The Navy is seeking $195 million for the effort in fiscal year 2023, a 167% increase over the $73 million the service received for the effort in fiscal 2022.

Project Overmatch is the Navy’s implementation of Joint All-Domain Command and Control, a Department of Defense-wide effort to connect sensors and shooters across the services and generally improve networking and data capabilities. Although the Joint Staff has worked to establish a strategy for JADC2 implementation, the services have largely been tasked with developing their own approaches. In addition to the Navy’s Project Overmatch, the Army is pursuing its Project Convergence and the Air Force is advancing its Advanced Battle Management Systems.

Project Overmatch is the most secretive of the three major JADC2 efforts by far. Details on Project Overmatch development have been scant, with spending classified by the Navy. While Army and Air Force officials have invited reporters to JADC2 demonstrations and documented spending in budget requests, Navy officials have been tight-lipped about their efforts.

“We’ve been very deliberate about keeping a low profile and not a huge internet presence on ‘here’s all your facts on Project Overmatch,’” said Rear Adm. Doug Small, commander of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command at the WEST 2022 conference earlier this year.

Small insisted the Navy is making progress, even though there aren’t public milestones and spending to help keep the program accountable.

“We have been working at a fever pitch to deliver on those goals, and I won’t go into any of the specifics on those things, but in general what we’re doing is bringing the best of world-class commercial technologies, how the best companies in the world deliver capability to their users, and we’re just bringing that into the Navy and doing it at speed and scale,” added Small.

While the release of a top line budget for Project Overmatch offers a new level of insight into spending on the effort, the Navy didn’t offer any context on the year-over-year increase in the fiscal 2023 budget request. The Navy did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

Part of the increase could reflect the Navy’s decision to shift network and IT authorities to Project Overmatch in 2021. That move was part of the Navy’s effort to unify its network modernization efforts under a single office. For fiscal 2022, the Navy asked for $1.2 billion for enterprise networks.

The Navy’s budget overview shows boosted funding requests for a number of information warfare efforts related to Project Overmatch capabilities. The service is seeking $1 billion for cybersecurity, a 26% increase over what it received for fiscal 2022; $651 million for satellite communications, a 17% increase; and $610 million for command and control systems, a 5% increase.

With the capital falling under Taliban control on Sunday, Aug. 15, hundreds of people rushed to the airport in hopes of securing a flight out of Afghanistan. Civilians flooded the tarmac, with some reports of deaths as individuals clung to aircraft during takeoff.

New satellite images from commercial provider Maxar Technologies show crowds gathering at the airport at 10:36 a.m. local time on Aug. 16. According to the company, one image shows a Turkish airliner preparing to takeoff while security forces attempt to hold back crowds from the active tarmac, preventing them from blocking flight operations. Other images show traffic jams as people flee to the airport, as well as huge crowds gathered on and around the tarmac.

Imagery company Planet also released two satellite images of the scene in Kabul taken 45 minutes apart, which show crowds arriving at the airport.

The Pentagon acknowledged Monday afternoon that flights out of Kabul had been grounded, as the military worked to clear people from the airstrip.

“We’ve certainly seen all the dramatic video coming from the airport today and we obviously don’t want anyone else to get hurt,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “So we’re going to work methodically in coming hours to restore a safe and secure environment so that air operations can resume.”

The satellite, the first heavy national security payload with a cost-saving reusable booster, had a 12,550-mile journey with an onboard liquid apogee engine to reach its orbit. It will go through two weeks of on-orbit testing and checkout, and is expected to enter operational use in a few months, where it’s advanced capabilities will contribute to the full GPS constellation.

The launch from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket happened only seven months after the last launch of a GPS III satellite, an accelerated timeline that the Space Force said shows its progress in speeding up launches in order to respond to potential threats quickly.

The reusable booster, a first for a National Security Space Launch, saved the government $64.5 million, according to the Space Force.

