![Commander of US Space Command General James Dickinson testifies during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing March 8, 2022, in Washington, DC.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/GettyImages-1239026530-800x534.jpg)
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The leader of the US Space Command, an Army general named James H. Dickinson, said Wednesday that megaconstellations corresponding to SpaceX’s Starlink network have played a very important role in Ukraine’s efforts to discourage an invasion by Russia.
“We’re seeing for the primary time what a megaconstellation means to the world,” Dickinson said. “That gives such resiliency and redundancy when it comes to maintaining satellite communications in this instance. That’s powerful, and the department is moving in that direction.”
Dickinson made his remarks on the Aspen Security Forum. As leader of the Space Command, Dickinson is answerable for the command and control of all US military forces in outer space. He said Starlink had facilitated communications amongst Ukraine’s armed forces and that other business firms had provided essential remark services through means corresponding to synthetic aperture radar, which may observe at night and thru clouds.
Distributed the chance
Moreover, Dickinson said that by having a constellation of distributed satellites, it was harder for Russia to take countermeasures.
“Having a megaconstellation, quite frankly, frustrates our adversaries,” he said, “since you don’t understand how many satellites it could take to have any form of a degradation to that architecture, or which one in the event you had to choose one, you would need to, you realize, have an impact against.”
Last October a deputy director in Russia’s foreign ministry, Konstantin Vorontsov, said using Western business satellites by Ukraine established “a particularly dangerous trend.” While Vorontsov didn’t specifically name any satellites, he almost definitely was referring to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation, which has been utilized by Ukrainian soldiers for communications and for tracking Russian troop and tank movements.
The usage of civilian satellites for wartime purposes, Vorontsov said, essentially made them military targets. Dickinson was asked how Space Command would reply to an attack on a US business satellite by a foreign adversary. Principally, he punted on the query.
“I do have a mission area protecting and defending, and that is widely known, assets on orbit,” he replied. “But to be honest with you, those should be directed to me by, you realize, my boss, and my boss’s boss, eventually if that were to occur.”
On the time that US Space Command was reestablished in 2019, Dickinson said the organization was tracking about 25,000 objects in space—lively and defunct satellites, in addition to old rocket stages, debris, and more. Now that number is near 50,000, he said. A few of that is as a result of the increasing variety of satellites, but a great amount has been attributable to activities corresponding to Russia’s anti-satellite test in 2021.
Striking a balance
Dickinson said that a few of this growth has come all the way down to recent objects identified and tracked by business providers. At present, he said, Space Command works with 133 business space firms, that are performing various functions from satellite communications to space domain awareness. He said these partnerships have proven potent in enhancing the capabilities of the US Department of Defense.
But does this increasing reliance on business firms—which have their very own priorities and at times mercurial leadership—not also threaten the flexibility of Space Command to do its job? What if an organization decided that it now not wanted its products for use as a part of the military’s warfighting capabilities?
“It is a balance,” Dickinson said. “In other words, we’re not going to be all business. We is probably not all military. But as we take a look at our mission areas inside US Space Command and the Department of Defense, there may be a balance between what is only military and what is likely to be relied upon as a service.”
Already, he said, the US military relies heavily on business services in other domains, corresponding to at sea, for shipping, and within the air, corresponding to using business aircraft for some legs of troop deployments. Still, he acknowledged, space is a comparatively recent domain, and the extent to which the military relies on business services for its duties remains to be being worked out.