The Air Force Research Laboratory is asking companies to submit ideas on how they would design and develop a spacecraft to monitor outer space beyond Earth’s orbit. AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate is planning an experiment called Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS). The satellite would operate beyond geosynchronous orbit, in the region near the moon.The project is being managed by the Space Force’s Space Enterprise Consortium (SpEC). Only members of the consortium can view the details of the posting and can compete for contracts. Submissions are due April 1.“The CHPS program will deliver space domain awareness in a region that is one thousand times greater than our current area of responsibility,” said Michael Lopez, CHPS program manager. “AFRL is interested in hearing from companies that may have ideas that differ from ours, and could contribute to the satellite’s capabilities.”
As NASA pushes forward to get humans back on the moon, questions have emerged on what this means for the Space Force and what role it might play in lunar activities.If successful, NASA’s return to the moon will lead to a permanent presence there and lay the groundwork for scientific research and commercial development.Like a Coast Guard for space, a military force conceivably would be needed to protect lines of commerce in the lunar economy. A 2020 memo signed by NASA and the Space Force noted that a military presence near the moon would help ensure civilians can operate safely.
https://spacenews.com/industry-proposals-sought-for-cislunar-highway-patrol-satellite/Quote...AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate is planning an experiment called Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS). The satellite would operate beyond geosynchronous orbit, in the region near the moon....
...AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate is planning an experiment called Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS). The satellite would operate beyond geosynchronous orbit, in the region near the moon....
Quote from: su27k on 03/23/2022 03:24 amhttps://spacenews.com/industry-proposals-sought-for-cislunar-highway-patrol-satellite/Quote...AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate is planning an experiment called Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS). The satellite would operate beyond geosynchronous orbit, in the region near the moon....As someone old enough to remember the 70's CHiPs TV show, I think this is not only a dumb acronym, but the wrong description implication.As a former private pilot I'm familiar with "highways in the sky", which are really just connections between waypoints that make it easier to keep traffic organized (i.e. reduce the likelihood of collisions). We don't have waypoints in space, just orbits, and even orbits don't have to have the same inclination, so are planning to ticket spacecraft that are not on the right trajectory??If they want to rip off a name from a 70's TV show, they should consider "SID", which was the "Space Intruder Detector" from the TV show UFO. Far more appropriate than guys in leather riding motorcycles around...
Space Systems Command is launching new efforts to help Space Force monitor the vast volumes of space beyond the Moon, Mars and eventually even farther, officials said this week.Lt. Col. Matt Lintker, who commands the 18th Space Defense (formerly Control) Squadron that currently is charged with monitoring near-Earth space, told the C4ISRNet conference on Wednesday that the service now has stood up a new 19th Space Defense Squadron with the mission of tracking what Space Force officials now refer to as “xGEO” space.Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) is essentially the outer orbit of Earth, some 36,000 kilometers above sea level. The new 19th Space Defense Squadron, with its “xGEO” remit, would have oversight over everything beyond that, including cislunar space, or the area around the Moon. Cislunar is seen as particularly fertile ground for future satellites, thanks to the benefit of Lagrange points, positions in space where, due to the gravitational pulls of nearby celestial bodies, objects essentially tend to stay put.
During a presentation last week at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, senior Air Force and Space Force officials were briefed on Project Rocket, an Air Force-funded experiment that looked at the challenges of tracking objects in space beyond Earth’s orbit. The project was led by a group of officers selected for the Blue Horizons fellowship, created to help military leaders develop entrepreneurial skills and examine the impact of technology on national security.“We pitched the idea of focusing on how do we provide a combatant commander the capability to track adversary activity in xGEO,” said Lt. Col. Phoenix Torrijos, an intelligence and foreign area officer who led Project Rocket.
