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#SpaceWatchGL Opinion: Space Traffic Management – Impact of Large Constellations on Military Operations in Space.

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As part of the partnership between SpaceWatch. Global and Joint Air Power Competence Centre, we have been granted permission to publish selected articles and texts. We are pleased to present “Space Traffic Management – Impact of Large Constellations on Military Operations in Space”, originally published by the Joint Air Power Competence Centre for the Conference Read Ahead 2020.

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South China Sea claimants and other developing countries seeking ways to counter major powers, says report.

The U.S. Air Force on Friday awarded rocket builders United Launch Alliance and SpaceX contracts worth billions to launch national security missions for five years starting in 2022.

The awards represent the second phase of the military’s National Security Space Launch program, which is organized by the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles, California. Four companies — Elon Musk’s SpaceX, ULA, Northrop Grumman and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — bid for the contracts, with the military set to spend about $1 billion per year on launches.

The NSSL awards represent nearly three dozen launches, scheduled between 2022 and 2026. ULA won 60% of the launches, and SpaceX won the remaining 40%.

The Chinese Navy is expanding at an incredible pace, rapidly outstripping almost all other navies. A year ago it had no amphibious assault carriers (termed landing helicopter docks). These large helicopter carriers are often the most powerful ships in many navies, and almost all navies want them. Fast forward a year’s time and they will likely have a fleet of them second in size only to the U.S. Navy. And China is building them quicker.

The rapid construction of Chinese Navy (PLAN) warships is hard to keep up with. China’s new Assault Carriers are known as the Type-075 LHD. They have already launched two in the past year. And now images have emerged on Chinese-language social media that, perhaps unwittingly, reveal yet another.

This equates to an assembly time in dry dock of about 6 months. It is difficult to make direct comparisons to the U.S. Navy because the construction approaches vary, and America is not in the same rush. But for context the U.S. Navy’s second America Class assault carrier, USS Tripoli, was laid down in June 2014 and launched in May 2017. 2 years and 10 months later.

The Army is developing a system to allow autonomous ground robots to communicate with soldiers through natural conversations — and, in time, learn to respond to soldier instructions no matter how informal or potentially crass they may be.

Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory, working in collaboration with the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, have developed a new capability that allows conversational dialogue between soldiers and autonomous systems.

Hypersonic weapons are the next frontier of great power competition between the United States, Russia, and China. The Army and Navy want to expedite the development of the missile and hope to field it in 2023.

Their latest missile test was a success.

By Caleb Larson

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Thoughts on the first atomic bombs used in anger, 75 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Not all the companies that won Skyborg contracts are assured to score orders to build prototypes.

SpaceX is launching South Korea’s first dedicated military communications satellite on Monday, with a target liftoff time of 5 PM EDT (2 PM PDT). The launch window spans nearly four hours, ending at 8:55 PM EDT (5:55 PM PDT), so SpaceX has considerable flexibility in terms of when the launch could actually take place.

The Falcon 9 rocket being used for this mission includes a first-stage booster that flew previously on SpaceX and NASA’s Demo-2 mission — the historic mission that carried astronauts on board a SpaceX rocket for the first time. That launch, which took place on May 30, saw astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley successfully delivered to the International Space Station — where they’re currently preparing to depart on Demo-2’s concluding trip home on August 1.

This mission will include a recovery attempt for the first stage, using SpaceX’s “Just Read the Instructions” drone landing ship in the Atlantic Ocean.