“Today’s launch culminated our work to use previously-flown hardware for NSSL missions,” said Walter Lauderdale, who leads the Space and Missile Systems Center’s Falcon work. “Our partnership with SpaceX enabled us to complete this huge milestone well in advance of our first Phase 2 NSSL launch, enhancing flexibility and resiliency for National Security Space missions.”

Space Force officials hailed the event as further progress in its ability to quickly launch new satellites into orbit.

“This successful launch occurred just seven months after SV04 and the team worked concurrent operations between both SVs during the dynamic situation presented by COVID-19,” said Cordell DeLaPena Jr., the program executive officer for SMC’s Space Production Corps.

The Lockheed Martin-built GPS III satellites offer advanced capabilities over their predecessors, offering three times as much accuracy and eight times the anti-jamming capability. GPS III satellites can transmit M-code, a more secure anti-jamming positioning signal for military use. The fifth GPS III satellite is the 24th space vehicle in the constellation that is enabled with M-code and the last one needed to achieve full operational capability for the space segment. The military still has work to do to make M-code available through ground systems and other equipment.

American war fighters rely on a mix of commercial and government-owned satellites for global communications, but that infrastructure begins to run a bit thin above 65 degrees North. Satellite availability above the 70-degree line is extremely limited, leaving U.S. forces and sensors in the Arctic with far less connectivity than the rest of the military.

But a new generation of low Earth orbit satellites designed to deliver commercial broadband could help fill that gap. Using constellations comprising hundreds of satellites, services like SpaceX’s Starlink and OneWeb are being built out to provide internet access to any location on Earth from orbit.

Last year, NORTHCOM and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) asked Congress for $130 million in their unfunded priority list — essentially a wish list of items that didn’t fit into the Pentagon’s annual budget request — to explore using those two constellations for Arctic communications. That funding enabled contract awards to SpaceX and OneWeb for full-scale testing.

Now, NORAD and NORTHCOM Commander Gen. Glen VanHerck requested $79.8 million in his FY22 unfunded priority list obtained by C4ISRNET to continue that effort — that’s about $30 million less than the commands expected to spend in FY22, according to their FY21 request. They would use the funding to test new terminal prototypes that can connect with multiple commercial constellations, a capability laid out in the Space Force’s Fighting SATCOM Vision.

Long term, NORTHCOM suggested that this investment could encourage companies to develop more polar coverage with their communications satellite constellations.

According to the unfunded priority list, SpaceX launched 10 Starlink satellites into polar orbit in January, and plans to launch over a hundred more this summer. OneWeb told C4ISRNET in May that it had launched 182 satellites with plans to deliver Arctic coverage by the end of 2021. That’s in line with VanHerck’s letter, where he said he expects 24/7 Arctic coverage provided by multiple commercial providers around January 2022. The general noted that additional funding will be needed in FY23 and beyond for commercial service contracts and terminals.

Defense News reporter Joe Gould contributed to this report.

On Tuesday, somewhere 22,000 miles above the Earth’s surface, one of the four missile warning satellites in geostationary orbit probably detected the launch of a rocket off the coast of Florida.

But the rocket launched from Cape Canaveral wasn’t a threat — it’s backup.

At 1:37 p.m., a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lifted off in a fiery plume from the recently renamed Cape Canaveral Space Station, carrying the fifth and penultimate SBIRS satellite into orbit. It’s job is to replace an older satellite.

Approximately 45 minutes later, the rocket successfully delivered the $1 billion satellite to its destination in geosynchronous orbit. However, work on the satellite isn’t complete. It will now enter a six-month testing period before the Space and Missile Systems Center hands it over for operational use.

“The space acquisitions process is not complete until assets are delivered on orbit, tested for functionality, and handed over to the operations arm of the space enterprise,” said Brig. Gen. D. Jason Cothern, Space and Missile Systems Center Vice Commander and Program Executive Officer for Space Enterprise. “Launch is the great connector of fully integrated space capability.”

