Space News:
The U.S. government, primarily the Department of Defense, plans to spend some $6 billion on efforts to monitor the space environment in real time through 2020, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
That figure, which the GAO acknowledged is not comprehensive, nonetheless represents one of the most detailed accountings of space situational awareness (SSA) programs and funding released to date. The spending is dominated by the Pentagon, with other agencies, primarily NASA, accounting for just 10 percent of the total.
Included in the survey are at least some of the programs that U.S. defense officials say are funded as part of a planned $5.5 billion investment over the next five years on space protection activities, largely in response to growing threats from Russia and China. Also included is a classified missile tracking satellite now being used for space surveillance.
The GAO carried out the survey in response to Senate language in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. The Oct. 8 report, “Space Situational Efforts and Planned Budgets,” makes no recommendations to the Pentagon or to Congress.
Tracking spending across multiple agencies on a common activity is a difficult task, made much more so because for some organizations, such as the Missile Defense Agency, space surveillance is a secondary mission and is not accounted for separately. The elusiveness of an overall dollar figure for SSA capabilities has been a long-term frustration for Congress.
Space surveillance has taken on increased importance in recent years as near-Earth orbit becomes, as U.S. government officials are fond of saying, more contested, congested and competitive. According to the GAO report, the Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) issued 671,000 notifications of possible orbital collisions in 2014 alone.
Compounding the congestion problem is what government officials say are increasingly threatening activities by China and Russia. The full extent of these activities has not been disclosed, but China has tested ground-based anti satellite weaponry while Russia has been conducting on-orbit satellite maneuvers that have alarmed government and industry officials alike.
