Remarks from the 27th National Space Symposium Gen. William L. Shelton, Commander, Air Force Space Command, AFSPC/CC

Commander, Air Force Space Command Gen. William L. Shelton, Commander, Air Force Space Command, AFSPC/CC

27th National Space Symposium, Broadmoor Resort, Colorado Springs, Colo.

General Shelton: Thanks for that kind introduction. And compliments to the Space Foundation for another great Space Symposium.

The 27th year. This thing has just grown every year. Nine thousand people participating this year. Unbelievable.

There are many dignitaries here that I’d recognize if we had time, but thank you all for being here today, for coming to Colorado Springs. There are many friends that I’ve been associated with, gotten to know over the years, and a long career in the space business, and I really appreciate all of you not walking out during the introduction. [Laughter].

I know many have traveled long distances to get here today, so this reminds me of a story about an airline pilot that I heard recently. This airline pilot came in for a landing and really cranked the airplane. He really slammed the thing in. And unfortunately, his airline had a policy that they would go stand out and say thank you to the passengers as they all exited. He dreaded his responsibility on this particular day, but went out there and did his duty, kind of kept his eyes down. All the passengers got off but one older lady, coming down the aisle, hobbling down the aisle on her cane. She came up to him finally and said, “Sonny, do you mind if I ask you a question?” He says, “No, ma’am. Anything.” She said, “Can you tell me, did we just land or did we get shot down?” [Laughter]. Well I hope that wasn’t your experience when you came out here and hopefully it won’t be your experience going home as well.

This will be a little bit different kind of speech. I want to open a dialogue, particularly with industry and academia today. I’ll just start this dialogue with some facts. The first fact I’ll talk about is dependence on space is high, higher than it’s ever been for sure within DoD. Navigation, timing, comm, weather, ISR, we’ll talk about all those things in a minute. But our dependence has never been higher. In fact it’s integrated into how we fight wars today so deeply that it’s hard to imagine taking space out of the equation.

The second fact is that our vulnerability in space is increasing. If you look at debris, both natural and manmade debris, that’s increasing. The traffic is increasing. We’ve now got over 50 nations that are participants in the space environment. Then the counter-space threats, both ground-based and space-based counter-space threats that we have to pay attention to.

Then the third fact, our budget will at best be flat. There are some other Draconian projections out there that would have our budget turning down very steeply. How much of that share will come to the space business? I don’t think we know. But I think it’s safe to assume that it’s going to be a challenging time for us.

So if you think about those three facts — dependence being high, vulnerability is increasing, and the budget for space is likely to come down — the logic would say that we ought to get more money, but we’re not going to get more money. So how do we think about this?

And here’s the question that I would like to pose to all of us. Are there architectural options that will provide a nexus of adequate capability, of passive resiliency and costs that are within budget? What do I mean by all of that?

Let’s talk about adequate capability. We’re not going to get any relief. I don’t expect any relief, I’m not asking for any relief from the National Command Authority, from combatant commanders, others users of space systems.

In terms of protected comms, national and nuclear command and control capability. When that message absolutely has to get there, nobody’s going to relieve us of that requirement.

Wideband communications. Increasing use of airborne ISR traffic over wideband communications. Intelligence traffic. Routine command and control that travels over wideband comms. It’s our lifeline, absolutely our lifeline to deployed forces around the world, as well as to our diplomatic corps around the world. And in this era of information-enabled warfare, there’s no question that wideband satellite communications will continue to play a central role.

Missile warning. We’ve got to maintain visual on some events around the planet. Missile defense. The contribution of missile warning to missile defense. Theater warning. Telling our troops when to duck, where that missile may impact. And with increasing capabilities on a space-based infrared system, battlespace awareness, technical intelligence. As we refine our IR sensors from space, there is no question that there will be more demand for this capability, not less.

Let’s talk about GPS for just a second. GPS is absolutely the gold standard for the position, navigation, timing capability across the world. And oh by the way, it’s free. That’s not a paid political announcement, it is free. There are civil, military, commercial uses that abound. It’s a $110 billion industry right now. Five hundred million cell phones are GPS-enabled just today. The military dependence on the timing signal from GPS as well as the positioning and navigation capabilities from GPS just flat enables precision warfare. Everything we do employing weapons any more seems to somehow involve GPS. Again, nobody’s going to relieve us of that requirement.

Weather satellites. With the recent breakup of the NPOESS program, the defense weather satellite system is part of the national and international weather capabilities for our globe. We’ve got the morning orbit, and it’s essential that we continue weather capabilities for our warfighters and for our civilian counterparts.

So that just kind of scratches the surface about dependence and I hope it makes the point that we’re not going to be relieved of any requirements, even as the budget comes down.

