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The centrality of resilience to Australia’s space capabilities

By Julia Dickinson, Chief Engineer, Military Satellite Communications, Lockheed Martin Australia

Australia’s growing emphasis on sovereignty in space is capturing the public’s imagination and spurring our industry and research sectors to greater heights. Perhaps most importantly, it is built on a recognition of the unprecedented role that space plays in our day-to-day lives.

In the past few years the increasing commercialisation of space, enabled in part by advances in technology and lower launch costs, has helped the local space industry to flourish. Since 2017 alone, we have seen the establishment of dozens of space start-ups, seven Australian designed and built satellites manoeuvred into orbit, as well as the first commercial launches from an Australian spaceport, and for NASA, no less.

A welcome evolution in our public policy settings has also been key to this growth. From the earliest days of our burgeoning space industry, Australian engineers and scientists struggled to obtain political support. Today, we have the Australian Space Agency and the Defence Space Command. Governments at all levels and persuasions are now key enablers, as they recognise the value of a sovereign space industry.

We only need to look to Ukraine, for example, to see both the critical importance of a space-based communications capability and the vulnerabilities of these systems.

With its terrestrial communications infrastructure badly degraded, Ukraine also found its existing satellite communications system had been hacked. In order to preserve its ability to fight and to maintain operations of critical infrastructure, transportable and mobile terminals from another satellite system were quickly flown in.

As the 2020 Force Structure Plan notes, “the public and Defence are increasingly reliant on satellite-based capability and services, particularly in an age where digital data and information are driving decision-making.”

Australia must be able to defend our commercial and military space systems, both in orbit and on the ground, against a potent array of current and future threats, such as orbital debris, cyber, electronic warfare systems, directed energy systems, anti-satellite missiles and co-orbital threats, to name but a few.

The most recent kinetic anti-satellite test by Russia in November 2021 caused outrage, not just due to the threat it represents to operational satellites in low orbits but to the extent of the debris field it created. Debris from this test and a similar Chinese test in 2007 has impacted International Space Station operations and continues to cause risk to it and other spacecraft in orbit.

Thanks to such events, the vulnerability of space systems, now and in the future, has been laid bare in trails of space debris thousands of kilometres wide.

As ASPI’s Malcolm Davis highlighted, “space is now central to modern joint and integrated warfighting and, with growing counter-space challenges a warfighting domain in its own right.”

With threats multiplying over recent years, new and different countervailing resilience measures have become imperative to any future Australian capabilities.

In January this year it was reported that a Chinese satellite moved a defunct navigation satellite from geostationary to a higher orbit. While this capability for rendezvous and proximity operations has previously been demonstrated by commercial western companies, this event highlighted a potential co-orbital threat to space systems.

Australia is taking any such current and future threats to our national security seriously, with resilience a dominant theme in Defence’s major space solution acquisitions, whether in MILSATCOM (JP9102), Space Domain Awareness (SDA) (JP9360) or Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) (DEF799-2).

At the establishment of an Australian Defence Space Command in March of this year, Air Vice-Marshal Catherine Roberts was just as emphatic. “We need to be able to protect our assets in space, otherwise it would change Australia’s way of life,” she said.

While this endeavour presents critical challenges for our space industry to deal with, it also creates significant opportunities.

Collaboration between primes, small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) and researchers to address the challenge of resilience will in turn further accelerate the growth and development of a sovereign space industry.

The advent of in-orbit hardware augmentation of satellite systems has opened the door for local industry to contribute significantly to the resilience of a space-based capability.

While some satellites can currently update their software to perform new functions, augmentation vehicles can now deliver new hardware to in-orbit satellites allowing, for example, the addition of cameras for neighbourhood watch, new sensors, or newly developed technologies.

On the basis they don’t put the core mission at risk, the potential for such resilience-enhancing upgrades via satellite augmentation vehicles is almost limitless. To make such missions a reality for our customers, Lockheed Martin recently announced an open standard for our own Augmentation System Port Interface (ASPIN). The ASPIN adapter provides an electrical and data interface between a host spacecraft and a satellite augmentation vehicle.

This means we’re able to upgrade operational spacecraft at the speed of technology and provide built-in servicing infrastructure for spacecraft in orbit. And that extensibility path can be used to either augment capability or assist with mitigating against future threats.

With such interfaces, the space vehicles in geostationary orbit present an opportunity for a variety of smaller missions that augment their core solution with additional capabilities.

Just like the pioneering Australian engineers and scientists at the Weapons Research Establishment in 1967, who met the challenge of designing and building the Weapons Research Establishment Satellite for launch in just 11 months, our current space industry is up to the task.

In fact, the industry is already generating value-add opportunities in response to the challenge of resilience.

Adelaide-based satellite technology business, Inovor Technologies, is one such example of Australian SMEs conceiving and developing small satellite solutions for space domain awareness and turnkey space solutions that can become satellite augmentation vehicles to enhance the resilience of satellite systems or provide additional missions of value to Australians.

With deep connections across Australia’s research, space and defence industries, Inovor is developing systems that can be specific to Australia’s future needs in space, while creating potential export opportunities.

There has never been a more exciting or critical time for Australia to be building our national space capabilities. But there has also never been a more challenging set of circumstances in which it must be done.

The global strategic environment is constantly evolving, threats are continuously emerging that demand extensibility and resilience to ensure our space systems survive a contested and/or denied environment, increasing debris and highly advanced military counter-space capabilities.

As the prime contractor for the US Government’s most secure and resilient military satellite networks, including MILSTAR, MUOS, AEHF, SBIRS, NGG OPIR, and GPS III/IIIF, it is our core business at Lockheed Martin to understand and account for other nations’ counter-space options to degrade, deny, or destroy satellite systems.

Australia must continue to prioritise resilience and ensure our space systems (and supporting infrastructure on the ground) are protected. Systems must be designed from the outset to withstand the intensity of the counterspace challenge we are seeing emerging across our region and the Australian space industry can play a key role in this.

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