ORLANDO, Florida — Space Force Association leaders announced Thursday the creation of a space-focused think tank and research center aimed at better educating government officials, military planners, defense industry firms and the public about the importance of space in everyday American life and the crucial role being played by the nation’s youngest branch of the armed forces.
Bill Woolf, president and CEO of the Space Force Association and a retired Air Force officer, made the announcement during a keynote speech kicking off the Spacepower 2025 conference here. The unveiling of the new National Spacepower Center, Mr. Woolf said, will help “bridge the knowledge gaps” between policymakers, private industry and military officials.
“The future is not waiting and neither can we,” Mr. Woolf told a packed ballroom at the Spacepower conference. “We must ignite a new era of integration between commercial and space capabilities. The pace of the threat is accelerated and if you move at yesterday’s speed, we fall behind. That is not an option.”
The Spacepower conference is one of the country’s largest gatherings of Space Force officers, enlisted Space Force personnel and top defense companies from around the world. The annual event reflects both the rapidly growing focus on space as a crucial domain for American military power projection abroad and, for private industry, as financially lucrative turf in which to do business with the federal government.
Closing a knowledge gap
Mr. Woolf said the National Spacepower Center will help drive innovation and clearly explain to decision-makers what tools the Space Force and its Guardians need to ensure America maintains its edge over adversaries in space.
“It will be a place where leaders, innovators and partners come together to experience the power of the space domain firsthand,” he said.
“And to understand why the U.S. Space Force is indispensable to our national security and to a thriving space economy,” said Mr. Woolf, whose Space Force Association is a nonprofit that advocates for the Space Force in much the same way that the Association of the U.S. Army has advocated on behalf of the Army for decades.
Unlike the Army and its advocacy group, the Space Force and the SFA are in their early years, having both been founded in 2019. In Congress and even across other corners of the Pentagon, there is still not a full understanding of the national security challenges and opportunities in the space domain, space-focused insiders say.
The National Spacepower Center, advocates say, will be a major clearinghouse for academic research and also something of a laboratory in which to test theories and gain knowledge about the nature of space warfare.
They also say that the center will offer an environment for testing and validating policy ideas and concepts specifically for the Space Force.
For example, the center could host unclassified table-top exercises, including “war games,” to plot out how confrontations with adversaries in space could play out and what their impacts might be on the American public. The knowledge gained from such exercises could then be used to inform the lawmakers tasked with writing space-related legislation and doling out money through annual federal budgets, proponents say.
A laser-like focus on in-depth policy recommendations, strategic concepts and capabilities tailored toward space power only can differentiate the center from the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, which was founded in 2013 and for more than a decade has been among Washington’s most well-respected organizations for aerospace research and policy discussions, proponents say. The Mitchell Institute is an affiliate of the Air and Space Forces Association, a separate organization.
A crucial moment for space
The creation of the National Spacepower Center comes at a crucial moment. America’s adversaries are making major strides in the fielding of both commercial and military space assets.
Russia is believed to be racing ahead with a program to field nuclear-armed anti-satellite weapons, which could use a nuclear blast in space to destroy another nation’s satellites.
China has invested heavily in building space weapons that can destroy or disrupt satellites that would “incapacitate” U.S. communications, intelligence, missile warning and undermine the military’s ability to conduct joint operations and project power.
In national security circles, there are high-stakes discussions taking place now about the best ways for the U.S. to counter those assets and to protect its own capabilities in space.
The National Spacepower Center’s first major policy paper, written by retired Air Force Col. Daniel Dant, examines the degree to which the Space Force and industry partners should pursue “dynamic space operations.”
Such operations refer to satellites and other systems able to maneuver, be serviced and refueled on orbit, make rapid orbital changes, and take other steps to make them “dynamic” in the space domain, rather than stationary.
Some specialists have urged the Pentagon to focus heavily on those capabilities.
But in his policy paper — an example of what proponents say will be the highly detailed policy research coming from the National Spacepower Center — Mr. Dant raises questions about that point of view.
Dynamic space operations “helps spacecraft avoid threats and complicate targeting, but it cannot fully solve problems like cyber intrusions into ground networks, attacks on data links, or political escalation risks … and certainly not without massive expenditures,” he writes in the paper.
“Many proliferated low-Earth-orbit constellations are designed to be short-lived and cheap, so heavy investment in refuelable or highly maneuverable platforms is not always economical or necessary for these missions. Moreover, over-reliance on maneuver also risks rapid depletion of valuable propellant and can increase operational complexity, making command and control and space traffic management more difficult under high stress situations.”