SBIRS is made up of four geosynchronous satellites, each with two sensors — a scanner that continuously monitors the Earth and a step-starer that can provide more accurate coverage for theater missions. In addition to the now five SBIRS GEO satellites, the Space Force operates two SBIRS payloads on host satellites in highly elliptical orbits, providing coverage of the polar regions with scanner sensors.

In 2014 the U.S. Air Force awarded Lockheed Martin $1.86 billion to build two more SBIRS satellites to replace the first two. SBIRS GEO 5 will eventually replace the first SBIRS GEO satellite, launched in 2011.

There were originally supposed to be even more replacement satellites, but in 2018 Congress opted to discontinue the SBIRS constellation, canceling planned seventh and eighth satellites. Instead, lawmakers tasked DoD with developing and launching a new constellation to eventually replace SBIRS. That constellation, Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared, is slated to be delivered in 2025.

Along with the SBIRS GEO satellites, Lockheed Martin is also the prime contractor for the first three Next Gen OPIR GEO satellites. The company was awarded $2.9 billion to design the satellites in 2018, and another $4.9 billion in 2021 to build them. Those are expected to begin launching in 2026. Northrop Grumman secured $2.9 billion to build two more Next Gen OPIR satellites for polar coverage.

This was the first launch of a U.S. military satellite using Lockheed Martin’s new LM 2100 Combat Bus, which features greater resilience, cyber hardening, enhanced power and common components that can streamline manufacturing, according to Vice President for Overhead Persistent Infrared Missions Tom McCormick. While the SBIRS GEO 5 and 6 satellites were originally contracted to be built on the same buses as the original constellation, Lockheed Martin opted to upgrade them to LM 2100 bus at no additional cost to the government. The company will also build the three Next Gen OPIR GEO satellites on the LM 2100 bus.

Tuesday’s Atlas V launch was the first for the Space Force out of Cape Canaveral in 2021. In addition to the SBIRS satellite, the rocket carried two tech demonstration satellites with multiple experimental payloads for the U.S. Air Force Academy. Secured on the aft end of the Centaur upper stage, those two satellites were deployed about 15 minutes into the launch.

ULA has launched all of the SBIRS satellites and will launch the sixth as well. SBIRS GEO 6 is on track for a 2022 launch.

That’s where the Aerial Dragnet program comes in. The wide-area surveillance capability from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency uses sensors mounted on drones to detect, classify and track small drones in dense, urban environments.

“We’re using drones to find drones, essentially,” Paul Zablocky, a program manager with the DARPA Strategic Technology Office, said Wednesday during the annual C4ISRNET Conference.

The government is concerned about the various dangers posed by small UAS, which can be armed with explosives or used to collect sensitive information.

“A small drone certainly poses a threat, and we’ve seen that at airports. We’ve seen on the news where they’ve been equipped with explosives. We’ve seen them used for ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] capabilities. And these can be used against our soldiers as well as civilian populations, so there’s certainly a threat there, and they are widely available,” Zablocky explained.

DARPA wants Aerial Dragnet to eventually be able to interface with C-sUAS systems, passing along its tracking data from optical sensors, acoustic sensors and inexpensive radars so that the weapon system can defeat the threat. DARPA is targeting a price point of $20,000 for coverage of 20 square kilometers (about 12 miles), which Zablocky said is relatively cheap compared to other systems.

Aerial Dragnet was tested in San Diego, California, in 2019 and more recently in Rosslyn, Virginia. The San Diego event was the first test of the system in a dense, urban environment, and Zablocky said he was surprised how much clutter showed up in the data. Using data from that test, DARPA has been able to refine its signal processing algorithms, he said.

That effectively wraps up DARPA’s testing of the system, said Zablocky, and the agency is looking to transition the program to another organization for further testing and development.

“We’re in conversations now with transitioning that program over. There’s still a lot of research and development to do,” he added. “So we’ve brought down a lot of the risks. We’ve — as I said — collected a lot of data and have a much better understanding of what needs to be done, but to really turn this into a capability or product will still take some work, so we are in conversations with various organizations to pick it up and continue to run with it.”