And we’re challenged with maintaining situational awareness in space. Our existing SSA capabilities, space situational awareness capabilities, currently track over 20,000 objects right now. We catalog those routinely and keep track of them. That number is projected to triple by 2030, and much of that is improved sensors, but some of that is increased traffic. Then if you think about it, there are probably 10 times more objects in space than we’re able to track with our sensor capability today. Those objects that are untrackable, yet they are lethal to our space systems — to military space systems, civil space systems, commercial — no one’s immune from the threats that are on orbit today, just due to the traffic in space.

Smaller satellites, more debris, more debris begets more debris, unfortunately, from a probability point of view. More debris is going to run into more debris, producing more debris. So you get the point.

It may be a pretty tough neighborhood in LEO and GEO in the not too distant future here. So that speaks to our need to have better capabilities in the Joint Space Operations Center. And let me talk just for a minute, I know a lot of you are interested in whither goest the JSPOC Mission Systems program. We recently had an independent program assessment on that program and we found some structural difficulties in the program. As a result, we’re reviewing those IPA results. We’ve pulled back some RFPs, suspended response to those RFPs. But just hang with us for a little bit. We’ll get a way forward developed here in the not too distant future and brief that through the department as well as to the Congress, so be patient with us for a little bit here.

But we must continue to provide the required services. No question about it. But as the Congressman just said, it will be with mature technologies and it may be with “just good enough” capability rather than pushing the state of the art.

I think it’s clear that we’ve got to restore confidence in our ability to produce on schedule and on cost, and above all, we’ve got to bake in a mission assurance mindset in all that we do in this business. Mission assurance has to come first.

So that’s adequate capability. What about passive resilience?

We can’t tolerate the loss of mission critical cability. We just can’t tolerate it. Whether that be due to intentional things or things that just happen due to technical difficulties. We can’t tolerate the losses.

So if you think about it from a technical point of view, a fault tolerant design, I think that’s where we need to be architecturally. We need to have a fault tolerant architecture as we go forward.

It’s very difficult to defend in space. It’s expensive. Physics gets in the way. The distances involved. I had them calculate the other day, okay, how big is our AOR in space? And from GEO down, 73 trillion cubic miles. How do you defend 73 trillion cubic miles?

So I think we’ve got to think about new ways that we’re going to bring about our constellations in the future, and how can we produce higher resiliency with those new constellations? Do we need to think about different orbital regimes? Inherently it seems like higher altitudes would be the right way to go, but is that the right way to go? Do we need to disaggregate our capabilities on satellites so that we aren’t building such blueprinted targets, so to speak, or even a technical difficultly takes out such a lot of capability.

What about hosted payloads? What about commercial partnerships? Commercial options? What about allied capabilities, international capabilities as well? Can we distribute sensors and network those together so we’ve got smaller satellites, smaller busses, but it gives you adequate capability when you network them together. Do we want to store and spare on orbit? Or do we want to build ORS-like rapid reconstitution or augmentation capability? And as we think through that, is the next series of conflicts likely to be a come-as-you-are war so that it doesn’t matter how rapidly you can get there, it’s come-as-you-are?

Do we need different strategies for different orbital regimes? Can we think about LEO, different from HEO, different from GEO, different from NEO? Is that something we need to think our way through?

And then how can all this contribute to launch process? With smaller satellites do we get more frequent launches but better production schedules, better economic order of quantities, better industrial base effects, shared ride possibilities? There are a lot of questions I think around passive resilience. Things we need to think our way through.

The final area I want to talk about is cost and costs within the budget. Can we analyze all these trades that I’ve just talked about and let cost be the independent variable? I think we can. But do we need to also think about designing the budget and just letting the budget be the driver?

We tried better, cheaper, faster, and we found that you could have two of the three but you couldn’t have all three. It’s tempting for industry to say to us, just get the government out of the way. I think we’ve all seen that movie too. That didn’t work so well. We tried it in the ’90s and it didn’t work. I’m not being pejorative here, I’m just saying there’s got to be a balance. There’s got to be a balance with government involvement. Industry has to have the freedom to innovate. I think we’ve got both ends of the spectrum here where no government involvement didn’t work, too much government involvement’s unaffordable for us and probably constrains industry too much. So we’ve got to find that balance somehow.

So as I sum up here, is there a nexus? Again, is there a nexus of adequate capability, passive resilience and affordable cost? I would submit to you that the die is cast for the next several years, maybe the next ten to fifteen years, just because of long development timelines. That gives us an opportunity right now to start turning the ship. And I’ll tell you, turning this big ship is hard. But as General Moorman used to tell me, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” He didn’t really say that, Ralph Waldo Emerson said that. But as applied to the space business, he was the one that did it first.

