of the experiments that will be conducted onboard, most notably one that will deliver solar power to the ground from space via radio frequency microwave energy.

Additionally, the spacecraft will also deploy the small satellite FalconSat-8, which was developed by the Air Force Academy and carries five experimental payloads. The X-37B will also host two NASA experiments that will study how seeds used for food products are affected by radiation and the space environment.

In its last expedition, which ended in October, the X-37 spent a record-breaking 780 days on orbit, for a total of 2,865 days across all missions.

One question that has loomed over the X-37 is whether it has counter-space capabilities and could be used to test offensive technologies. Some space researchers believe the vehicle was used to launch three cubesats that were not registered in international tracking databases.

“The secret deployment of multiple small satellites raises additional questions about the mission of the X-37B,” stated the annual Global Counterspace Capabilities report released by the Secure World Foundation in March. “It suggests that the X-37B may have a mission to serve as a covert satellite deployment platform. The secrecy surrounding both the X-37B and the deployment may indicate they are part of a covert intelligence program, but it may also indicate the testing of offensive technologies or capabilities.”

The spacecraft also has unique performance attributes with regard to maneuverability, according to former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson. In July, Wilson said the X-37B “can do an orbit that looks like an egg and, when it’s close to the Earth, it’s close enough to the atmosphere to turn where it is.”

“Which means our adversaries don’t know — and that happens on the far side of the Earth from our adversaries — where it’s going to come up next. And we know that that drives them nuts. And I’m really glad about that,” she added, according to Military.com.

Saturday’s launch was the second-ever by the U.S. Space Force and the 80th under the National Security Space Launch effort. Space and Missiles Systems Center plans to launch seven other missions this year, it said in a news release.

Nathan Strout and Aaron Mehta contributed to this story.

As part of the fiscal 2020 defense policy bill, Congress established a Space Acquisition Council to oversee, manage and integrate the Pentagon’s disparate space acquisition entities, which include the Space Development Agency, Space and Missile Systems Center, and Space Rapid Capabilities Office.

The department is currently looking at the April 8-9 timeframe to hold the first meeting and and wants to move forward with a meeting even if COVID-19 continues to be a concern, said Shawn Barnes, who is currently performing the duties of assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration.

“I’m still looking at April as a target and I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to do that,” Barnes told Defense News in a March 19 interview. “But we’ll adjust accordingly. We may end up doing that, frankly, as a virtual meeting if we need to.”­­­

The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act mandates that the members of the council will include the Air Force undersecretary; the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, who will chair the council; the assistant secretary of defense for space policy; the director of the National Reconnaissance Office; the chief of space operations; and the commander of U.S. Space Command. All will be required to attend monthly council meetings.

Barnes said that the agenda of the first meeting will involve creating a charter for the organization that lays out the participants, roles, responsibilities and authorities of the Space Acquisition Council. The charter will also take into account recommendations the Defense Department will make in a space acquisition report, which is due to Congress on March 31.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced space organizations inside the Pentagon to alter their normal ways of business. Most personnel are working from home, and the number and size of meetings inside the building has decreased as more interaction moves to virtual venues, Barnes said.

While some personnel have had to come into the Pentagon to do work on classified networks, Barnes said his office has been careful to limit the number of people working in secure spaces together.

“We’ll bring in a couple of people to let them work on those classified networks, make sure we’re doing the kinds of things that we all should be doing [like] cleaning our keyboard,” he said.

“As we move forward there may be some challenges, but we’ll adjust accordingly as need be. For most of the kinds of things we’re doing in terms of broad architecture and acquisition reform, that really doesn’t require classified work because most of that is about process and it’s not about the specifics of any particular capability.”

Despite the uncertainty caused by COVID-19, Barnes said he was “pleasantly surprised” by the progress being made in the Pentagon’s space enterprise.

“The current environment hasn’t slowed our ability to do any space operations,” he said. “There have been no bumps or hiccups in the road. We are moving out as rapidly as we can on standing up the Space Force,” he said.

“Continuing resolutions, budget battles of any kind, are an enormous problem for the national security community,” said Griffin. “When the things we think we need to do are delayed or prevented by budget battles in Congress and continuing resolutions, it slows us down and in some cases prevents us from doing things that we earnestly believe we need to do. The Space Development Agency is one of, but by no means the only, casualty of our current situation.”

The administration requested $149.8 million in new funding for the SDA for fiscal year 2020, and is reported to want almost $11 billion over the next five years. Still, the agency needs Congress to approve that funding.

Griffin says he sees bipartisan agreement in Congress that the United States needs to reform its space architecture. But for now, the SDA is waiting for Congress to allocate them the funding needed to pursue the projects on its agenda, he said.

“I don’t know if we will ever get a budget,” said Griffin. “We will cope as best we can.”

Griffin oversaw the establishment of the SDA as a way to build the future national security space architectures while avoiding the conventional acquisition system, which was operating at too slow a pace to meet the military’s needs.

“Our government acquisition timelines tend toward the 15-year mark on average, from statement of need to operational capabilities. Our adversaries are using three- and four-year timelines consistent with what we used to be able to do,” said Griffin.

