PETERSON SPACE FORCE BASE, Colo. -- Gazing out over the Pacific from the top of Haleakalā, I’m taken aback by the beauty of the scenery -- the unique volcanic landscape, the clear blue of the sky from over 10,000 feet elevation, and the Maui Space Surveillance Complex in the background. While the view is beautiful, it wasn’t a vacation that brought me to the enchanting Maui Island, nor was it a military focused engagement with the United States Space Force’s 15th Space Surveillance Squadron.
Far more importantly, it was the fantastic and critically important engagements with industry, academia, foreign governments, and the local Maui community that gather for the annual Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Space Situational Awareness and Space Domain Awareness Conference that brought me to the beautiful shores of Kihei and the pristine and sacred summit of Haleakalā.
Before I continue, however, I would be remiss to not grant a heartfelt Mahalo to the people of Maui, who graciously and courteously greeted us to their island less than two months after the horrific fires that ravaged so much of this beautiful land.
As a member of the United States Space Force, my job is leading the future Space Domain Awareness sensor branch of the SDA and Environmental Monitoring Mission Area Team of Headquarters Space Operations Command.
In this capacity, my job is to manage the operations perspective, working closely with our acquisitions Field Command, Space Systems Command, to acquire the next generation of SDA sensors for the USSF. My portfolio includes both telescopes and radars to monitor Resident Space Objects in the low earth orbit, medium earth orbit, and geostationary equatorial orbit (LEO, MEO, and GEO) realms. The problem is that Space, as referred to by the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “is big. Really Big.” It is challenging to field enough sensors, fast enough, around the world to provide all the coverage we need, and this is where partners can help to augment. Partners like commercial companies who provide sensing services, other nations, academia and even other US organizations who may have sensors for other missions which when not doing their primary mission, might be able to contribute to SDA.
Just a few short years ago, when I was a member of what was then called Air Force Space Command, commercial companies were just beginning their ventures into SSA sensors and services. Since then, their capabilities locations and coverage have grown, resulting in more potential to augment the Department of Defense. There are also many more international partners, some of whom are building or considering building their own sensors, who are interested in partnering with the United States and integrating their capabilities with our command-and-control networks.
In the end, the result of partnering and partner integration has the promise of increasing the completeness, responsiveness, and reliability of SDA to support both the demands of Orbital Safety in an increasingly congested environment, as the need to identify, maintain custody and characterize threat actors who may put US and allied space capabilities at risk. With our partners, we can accomplish both missions infinitely better than we ever could alone.
AMOS provided the perfect opportunity to engage industry partners to learn their latest advancements, and to collaborate with our allies and partners about how we can improve our interoperability and cooperation. In addition, I had the pleasure to converse with some of the brightest minds of academia solving problems I didn’t even know existed.
Our Chief of Space Operations, General B. Chance Saltzman, charged us to strengthen our partnerships as a critical step in building combat-ready forces. “Space power is a collaborative endeavor. Even with superlative talent and exceptional capabilities, the Space Force will not succeed without robust joint, coalition, international, interagency, academic, and commercial partnerships.”
There will still be a need for the USSF to procure dedicated, purpose-built mission systems, like the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability, to provide the Space Domian Awareness which allows the USSF to secure our Nation’s interests in, from, and to space. My experience at AMOS made it crystal clear that international, commercial, and other partners offer options to help meet needs, provide augmenting capability and capacity, increase reliability, and collectively help us to be ready to deter and if necessary, win the fight.
And while I try to take in the beauty of Maui every chance I get, it is these engagements I look forward to and get most excited about.
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Lieutenant Colonel Tyler Eske is the deputy chief of the Space Domain Awareness and Environmental Monitoring Mission Area Team at Headquarters Space Operations Command, United States Space Force, Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. He has over 17 years of experience in operations and at the staff level with ICBMs, ground based surveillance radars, Electronic Warfare systems, and command and control systems. He has previously served as the operations officer for the 18th Space Defense Squadron.