Recently, analysts predicted that a rocket stage from a Chinese space mission would crash into the moon. The impact was predicted to happen in March 2022. Did it? The world didn’t know until late June — almost four months later.More and more space activities are being planned for the moon and the space near it, commonly known as cislunar space. This expansion is being driven by several factors, including the miniaturization of computing technology, decreasing costs of launch and manufacturing, growing maturity of the commercial sector, and renewed geopolitical rivalries motivating the exploitation of space for strategic purposes. But our thinking has not caught up to this changing reality. We lack situational awareness and effective frameworks for reasoning about this domain. We need new tools to help us understand this emerging landscape, lest perceptions become distorted, increasing the risk of conflict.
The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate over the next three years hopes to launch big-ticket military experiments, including a GPS-like navigation satellite, a solar power spacecraft and a deep-space mission to monitor regions around the moon.<snip>Previously known as the Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS), the experiment has been renamed Oracle. Raley said the lab decided to rebrand the project and select a name from Greek mythology, in line with NASA’s preference to name moon missions after Greek gods.<snip>AFRL is evaluating industry proposals for Oracle, Raley said. “There’s a lot that we need to learn about how to operate, navigate and communicate from that section of space.”A priority for the military is to “understand if other countries are operating out there, and what capabilities they have,” he said. However, he added, “it is not 100% clear yet that there’s a lot of military utility to operating in cislunar space. And so a lot of what we’re doing is starting to answer that question before the U.S. government makes a bigger investment in militarizing that space.”
The Space Force expects to know by next spring what capabilities it will need to carry out space domain awareness activities in cislunar space.In a talk during the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference here Sept. 28, Col. Marc Brock, commander of Space Delta 2, the unit responsible for space domain awareness for the Space Force, said a study is underway by the 19th Space Defense Squadron (SDS) on what’s needed to monitor activities beyond geostationary orbit, called xGEO by the Space Force, and out to the moon.That study, he said, will look at requirements to create an “operational capability” for cislunar or xGEO space domain awareness. That includes training, technologies and centers needed to carry out the mission. He said that report should be ready by next April or May.
Feb 10, 2023 The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Oracle spacecraft will collect observations of resident space objects in the region near the Moon and potentially beyond. These observations will be cataloged and used to maintain awareness in the regime. Oracle will deliver advanced space capabilities in support of the U.S. Space Force’s space situational awareness mission.
What are they specifically looking for out of Earth's orbit?
Quote from: jstrotha0975 on 03/23/2022 04:44 pmWhat are they specifically looking for out of Earth's orbit?They can't say "we are going to patrol Moon surface", so they say "we are going to patrol space out of Earth orbit".But as soon as Moon will become a feasable commercial target, there will be need to defend private properties from competitors.
Quote from: spacexplorer on 05/05/2023 07:50 amthere will be need to defend private properties from competitors.Private property of land on the Moon isn't allowed. Resource extraction is allowed but I don't think that we will be seeing space pirates any time soon.
there will be need to defend private properties from competitors.
There is nothing else out there worth fighting for for in the near/mid term.
It’s mostly about protecting assets in GEO and high orbits from attacks originating from even farther out where we’re currently not surveilling. It doesn’t take much delta-V to push an attack sat out of GEO, loop it out of range of GSSAP (Geosynchornous Space Situational Awareness Program) sats, and bring it back to on top of a DSP/SBIRS, GPS, etc. assets.The nightmare scenario is not only an attack that disables some of those missile warning and geopositioning capabilities, temporarily making our terrestrial assets in theater blind and dumb at the outset of a major enemy operation (think invasion of Taiwan), as bad as that would be. But it’s also an attack that is not attributable to any enemy because we couldn’t track their incoming attack sat. That could leave us bumbling around trying to figure out our response for an extended period of time.Software attacks, dazzling lasers, and plain old electronic noise are much more likely means of satellite interference in wartime for the foreseeable future. But it’s worth a couple bucks to see if anyone has an elegant solution to tracking beyond GEO to cover that particular weakness.
