Original title: US space forces promote "satellite diffusion"

　　 According to a report on May 16 on the website of the US National Defense Monthly, the US space force is turning to an orbit structure composed of a large number of small satellites rather than a small number of large advanced satellites. These rapidly increasing satellite clusters bring advantages to the space forces, but also raise new problems to be solved.

General Chase Salzman, commander of US space operations, said that the main benefit of the proliferation of satellites is to improve the anti strike capability of the troops. Salzman said at the seminar of the American Space Foundation: "If I only need five satellites to carry out a mission, then in the eyes of the opponent, he does not need to consider too many targets. However, if we spread the mission to hundreds of satellites, it will greatly change the opponent's attack plan."

One of the mission areas in which the space force actively pursues proliferation is missile early warning and tracking of advanced weapons, such as hypersonic weapons. The Space Development Agency of the US Space Force is developing a low earth orbit satellite group called "Enhancing Warfighter Space Architecture", while the Space Systems Command is studying a similar medium earth orbit project.

Both organizations are in the process of system procurement and deployment at a pace of two or three years, and will purchase artificial satellites from multiple suppliers.

A press release from the Space Systems Command said, "This unique development strategy encourages continuous competition and pushes innovative technologies into all phases of the project.". However, Colonel Rob Davis, executive officer of the space sensing program of the command, said that this strategy also brought challenges, such as how to achieve data sharing between satellites of different companies.

Davis said at the seminar that in the first phase of the orbital satellite group to be launched in 2026, the satellites provided by three contracted suppliers, including Raytheon, "basically cannot be interconnected". "For example, Raytheon's satellites can only talk with Raytheon's satellites, and then satellites of different companies can obtain data through our ground network."

He said that for satellite versions in the second phase and beyond, "ideally, we hope to achieve cross platform communication. So, this is an area we are studying: can we provide a sufficiently mature R&D standard in the contract?"

Davis said that the Space Development Agency has released the optical communication terminal standards for its low orbit satellite group, and the Space Systems Command is working with the agency and industry to expand these requirements for the China orbit project.

In April this year, NASA released a request for information on the next generation 4.0 optical communication terminal standard. Derek Tournier, its director, said that according to this new set of standards, NASA hopes to use technological progress to allow "higher bandwidth under the same size, weight, power and cost as the previous system".

Another challenge of diffusion is that so many new satellites may make the space force's field perception system difficult to parry. However, Colonel Brion McLean, the program executive officer of the Space Systems Command responsible for space domain perception and combat capability, said he was optimistic that the space force could solve any potential problems.

He said: "The challenge brought by the extremely large number of objects is that we need a lot of data, we need a lot of sources, and we need a lot of processing capacity." McLean praised that the Project Implementation Office of the headquarters is completing corresponding work in battle management, command, control and communication, "In order to upgrade the processing capacity, I think it will effectively solve many challenges".

He said: "Our demand will continue to grow. I predict that those competitors who want to engage in activities that do not conform to international rules... will try to take advantage of this. I also know the strength of our space forces. If we can provide them with appropriate tools, they will find new ways to ensure that their opponents have no chance." (Compilation/Zhu Li)