WASHINGTON — Iran used commercial satellite images to monitor Ain al-Asad Air Base in Iraq as it prepared to launch more than a dozen ballistic missiles at U.S. and coalition forces, 60 Minutes reported.

That detail came more than a year after the night of the attack on Jan. 7, 2020. Iran said the barrage was “fierce revenge” for the assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, killed by the U.S. in a drone strike days earlier. The missile attack damaged the base, equipment and a helicopter, and 110 people had to be treated for traumatic brain injuries. But no one was killed, thanks in part to early intelligence that an attack was imminent and a critical early warning from the Space Force’s missile warning satellite operators.

The 60 Minutes report revealed new details about the timing of the evacuation, and how Iran tried to use commercially available satellite imagery to monitor the base.

The report said that Iran purchased satellite images of the base on the day of the attack, and U.S. Central Command was aware of it. According to CBS News national security correspondent David Martin, USCENTCOM Commander Gen. Frank McKenzie timed the evacuation of al-Asad Air Base around Iran’s purchase of satellite imagery of the base.

“If you go too early, you risk the problem that the enemy will see what you have done and adjust his plans,” McKenzie told the reporter.

McKenzie waited until Iran had purchased its last satellite image of the day before evacuating the base, ensuring that Iran was acting on out-of-date images, he said in the interview.

“They would have seen airplanes on the ground and people working,” said McKenzie. “I think they expected to destroy a number of U.S. aircraft and to kill a number of U.S. service members.”

In a statement, USCENTCOM told C4ISRNET that it “does assess that Iran uses commercial satellite imagery from a variety of sources.” It declined to answer further questions.

It is not clear which satellite imagery provider Iran purchased the images from.

The U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Defense buy commercial satellite imagery for a number of different uses. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency purchases unclassified commercial images to share with other government organizations, while the National Reconnaissance Office is using study contracts to determine what commercial imagery it will purchase for the intelligence community. The military is also showing increased interest in the growing commercial satellite imagery market, signing agreements with various companies for images and real-time analytics. In September, the U.S. Army experimented with using commercial imagery for beyond-line-of-sight targeting.

It’s also not clear how the U.S. military knew Iran was purchasing the images, or how it knew when images of al-Asad Air Base were purchased.

From the growth of the nascent military branch to the award of massive new launch contracts, 2020 was a busy year in the space domain. Just this December, the Trump administration formalized its thinking about space in a new National Space Policy and gave Space Force members a surprise birthday gift: an official name. With new developments, launches and announcements spilling out throughout this year, even the most ardent observers could be forgiven for missing a story or two.

And so — without any more bloviating — here’s a recap of the top six military space stories of 2020.

The Space Force takes shape

While history will note 2019 as the year the Space Force was created, 2020 was the year the new service began to take shape.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond says his team had five focus areas for year one of setting up the first new branch of the military in 70 years: developing its people, developing its doctrine, presenting an independent budget, designing the force and presenting forces to a joint command. Raymond’s team has arguably made strides in all of those areas.

In 2020, the Space Force got its first member and chief of space operations, added 2,500 people to the new service, defined “spacepower” as distinct from military power in its capstone doctrine, set up the first of three commands, began implementing a series of acquisition reforms, and gave its personnel their official name: guardians. Questions remain, such as which capabilities and offices will transfer to the Space Force from the other services and what the new Space Systems Command will look like. Still, Raymond was optimistic about the progress made in year one.

“As I look back on this first year, I look back with great pride — great pride for the work that our space professionals have done in establishing this new service,” said Raymond in a December media call. “The progress we have made far surpasses anything I would have expected. We have completely reorganized the national security space organization — the largest restructure in our history.”

Space Development Agency orders first satellites

When the Trump administration created the Space Development Agency in March 2019, the office was a bit of an enigma. While most observers called for the consolidation of space systems acquisitions, the Trump administration established a new agency outside the purview of the U.S. Air Force. Furthermore, experts questioned whether the agency would survive the year, especially with the establishment of a Space Force imminent.