In conclusion, let me say this. I need your ideas. It may sound like for you mathematicians in the audience that I’ve just presented N equations and N+1 unknowns. But I don’t think so.

I want to leave you with another quote, this one from George S. Patton that says, “If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

I’m challenging every audience I speak to to help me think about this. I’m absolutely convinced that there are better ways to do the missions we’re charged with doing and that we can find those better ways and fit them within the available budget.

I’ll quote the Rolling Stones, too. Somebody said you can’t quote the Rolling Stones and George S. Patton in the same speech, and I’m going to prove you can. [Laughter]. They once sang, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime you just might find you get what you need.” I think that’s where we need to be. Getting what we need in this business. But it’s only with the combined talent of industry, the government, academia, our national labs, we’re going to find the nexus that we’re seeking.

Thanks for your attention. I look forward to your questions. Thank you.

[Applause].

Moderator: Thank you very much, General Shelton. We have some questions that are coming from the audience. I’d like to start with one that asks, if the Air Force plans on funding space debris mitigation capability at all?

General Shelton: We haven’t found a way yet that is affordable and gives us any hope for mitigating space debris. The best we can do, we believe, is to minimize debris as we go forward with our operations. As we think about how we launch things, as we deploy satellites, minimizing debris is absolutely essential and we’re trying to convince other nations of that imperative as well.

Unfortunately, with the duration of most things on orbit, you get to live with the debris problem for many many years and in some cases decades. So minimizing debris is important to us and it should be to other nations as well.

Moderator: With the U.S. Air Force taking DoD corporate ownership of space, what can be done to ensure that requirement equities are best represented for other DoD services? How can the Department of Defense coordinate those efforts?

General Shelton: We now have a Defense Space Council that is chaired by the Executive Agent for Space who also happens to be the Air Force Secretary, but the membership on that Defense Space Council includes all the services. It includes all the major offices, Secretary of Defense offices. So I think it is a broad representation of all the equities within the department. So I’m convinced from that as well as the requirements process which takes you through the joint process each and every time that we get those service equities protected and the other agencies within the Department of Defense. So I satisfied that we’re doing a good job.

Moderator: Can you speak to the status of the JSPOC Mission System, timing, and so on?

General Shelton: I spoke to that in the speech but let me reiterate. The difficulties we’ve found structurally with the program have caused us to take a pause here and think about our way ahead. We are actively working the way ahead right now and we expect sometime within, I would guess within the next few weeks here, we’ll be able to announce a way ahead.

Moderator: Another question was, will there be a new service to consolidate an integrated space responsibility in the U.S. space force?

General Shelton: I don’t see really any move toward a U.S. space force any time in the future. That’s a question that’s been around for probably 20 years or so. But I think the services bring in their unique requirements. The Air Force certainly has the lion’s share of the capability, the people, but I think it fits very well within the Air Force. I think we’ve been good shepherds of the capability. I think we’ve been good stewards of the resources required. So I don’t think anybody’s really got a complaint which would drive us toward a separate force.

Moderator: As you mentioned, space debris is of course an international and longstanding problem that we have. What is your opinion on how the government as a whole should interface, both domestically and internationally, on that topic? Do you think the Air Force; the Department of Defense are the appropriate lead agency on that? Or do you envision a more collaborative effort?

General Shelton: I think everybody across the entire government, the international space community as well, ought to attack this problem with vigor. You can’t do much with what’s there already, but you certainly can do a lot about minimizing what’s going to be there in the future as we consider how we launch things, the kinds of tests we conduct in space, the kinds of activities that we decide we’re going to present, and finally, end of life strategies for satellites that move them out of important operational orbits.

Moderator: Another thing you mentioned in your talk was costs. I have a question regarding the cost of the EELV program being a big concern. The audience is curious as what is being done to address specific launch costs that might be driving that.

General Shelton: We are concerned as well. We are very actively working with ULA to get to a better strategy for procuring launch vehicles. What we have proposed is that we would buy a block, a guaranteed block of launch vehicles over a number of years, giving them some consistency so that they can work with their suppliers and understand the business that’s coming down the pike.

We also want to get better involved with them in understanding their overhead costs and trying to drive some of those overhead costs down. So there’s a lot of work going on. In fact probably over the next six months we’ll have a very concerted effort to do what we can to drive down the launch costs.

Moderator: Our next question is with regard to mission assurance. The audience member recognizes it’s very important but is curious as to what the best way to control the high costs associated with the fact that our oversight organizations really have no cost or schedule responsibility.

General Shelton: I understand the question, for sure.