As an example, Griffin pointed to the F-117A stealth fighter, where there was only a 32-month stretch between signing a contract and getting an operational plane on the runway.

“If we can’t relearn how to do what we once knew how to do better than any other society, we will not prevail,” said Griffin. “So the Space Development Agency was created in the DoD to work outside the existing acquisition system to work with commercial space, to work with the purveyors of new architectures that will be more proliferated, more resilient and above all else, more timely in their application.”

For Griffin, the SDA was established to solve two overwhelming needs for the military: guaranteed communications and the ability to detect and track hypersonic weapons.

The SDA is currently looking to provide that first need through a layer of 70 satellites in low-Earth orbit. That large constellation provides resiliency through numbers, explained Griffin, and prevents a Pearl Harbor-type strike that could knock out all of the U.S. military’s guaranteed communications capabilities in a single blow. While the DoD will continue to purchase significant amounts of time on commercial communications satellites, that need for a resilient, guaranteed communications capability is unlikely to be provided commercially, he added.

Griffin also sees the SDA providing a LEO solution to detecting and tracking hypersonic weapons, which are much dimmer than the conventional ballistic missiles the Air Force’s current missile detection architecture was designed to handle. According to Griffin, the hypersonic challenge can be met in two ways: placing sensors closer to the missiles themselves (i.e., placing the sensors in LEO instead of geostationary orbit) or by putting even stronger sensors in GEO. In cooperation with the Missile Defense Agency, the SDA is taking the former approach.

“This will give us the persistent, global, low-latency surveillance, tracking, targeting and fire control we have to have to meet these new threats,” said Griffin. “If we take as our paradigm that this is going to be government business as usual, then I don’t know what the outcome will be, but … I can guarantee what the outcome won’t be: The outcome won’t be affordable and it won’t be timely.”

Using Intellian’s 1.5 meter antenna, the Navy was able to maintain a broadband connection while switching between Telesat’s satellites in low earth orbit and geostationary orbit. The demonstration shows how in a scenario where a satellite in geostationary orbit is attacked or denied, the antenna is able to switch to a LEO satellite to maintain a persistent broadband connection.

“Live testing over Telesat Ka-band satellites with Intellian’s 1.5m Ka convertible VSAT confirms that the antenna is an important innovation accessing space-based ‘layers’ of satellites in next-gen space architecture,” said Kurt Fiscko, technical director of PMW/A 170 at PEO C4I in a statement.

“One of the key elements that the government is looking for, particularly the military, is a path to more resilient, more flexible networking in space,” said Telestat’s Don Brown in an interview. “What Telesat is doing in this demonstration with Intellian is addressing one of the key proof points of future resiliency and flexibility … the ability to go between GEO satellite constellation and LEO constellations.”

According to Telesat’s Rich Pang, the antenna is perfectly sized for use on the Navy’s small ship variants.

Telesat is also a contractor working on DARPA’s Project Blackjack, an effort to demonstrate the military utility of a constellation of small LEO satellites. The Space Development Agency is building off of that effort to build the U.S. military’s next generation space architecture in LEO. Comprised of hundreds of small satellites in LEO, that architecture is meant to create resiliency through numbers and provide a backup to many capabilities that are currently provided through a few exquisite satellites in GEO.

“The real impetus for this demonstration is that the government has come out and said, ‘we don’t want to be locked into not only one particular provider, but we want to be able to operate in multiple regimes so we can be disaggregated and resilient,” said Pang. “So if someone attacks the GEO belt and takes out those assets I can switch to LEO, or vise versa.

“We think it’s a very exciting, very reasonable approach to the future,” said Brown.

When pressed by Sen. Richard Durbin (D- Illinois) about whether the agency should spend $4 billion on a new layer of sensors or on a new east coast missile defense site to address a potential future threat from the Iranians, Lt. Gen. Samuel A. Greaves was unwavering in his support for new sensors.

“We must improve the sensor layer. Period,” Greaves told the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee.

The Missile Defense Agency has been advocating for sending a layer of sensors into space to respond to increasingly sophisticated missile technologies currently being developed by U.S. adversaries. Space sensors would attempt to fill the gaps within the current layer of terrestrial sensors operated by the Department of Defense.

During the hearing, Greaves expressed concern about hypersonic missiles, which would travel at least five times the speed of sound.

“The hypersonic threat is real and it’s coming … It’s just a matter of time before [Russia and China] have fully developed that capability,” he said. “The concern is that technology leaking into the space that we have to deal with, rogue nations like North Korea and Iran.”

But the first step to defending against such a threat, according to Greaves, is better sensors.

“With these maneuvering threats you must maintain custody from birth to death,” said Greaves. “Plus with the more complex countermeasures that these threats will produce to confuse our defensive systems, the ability to maintain a custody becomes even more important.”

In November 2018, Chinese state media outlets boasted of two tests of a new DF-17 missile, equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV). The missile is likely capable of carrying both nuclear and conventional payloads and may be capable of delivering a maneuverable reentry vehicle rather than an HGV, according to reporting from the Diplomat.