But in 2020, SDA defined its place in the nation’s space enterprise: building a new National Defense Space Architecture that will be made up of hundreds of satellites in low Earth orbit. The core of that architecture — a space-based mesh network — will serve as the space component of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the Pentagon’s effort to connect any sensor to any shooter across services and domains.

And while the agency’s biggest advocate in the Pentagon — Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin — left the government for the private sector, the office moved forward confidently in soliciting and awarding its first contracts over the summer. In August, the agency awarded York Space Systems $94 million and Lockheed Martin $188 million to build 10 satellites each for the inaugural transport layer. Then in October, the agency issued contracts for its first eight missile tracking satellites: $149 million for SpaceX and $193 million for L3Harris. A protest from Raytheon Technologies is holding up the tracking layer satellites, though SDA says it is taking corrective action and working to keep the effort on track for a 2022 delivery.

SpaceX and ULA win massive launch contracts

In one sense, the story of 2020 could be the emergence and success of several small launch providers despite a global pandemic. Yet the biggest launch contract of the year was for traditional heavy launches. In August, the Space Force issued its National Security Space Launch contract to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, with the former receiving $316 million and the latter receiving $337 million.

The National Security Space Launch contracts will support more than 30 heavy lift launches for the Space Force and National Reconnaissance Office over a five-year period — from fiscal 2022 through 2027. Under the arrangement, 60 percent of launch services orders will go to ULA, with SpaceX taking up the remainder.

While the award is a major victory for SpaceX, which has fought tooth and nail to force its way into the lucrative military heavy lift launch market, it is undoubtedly frustrating for the two companies left out — Northrop Grumman and Blue Origin — which had been developing new rockets as part of the competition.

On-orbit servicing presents new opportunities

2020 marked the first successful docking of two commercial satellites on orbit as part of a commercial satellite life extension service offered by Northrop Grumman’s SpaceLogistics. That service involves attaching a SpaceLogistics Mission Extension Vehicle to an Intelsat communications satellite with depleted fuel reserves. By supplementing the satellite’s fuel reserves with its own and effectively towing the client around orbit, the MEV is expected to stretch the satellite’s service life by five years.

While the mission was entirely commercial, it has major implications for the military, which is looking into using SpaceLogistics’ services to extend the lives of its own satellites.

And commercial on-orbit satellite servicing could extend far beyond simply supplementing empty fuel reserves. Following the successful docking in February, SpaceLogistics announced a partnership with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program, which is working to create the first commercial spacecraft with a robotic arm that can perform repairs, augmentation, assembly, inspection or relocation of other spacecraft already on orbit.

SpaceLogistics is understandably bullish about the prospect of the military purchasing life extension services, and the Department of Defense has expressed interest. Other companies are eager to compete to provide those services. Most notably, Astroscale entered the field in June, providing its own slate of on-orbit servicing solutions.

Perhaps on-orbit servicing won’t be as feasible or cost effective as hoped, but 2020 was the year the concept became a reality.

Russia continues anti-satellite weapons testing

Throughout 2019 and 2020, the Pentagon used the development and testing of anti-satellite weapons by Russia and China as a justification for establishing the Space Force. And in 2020, Russia provided plenty of fodder for those who believe that nation’s space activities are provocative, to say the least.

In 2020, the Russian government conducted two tests of a direct-ascent anti-satellite missile, capable of taking out satellites in low Earth orbit. While Russia has tested such missiles in the past, pushback from the newly established U.S. Space Command brought the issue to the fore in 2020. The 11th combatant command was quick and direct in calling out the tests, which it characterized as aggressive.

“Russia’s DA-ASAT test provides yet another example that the threats to U.S. and allied space systems are real, serious and growing,” said Raymond, then-head of U.S. Space Command, after the first test in April. “The United States is ready and committed to deterring aggression and defending the nation, our allies and U.S. interests from hostile acts in space.”

The command continued its criticisms of Russia in December, when that government conducted another test.

