'Semper Supra', Always Above: US Space Force Preserves Freedom from Chinese, Russian Threats

COLORADO SPRINGS – In late 2019, President Donald Trump signed legislation that created the United States Space Force. It's the first new branch of the Armed Services in more than 70 years.

What exactly is the mission of the Space Force? CBN News traveled to Colorado Springs for an up-close look.
 
Preserving Freedom in Space

The U.S. military plays a key role in protecting this country and world on the ground, water, and in the air. Now it's taking that mission to a new and even more vast frontier.

"Space is becoming more and more important to the entire world, and the Space Force is here to protect our American interests and to preserve freedom in space," Lt Col Scott Nakatani told CBN News.

An explanatory video on the U.S. Space Force website echoes that importance, saying, "Today, space is essential not only to our way of life. It's absolutely critical to the modern way of war. GPS, ATMs, cell phones, gas pumps, traffic lights, power grids, guided missiles, surveillance, RPAs, ground combat control. There's no such thing as a day without space operations."

On the Ops floor of the 22 Space Operations Squadron, a map shows seven remote tracking stations which are equipped with antennas to enable space access.

"We facilitate everything from space launch to disposition of end of life satellites and everything in between," said Lt Col Jason Panzarello.

Potential Adversaries

Maj Gen Shawn Bratton oversees the Space Training and Readiness Command. He sees this new branch as critical to America's future.

"We've always flown these spacecraft; we didn't just invent them all with the stamp of the Space Force," he explained to CBN News. "We flew them as part of the Air Force."

"But there's been change recently; we've really seen potential adversaries move into the space domain, begin to threaten our capabilities, and I think that drove Congress to think through and finally decide to create a new service specifically focused on the space domain," Bratton continued.

The service's uses of its spacecraft include communication, GPS and more military specific needs.

"...The missile warning spacecraft, for example, so we can look and observe missile launches around the world, primarily to warn the Joint Force," Bratton said.

China and Russia

The Major General confirms the greatest threats in this arena are China and Russia.

"Both have considerable space capability. We see them testing weapons now in the space domain which is new behavior in the past kind of 10 to 15 years," Bratton said. 

"And so I think that gives us cause for caution and causes us to really think about how do we protect and defend our capabilities in space," he continued.

Brad Bowman serves as senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He says the space domain is hotly contested.

"Absolutely, absolutely," he emphasized. "Even as China and Russia are fielding capabilities, combat capabilities in space to take out our satellites, they're simultaneously trying to take steps at the United Nations to bind our ability or to constrain, limit, reduce, end our ability to do the same thing."

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"It's good old Soviet hypocrisy at its best," he added.

'Uninterrupted Communications'

Lt Col Brian Dea oversees around 400 Space Force guardians and government civilians operating close to 30 military communication satellites.  

"Right now, whether it be operations in the European theater, the Pacific theater and the Middle East, we're supplying all of the communications to ensure that all of those soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Guardians that are in harm's way have absolutely uninterrupted communications to execute their mission," Dea explained.

Virtual and Augmented Reality

Part of the U.S. Space Force training focuses on enhanced, technical education. Lt Col Ryan Durand is the provost of the National Security Space Institute, which incorporates virtual reality and augmented reality into the curriculum.

"Allow students to have more of a hands-on approach to, 'What is inside of a satellite? What does it look like? What do orbits look like?' and those kind of things," he shared.

One Virtual Reality simulator allows the students to move an orbit; it helps them to visualize what actually happens when they send commands to a real-life satellite from the Earth.

Augmented Reality allows guardians to do things like expanding and contracting an image of a satellite to look at its different dimensions, causing the course work to come alive.

War Games

Another aspect of preparing Guardians involves taking part in war game simulations.

"If our Guardians and our joint partners, if they do not have the opportunity to face a threat in a training environment, when they have to meet the real threat, they're not going to be as equipped," SMSgt Stephanie Kau told CBN News.

MSgt Joshua Mouser showed us a representation of what's called a "direct ascent anti-satellite missile."

"It's literally just a missile that is launched from the ground with the intention of striking an object that is orbiting in a low-Earth orbit," Mouser explained. "It's a very serious threat."

'Constantly Evolving'

Space Force Weapons Officer Capt Mike Foley describes the space domain as "constantly evolving".

"As the world gets more interested in returning to the moon, landing astronauts again on the lunar surface, that adds a whole new layer of complexity to the space domain, where now we're not just worried about our geosynchronous satellites in orbit, we're worried about the space all the way out to the moon," he said. 

And when you think of the moon, astronauts might come to mind, but don't confuse NASA with the Space Force.

"NASA is the science side of things if you will, the exploration," Foley clarified. "Our job is to protect and defend the domain, so that includes NASA."

The Space Force motto is "Semper Supra", which means "Always Above", and as space plays a growing role in everyday life, it's clear there's a real need for a military to keep its eyes on what's above in order to secure our freedom.