MAUI SPACE SURVEILLANCE COMPLEX, Hawaii—China is “intentionally trying to do things” in space “so we don’t see it,” from changing the brightness of their satellites to maneuvering in what it believes are the United States’ blind spots, and the U.S. Space Force has to “keep pace, and we’ve got to keep advancing our capabilities so that that’s harder and harder for them to do,” the chief of space operations said this week.
“If you’re going to do something irresponsible, we’re going to see it. We’re going to tell the world, and then we’re going to react and respond,” Gen. Chance Saltzman said in an interview.
But the general noted that talking about it—even while standing on the windy roof of the Pentagon’s largest telescope, which itself sits atop a 10,023-foot volcano—is much easier than doing it.
In the “theory of success” Saltzman laid out in early 2024, he names three components for maintaining space superiority: Avoid operational surprise, deny first-mover advantage, and confront malign activity. Space domain awareness—tracking what goes on in space—is essential to the first of those three, and officials say this island complex is uniquely suited for the task.
“From a space perspective, this particular piece of land is pretty important because some of the work you can do here, you just can’t do elsewhere,” Saltzman said. “We don’t take it for granted that we have access to this kind of land.”
The service’s domain-awareness efforts are led by Mission Delta 2 under Col. Barry Croker, who noted that today’s visitors had driven into, and then out of, fluffy cumulus clouds on their way to the summit.
The top of Haleakala is “almost always above the weather,” with crisp, clear air, Croker said. “Think about where we are located, and what we can see in our field of view. So all the things that are in geostationary orbit, hovering about the Earth now, that are over the Pacific. This is a great place to look, because we can see almost all the way to the United States [West] Coast, but we can also see west towards, over mainland China, that area.”
Because of the elevation, weather, and other conditions, the peak of this long-dormant volcano is “the third-best place to put a telescope in the world,” and the best for looking at the sky during the day, said Lt. Col. Douglas Thornton, commander of 15th Space Surveillance Squadron.
This Advanced Electro Optical System telescope was built in the 1990s. Despite its massive size, it can rotate quickly enough to track satellites or ballistic missiles, though it only sees a small portion of the sky—about the width of about two-and-a-half pinky fingers held at arm’s length.
It takes a satellite in low-Earth orbit about five to nine minutes to pass overhead, Thornton said, so the telescope tracks that, “and then we have the laser guide star that shoots up, we’re correcting that image, and so that way we can see what the the satellites are, and we can make out, you know, solar panels and other things on there.”
While this particular telescope has a great capability to track a LEO satellite overhead, Saltzman said it only captures about 10 percent of its total orbit. So if a satellite maneuvers as soon as it leaves the field of view, or does “something weird,” it may not be where one might expect when it comes back around. “What we have is adversaries that are trying to be deceptive, trying not to let us track their” assets.
Added Croker: “We built a really great system for telling us where things were. It’s difficult to know where things are going to be.”
The orbital-awareness mission started before space was a “warfighting domain,” he said, so “it was keeping track of things that were in space to make sure we weren’t running into each other. Today we’re tracking over 40,000 pieces of things in space, and so from just a ‘things moving around’ [perspective], that’s really important. How do you launch a new satellite into orbit and make sure you’re not going to hit something?”
Saltzman said the stakes couldn’t be higher.
“The other services built their force structures around the presumption that they will have access to space,” he said. “They take it for granted, and they’ve been able to do that, but that’s just not the case anymore. So now we’ve got to understand what’s going on up there, build those resilient architectures, and be able to respond in kind if [adversaries] create problems for us.”
To protect the assets and capabilities the Pentagon and commercial industry has in space, Croker said, the Space Force must track not just what is where, but who is where—and what their intent is.
“We see a lot of proliferation of capabilities on orbit,” he said. “And we go, is that really a research technology? Or could they have another purpose for that? The ability to grab onto something and move it to a different orbit, is that junk removal or, you know, maybe the way they’re exercising that and the places they’re doing it, maybe there’s other capabilities that they’re trying to develop.”
The AEOS telescope is one of several telescopes here; among the others are three Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance Systems telescopes, which are smaller and older but are undergoing Ground-Based Electro-Optical Sensor System upgrades now—which entails modernizing the sensors, optics, algorithms, and post-processing of the data so they can “see smaller, dimmer things further” into space, Thornton said. A similar upgrade at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico was completed in August, while the Maui upgrade is not expected to be finished until April or later.
Because the 15th SPSS has an Air Force Research Laboratory team that operates experimental systems, that team was “able to procure the sensor that’s going on the back of it before we got it on our telescopes, and they were able to test it out, see how it works and everything, before we actually put it in operations,” he said.
“Our mantra has been that ‘operations drive research, and research evolves operations,’ and we really try to stick to that with everything we do here.”
The site is not without controversy. Native Hawaiians consider Haleakala a sacred space, and Space Force proposals for additional telescopes on the summit have been met with protest. A fuel leak at the site in 2023 also angered locals, and the Space Force is amid a multi-year process to clean up the fuel without removing any dirt from the site.
In a speech at the AMOS conference the day after the telescope tour, Saltzman said the Space Force is “honored to be associated” with Haleakala, adding that the service is “fully committed to respecting the mountain’s cultural and spiritual significance and moving forward only in complete partnership with the community.”
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