“Russia has made space a war-fighting domain by testing space-based and ground-based weapons intended to target and destroy satellites. This fact is inconsistent with Moscow’s public claims that Russia seeks to prevent conflict in space,” Space Command head Gen. James Dickinson said. “Space is critical to all nations. It is a shared interest to create the conditions for a safe, stable and operationally sustainable space environment.”

But perhaps more concerning than the direct-ascent missiles was what USSPACECOM characterized as the testing of an on-orbit anti-satellite weapon. In July, USSPACECOM announced that a Russian satellite appeared to have launched a high-speed projectile into space, an action inconsistent with its stated purpose. A similar test was carried out in 2017.

U.S. officials have not shied away from characterizing this capability as a weapon — especially since Russian government satellites have a habit of sidling up to U.S. commercial and government satellites.

“China and Russia are continuing to develop space weaponry,” said Vice President Mike Pence in December remarks to the National Space Council. “Russia demonstrated a space-based anti-satellite weapon earlier this year. China is developing a new manned space station, and its robotic spacecraft will return samples from the moon in just a matter of weeks.”

Army tests space-enabled sensor-to-shooter pipeline

Superficially, the Army doesn’t scream space. Yet in 2020, the Army made big advances during Project Convergence that show how it plans to use new space-based capabilities to enable beyond-line-of-sight targeting.

Project Convergence is the Army’s new campaign of learning, an effort to transform the battlefield with artificial intelligence, developmental networks and new sensing capabilities. In short, the Army wants to be able to connect any sensor to the best shooter. Satellites were used both as sensors to detect threats and as a network to connect sensors and shooters across the battlefield.

Tactical imagery satellites were a major part of Project Convergence. Taking images of the battlefield from their high vantage point, a satellite would downlink its data to a TITAN surrogate, where artificial intelligence was then used to process that imagery, automatically detect threats, and provide targeting data to Army shooters. In this new setup, satellites can provide the essential sensing capability to enable beyond-line-of-sight targeting.

The Army also tapped into new commercial satellite networks in low Earth orbit to connect its systems. Using proliferated constellations such as SpaceX’s Starlink, the Army was able to transport data hundreds of miles in just seconds. Army officials say they will be able to experiment with even more capacity at Project Convergence 2021, as the commercial constellations become more mature.

All told, those space-based capabilities helped cut down the sensor-to-shooter timeline from 20 minutes to 20 seconds.

“I can tell you with confidence, there isn’t a person in the Army now who doesn’t understand or isn’t able to appreciate the capability that this deep sensing capability from space provides now,” Willie Nelson, director of Army Futures Command’s Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing Cross-Functional Team, told C4ISRNET following the exercise. “There’s not a dry eye in the room when you look at how fast we can rapidly find threats and get those to shooters.”

Much, much more to come

Missing your favorite military space development of 2020? Perhaps you were more interested in the relaunch of the secretive X-37B space plane, the operational acceptance of M-Code Early Use, or even the completion of the Advanced Extremely High Frequency communications constellation. 2020 was a busy year to be sure, and 2021 looks to be equally enthralling as we learn about the Biden team’s plans for the space domain, see how the Space Force organizes its acquisitions, and find out how the military will utilize emerging commercial space capabilities.

A satellites in low Earth orbit will provide targeting data for hypersonic weapons that are dimmer than traditional ballistics and can maneuver in flight, plugging a massive hole in the U.S. missile warning architecture.

Lawmakers, who approved the appropriations package Dec. 21 by a majority wide enough to overcome a veto hinted at by President Donald Trump, had expressed concern throughout the year that the agency’s budget does not include any funding to develop the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS). While MDA leadership did ask Congress to fund the constellation, seeking $108 million for HBTSS in its unfunded priority list, legislators communicated their confusion about why such a high priority program was not included in the agency’s actual budget request.

“In particular, ongoing acquisition programs that were identified as high priority within MDA’s architecture as recently as one year ago, such as the development of a space sensor for the tracking of hypersonic threats and ballistic missiles … have been removed from MDA’ s budget, or underwent significant funding reductions,” lawmakers wrote in comments on the plan. “The inconsistencies are concerning.”

