Small is…Resilient?

A few years ago as emerging threats challenged the belief that space was a safe haven for satellites the U.S. Government began to rethink its space strategy. Concern grew that its long history of buying and deploying large, expensive satellites fixed at geosynchronous orbital locations rendered them “big, juicy targets” (per Gen. John Hyten). Since that time the U.S. Department of Defense has been edging towards a new paradigm that refutes the concept of “bigger is better.” For more than 40 years most satellites, both defense and commercial, have been getting larger and more expensive, bringing with them more capabilities whether that be bandwidth, capacity, coverage, connectivity, or all of the above. Partly as a consequence of the growing cost per satellite, fewer and fewer of them have been deployed. Concern over too much aggregation of capability in a small number of prospective targets led to the consideration of more highly distributed architectures, breaking up the global capability to minimize the cost of smaller individual satellites.

Recently the Space Force announced their formal commitment to this new direction in the design, development, acquisition, deployment, and operation of future space systems.Resilience to new emerging threats is the central driver to this revectoring by the Space Force and while it does not explicitly declare that future large GEO satellites are over, hybrid architectures are likely to be dominated by smaller GEO, MEO, and LEO satellites to make it more difficult for adversaries to deny service to the warfighter. These new system architectures are comprised of hundreds to thousands of small satellites, in many constructs linked into a single network. The extent to which this is affordable is still unknown. The Space Development Agency (SDA) is the pathfinder for this approach and satellites to support its layered space architecture are already in production. But, to quote Bob Dylan, “The times they are a’changin’.”