WASHINGTON \u2014 The Air Force Research Laboratory could award a contract as soon as this summer for a new experiment on cislunar space domain awareness to help the U.S. military observe and track objects that reside between geostationary orbit and the moon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AFRL plans to issue a solicitation by March for the Cislunar Highway Patrol System, or CHPS, the director of the lab\u2019s Space Vehicles Directorate, Col. Eric Felt, told C4ISRNET in a recent interview. Using the Space Force\u2019s Space Enterprise Consortium contracting vehicle, Felt expects to make an award this summer and is eyeing a 2025 launch date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CHPS is one of several AFRL programs focused on cislunar space operations, the area between geostationary orbit \u2014 itself more than 22,000 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface \u2014 and the moon\u2019s orbit. Other efforts include the Defense Deep Space Sentinel pathfinder \u2014 which will demonstrate the use of small satellites for a range of cislunar missions \u2014 and Autonomy Demonstrations and Orbital eXperiments, a portfolio of demonstration satellites focused on cislunar space domain awareness and logistics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These new projects come as the Defense Department made a notable shift in its posture toward cislunar space in the last few years \u2014 from viewing potential deep-space threats as part of a far-off future to recognizing that those threats may present much sooner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe envisioned that there could be adversary activity out there that could pose a threat to our space systems many years ago, but we thought: \u2018Oh, that\u2019s a long way out,\u2019 \u201d Felt said. \u201cBut there\u2019s been so much activity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking last month during a Mitchell Institute event, Chief of Space Operations Gen. John Raymond said he expects the Space Force will have a cislunar domain awareness capability on orbit within the next five to 10 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The increased activity isn\u2019t just adversarial, Felt noted. It\u2019s also commercial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat pace of activity then causes us to say: \u2018Well, we had a plan to get after cislunar space domain awareness, but now we need to accelerate our plan because things are happening much faster than we expected,\u2019 \u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last April, the Space Vehicles Directorate convened a cislunar stakeholders meeting, bringing together officials from the Defense Department, NASA and the intelligence community to coordinate their work in this area and develop a road map that identifies capabilities each agency is pursuing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The agencies have made \u201ca lot of great progress\u201d on the road map, the details of which won\u2019t be released publicly, Felt said. He noted that much of the synchronization work was completed and that industry will likely see more solicitations for programs like CHPS soon as those efforts get off the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Felt doesn\u2019t foresee a need for another dedicated event similar to last year\u2019s stakeholder meeting; the need for cislunar domain awareness has become more mainstream and is now baked into regular discussions. As examples of this, Felt pointed to a late October conference on cislunar security as well as a space domain awareness leadership workshop in January that included a full day\u2019s meeting on the topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe have rolled the cislunar challenge into the existing things like it\u2019s just another kind of space domain awareness,\u201d he said. \u201cIt happens to be a kind that we need to do a lot of work on, but we decided we would be better to bring it into the mainstream.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The increased focus on cislunar projects reflects a growing recognition of a near-term need for deep-space domain awareness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":69432,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":37,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"10":{"categories":["military-space-report","newsletters","daily-news-roundup","home","space"],"primary_category":"space"}}},"categories":[7,106,29,32,37],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3260],"class_list":["post-26388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-battlefield-tech","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-newsletters","category-space"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"CD5AAAA6FJALPCSVOYZ5VHDBFI","arc_canonical_url":"\/battlefield-tech\/space\/2022\/02\/13\/air-force-research-lab-building-momentum-on-cislunar-projects\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n