Even if better sensors were in place, Greaves said other challenges to defend against hypersonic missiles remain.

“Once you develop an acceptable robust sensing architecture, then the other side of the equation is the interceptor piece,” Greaves said. “Do we need a new faster interceptor to combat the hypersonic threat?”

To respond to the increasing threat from hypersonic missile technology the MDA is requesting $120 million in fiscal 2019 for hypersonic missile defense. While this is a small segment of MDA’s $9.9 billion budget, it is a significant increase in the agency’s funding for this area. For fiscal 2018, Congress authorized $75.3 million for MDA to initiate the development of a capability to counter hypersonic boost-glide vehicles and conventional prompt strike assets.

But don’t expect Captain Kirk ordering phasers set on stun, “Battlestar Galactica” or ray guns blazing in orbit in the near future, space experts said. And some said a military space force may make it harder to keep Earth’s orbit a place of peace.

Saying his national security strategy “recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea,” Trump said at a San Diego Marine Corps base that he’s considering “a space force” that would be the equivalent of the Air Force, Army and Navy.

Trump said at first he wasn’t serious when he floated the concept, but “then I said what a great idea, maybe we’ll have to do that.”

This is more about boosting reconnaissance and cybersecurity than fighting in orbit, said Sean O’Keefe, who was both NASA administrator and Navy secretary under President George W. Bush.

Trump’s own defense secretary and Air Force secretary argued vociferously against it when members of Congress pushed it last year, O’Keefe said. You can emphasize more help for the military in space without going to the massive organizational change and expense, he said.

It could be a bureaucratic nightmare, said O’Keefe, a professor at Syracuse University.

He said some people may argue that a space force would “compromise the sanctity of considering space to be off limits from warfare.”

Ever since the Space Age started with the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, there has been a military and national security aspect to space, even though there are treaties and a United Nations committee that explicitly talk about keeping space a place of peace. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower established two separate space programs — a civilian one that became NASA, and a military one. NASA is much more public, but the military program is just as big.

The military space program has mostly been led by the Air Force. For the past several years, the military has been flying an unmanned space plane, a lot like the retired civilian space shuttle but smaller, experts said.

“It’s really what we’re already doing but giving elevated status to the mission,” American University space expert Howard McCurdy said of Trump’s proposal.

The military toyed with the idea of an Air Force space station in orbit in the 1960s, but President Richard Nixon’s administration killed the idea, mostly because it found that robotic space efforts were more effective and efficient, McCurdy said.

McCurdy, O’Keefe and others said any space force would probably consist of cadets on the ground operating robotic systems in space.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology astronautics professor and former NASA deputy administrator Dava Newman said she prefers space to be as peaceful as possible.

“Space is for exploration and lifting up humanity,” Newman said. “We should learn from our mistakes on Earth and keep space peaceful.”

“I’m sorry for everybody out there who champion some other high priority, some technical thing; it’s not that I disagree with those. But there has to be a first, and hypersonics is my first,” Griffin said at the McAleese/Credit Suisse conference Tuesday, in his first public comments since taking office 10 days ago.

The department will be looking to invest more in both offensive hypersonics capabilities and ways to defend against the threat, with new budget items likely to appear in the fiscal 2020 budget, Griffin said, adding that the goal is to leapfrog the work that China and Russia are doing in the hypersonic realm.

“I didn’t take this job so that we could regain parity with our adversaries. As I’ve taken to saying: ‘I want to see their hand and raise them one. I want to make them worry about catching up with us again,’ ” he said. “Any American, any ally or partner that we have who doesn’t see it that way, I don’t have time for you.”

The necessity, in Griffin’s mind, comes from the way hypersonic weapons can put at risk America’s ability to project power.

“When the Chinese can deploy [a] tactical or regional hypersonic system, they hold at risk our carrier battle groups. They hold our entire surface fleet at risk. They hold at risk our forward-deployed forces and land-based forces,” Griffin said.

“Without our ability to defend and without at least an equal response capability on the offensive side, then what we have done is we have allowed a situation to exist where our deployed forces are held at risk and we cannot do the same for them,” he continued. “And so our only response is either to let them have their way or to go nuclear. And that should be an unacceptable situation for the United States.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency budget for hypersonic weapons has increased steadily over the last two years, but more funding would inevitably be welcomed by supporters of the technology.

In FY17, Congress appropriated $85.5 million for hypersonics. That went up to $108.6 million in the FY18 request, a 27 percent increase.

And for the recently released FY19 request, the figure shoots up to $256.7 million — a whopping 136 percent increase, but still a fairly low figure by Pentagon standards.

In terms of hypersonic development, Griffin will have allies inside the Pentagon.

Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, the director of the Missile Defense Agency, said the pace at which Russia and China are “researching, developing, testing, delivering weapons systems” requires his agency to take the hypersonic threat seriously.

And Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also expressed concern over where the U.S. is on hypersonic technology development, although he noted that gap is not yet fatal.

“We have lost our technical advantage in hypersonics,” Selva said Jan. 30. “We haven’t lost the hypersonics fight.”