In fact a study was done probably about two years ago now. If you look at the cost of mission assurance, it is a very small percentage of the cost of the individual satellites that we’re talking about, and if you include the satellite and the launch vehicle together it is just almost minuscule. When you look at how much money it is in practical terms to all of us, it looks like a lot of money. But in terms of the overall cost of the program, it’s a very very small cost. If you took that off and the end result was mission failure, that cost looks even cheaper.

So you’ll see us trying to be more efficient in how we do mission assurance, but we’re not going to back off on mission assurance. In fact we’re looking for ways to become more effective and more efficient at the same time.

Moderator: This next question has been in the news a little bit lately. The audience is curious as to what the status is of the LightSquared system, any possible inference it might have with the GPS system.

General Shelton: That’s an interesting technical problem for us right now. We’re doing some testing as well as some others are doing some testing with actual LightSquared hardware and actual GPS receivers to understand what the interference possibilities might be.

We think the results of that will be available in time to support a mid-June decision by the FCC and we’ll let the data speak. As I told some folks yesterday, I have no outcome in mind on this. I just want to get this into the technical realm, let the tests determine a way ahead, and decide what the right way ahead for the United States government is.

Moderator: Another question, something you referred to earlier, wondering how we can characterize the cyber threats, specifically to our space ground systems. How they might be uniquely vulnerable?

General Shelton: We are always looking carefully at our ground stations, trying to determine how vulnerable they are, both to physical attack and cyber attack as well. Not to say they aren’t vulnerable, but we’ve taken some steps obviously that I can’t talk about here to make them less vulnerable.

Frankly, I worry more about physical attacks at this point than I do cyber attacks.

Moderator: I have several more questions here. One is specifically what effect has the six month plus budget approval process delay had on your operations if any?

General Shelton: On operations, we haven’t been affected at all by the delay. We have been affected in our ability to move forward on some acquisition programs. Without the new start authority, without the authorization in place and the appropriation in place we can’t move ahead with activity we had planned for this year. So it’s definitely an impact on acquisition. In operations thus far we’ve been able to manage it.

Moderator: Our next question returns us to the space situational awareness realm. A question regarding how space situational awareness and commercial partnerships might be able to be leveraged by your department, moving forward kind of as a balance to commercial/government approach.

General Shelton: I think we’ve already taken some of those steps, but there’s a lot more to be done. We really believe that a sharing of data back and forth between commercial operators and the government can be enhancing for both. We certainly can help with collision avoidance kind of activities. We can certainly help with information sharing about potential threats. Those kinds of things we think are areas that we can really capitalize on.

The commercial partnerships become a little difficult for us just in terms of contractual arrangements, liability arrangements, and all that. But I think we can work through those things. It’s just a matter of getting all the right folks together and having these discussions. We’re actually very excited about the partnerships that are available to us for the future.

Moderator: Our next question is with regard to technology acquisition and of course technology is moving at a breakneck speed in its development. The audience is curious if there are any specific steps that have been taken by the Air Force to accelerate the rate at which that technology is integrated into our space systems?

General Shelton: We have a very active relationship with the Air Force Research Lab. We turn to them as our S&T house, if you will, that certainly focuses our S&T work, so we look to them and have strategic meetings with them every year to define what that year’s priorities will be, where the investments will go, the technologies that we need for enabling technologies, for things we have planned in the future. So I believe if anybody is looking for who do you turn to for space technology and that kind of work, I would refer you to the Air Force Research Lab because they’re doing a lot of great work for us.

Moderator: We have an audience member who is curious about your thoughts about combining multiple systems into a single satellite, operations as an example. A satellite system that might provide weather monitoring as well as GPS capabilities.

General Shelton: My challenge as I think about that is this whole, again this thing that’s in my head about passive resilience. Does that promote passive resilience or does that inhibit passive resilience? That’s something we would have to think about.

Of course the problem, if you talk about weather and GPS together, that’s different orbits that we’ve got those satellites in. Weather satellites are typically in a sun synchronous orbit; GPS is in a NEO orbit. So whether those would work together, there might be some augmentation provided by a GPS payload on a weather satellite. It certainly might be worth looking at, but again, I’m more right now thinking about disaggregation, not aggregation.

Moderator: You mentioned design to cost. Does design to cost mean that development work will be shifted to a fixed price contract scheme? If so, has there been anything put in place to prevent kind of a recurrence of past cycles?

General Shelton: I don’t have a preconceived notion about that. We could certainly have discussions. As I said at the start, this is hopefully the start of a dialogue. I’d like to hear from lots of folks on their ideas.

I just laid my soul bare here, and I’d like for industry to do the same back in return, so I’m anxious to hear your thoughts on that.

Moderator: Thank you very much for your insight. We very much appreciate the time. The audience will join me in thanking you again.