The $130 million budget addition for the project includes a $10 million transfer from the Space Development Agency.

The legislation also appears to resolve some tension between the Pentagon and Congress over which agency should lead HBTSS development, a disagreement ongoing since 2019.

Lawmakers seemed to settle the debate with a mandate that MDA serve as the lead agency on the effort in the fiscal 2020 defense policy legislation. But the issue was revived earlier this year when then-Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin reportedly decided to place HBTSS funding under the Space Development Agency’s (SDA) budget request. The MDA director’s testimony that his agency was still in charge of HBTSS at a March hearing did little to assuage lawmakers’ frustration over the move, and they ultimately threatened to remove MDA from Griffin’s portfolio.

The source of the confusion seemingly comes from HBTSS’ place within the missile warning enterprise. While the program is ostensibly owned by MDA, it is just one part of a hypersonic detection and tracking solution being built into the National Defense Space Architecture (NDSA), a constellation being developed by SDA that will eventually be made up of hundreds of satellites in low Earth orbit.

The constellation will include its own wide-field-of-view tracking layer satellites that will initially detect hypersonic threats. As threats come into and leave the view of individual satellites, custody of the threat will pass from satellite to satellite via an on-orbit mesh network. Ultimately, custody will land with an HBTSS, which has a more sensitive medium-field-of-view sensor that can create the targeting data needed to destroy the threat.

Due to HBTSS’ relationship with SDA’s architecture, the White House argued throughout 2019 that it was too early to put a single agency in charge of the program. Lawmakers seemed to put the issue to rest by placing MDA in charge, but Griffin’s reported move to shift some oversight back to SDA revived frustrations.

Griffin’s view, however, may have won out in the end. The newly passed fiscal 2021 appropriations bill states that SDA and MDA “will share responsibility for developing and deploying the HBTSS architecture and constellation under a joint memorandum of agreement that defines each agency’s roles and responsibilities.”

That isn’t to say Congress doesn’t want more clarification. The legislation calls on the agencies to submit a comprehensive acquisition strategy for HBTSS to Congress, including all components of the architecture, cost estimates, integrated test plans and more.

It’s hardly the most pressing question for the new service, but the absence of any definitive answer has lit the imagination of observers, who have suggested everything from the straightforward “troopers” to the decidedly weird “spacers.” For its part, Space Force leadership has simply referred to its members as space professionals.

But Vice President Mike Pence put an end to the speculation in a surprise announcement Dec. 18, when he declared that members of the Space Force would be referred to as guardians.

“We just returned from the Oval Office, so it is my honor on the behalf of the United States to announce that henceforth the men and women of the United States Space Force will be known as guardians,” said Pence. “Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and guardians will be defending our nation for generations to come.”

The announcement came during a small ceremony at the White House celebrating the one year anniversary of the Space Force, established by law on Dec. 20, 2019.

“On behalf of your commander in chief, let me urge each and every one of you guardians to keep pushing,” said Pence. “Keep pushing the vision and the mission of the United States Space Force, which is to ensure that America remains as dominant in space and from space as we are on land and sea and air.”

The Space Force initially began soliciting suggestions from its ranks in February.

“We received more than 500 submissions from space professionals across the globe,” Col. Mary Catherine Hague, deputy director for space and advisor to the chief of space operations, told C4ISRNET. “From those submissions, we narrowed the finalists down to astra, guardian, sentinel, talon and titan. Guardian was the clear front runner after careful research involving space professionals and the American public.”

While the final choice might surprise some, the Space Force offered a further explanation of the name.

“Today, after a yearlong process that produced hundreds of submissions and research involving space professionals and members of the general public, we can finally share with you the name by which we will be known: guardians,” read the statement. “The opportunity to name a force is a momentous responsibility. Guardians is a name with a long history in space operations, tracing back to the original command motto of Air Force Space Command in 1983, “Guardians of the High Frontier.’”

Valerie Insinna contributed to this story.