Space

ROME — Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni has said Italy may employ Elon Musk’s Starlink service to provide encrypted satellite communications to link its military contingents around the world because there is “no public alternative.”
Meloni said Starlink offered advanced technology and, unlike European collaborative satellite program IRIS2, was ready.
“This is a European problem,” she said, adding the European Union “did not get there in time to have public technology able to secure this communication.”
Italy is in talks with Starlink, part of Musk’s SpaceX aerospace business, to use its 6,700 satellite constellation in a reported five-year, €1.5 billion ($1.55 billion) deal.
“Space X has illustrated to the government its technology that allows secure communication nationally and globally which means for us guaranteed communications with our diplomats and military missions abroad,” Meloni told reporters in Rome ..

Space transport company Blue Origin successfully flew its New Glenn rocket for the first time early this morning, a major step toward enabling the firm to compete for national security missions.
New Glenn lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida just 2 a.m., carrying an experimental payload it built for a Defense Innovation Unit program.
“New Glenn is foundational to advancing our customers’ critical missions as well as our own,” the company said in a statement. “The vehicle underpins our efforts to establish sustained human presence on the Moon, harness in-space resources, provide multi-mission, multi-orbit mobility through Blue Ring, and establish destinations in low Earth orbit.”
The company had hoped to recover the rocket’s first-stage booster and land it on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean — an ambitious goal for a debut mission — but it lost the initial stage during descent.
The inaugural New Glenn launch is ..

Navy researchers are testing a fully autonomous satellite designed to detect and characterize objects in space.
The system, called Autosat, is designed to task, calibrate its signals and send and receive information on its own without the need for a human operator. Steven Meier, director of space technology at the Naval Research Laboratory, said his team has demonstrated the capability in the lab.
“We’ve done a demo of this and proven out the principles and are looking for the next step,” he said during a panel at the Potomac Officers Club’s Research and Development Summit in McLean, Virginia. “We want to get funding to actually build a system along these lines and launch it.”
Autosat features an imaging payload that the lab has trained with a database of images, including airports, runways, roads and buildings. The more information the payload receives, the smarter it becomes about recognizing patterns and spotting objects.
Satellites that can detect and track object..

The Pentagon’s acting acquisition executive has ordered a review of the Space Development Agency’s progress toward fielding a proliferated constellation of missile tracking and data transport satellites.
“I am requesting the Secretary of the Air Force rapidly form an independent review team (IRT) to assess SDA’s organizational performance and acquisition approach,” Steven Morani, who is performing the duties of Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, said in a Jan. 31 memo obtained by Defense News.
Breaking Defense first reported on the memo.
SDA was created in 2019 to quickly field a constellation of hundreds of data transport and advanced missile tracking satellites in low Earth orbit, about 1,200 miles above the Earth’s atmosphere. Those spacecraft will augment existing fleets of large satellites, and SDA plans to upgrade its capabilities on a two-year cycle.
The agency began launching its first batch of satellites, dubbed Tranche 0,..

Although the Space Force currently lacks a Senate-confirmed acquisition executive, the service’s interim procurement lead, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, said this week he is making a concerted push to follow through on reform efforts championed by his former boss — and in many cases, pursue them even more intently.
During his time in the Pentagon, former head of space acquisition Frank Calvelli penned a list of acquisition tenets, which became his formula for delivering satellites and ground systems on faster timelines. It called for program managers to hold companies accountable for poor performance, award executable — and mostly fixed-price — contracts and, when possible, opt for commercial capabilities over bespoke government systems.
Purdy, who has served as acting acquisition executive since Calvelli left the role in January, said Tuesday that he and his team are making the most of this transition period by taking further steps to revamp the Space Force’s acquisition ..

The Space Development Agency is launching a study to look at how its proliferated satellite constellation could support the Trump administration’s proposal for a homeland missile defense shield.
In late January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling on the Defense Department to establish an “Iron Dome for America.” Though its name is a reference to Israel’s Iron Dome, the system would be designed to counter a range of advanced missile threats, including hypersonic weapons, cruise missile and drones.
The multilayered architecture would feature several space-based elements that build on existing capabilities like the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program and the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, or PWSA. It also calls for the development of space-based interceptors, reviving a controversial discussion about the technically complex and politically loaded capability.
SDA&rsqu..

The Space Force last week awarded Firefly Aerospace a nearly $22 million contract to launch a mission aimed at transitioning the service’s vision for rapid response capabilities from a demonstration to operations.
The mission, dubbed Victus Sol, will be the fifth Tactically Responsive Space mission for the service since September of 2023 when it worked with satellite and rocket companies to deliver a spacecraft in a matter of months andlaunch it with just 27 hours of notice.
To date, those activities have all been geared toward demonstrating the concept, but a spokesperson for Space Safari, which manages the missions, told Defense News on Friday that Victus Sol is “moving beyond demonstrations” and will support Space Force operations.
The spokesperson would not confirm any details about the mission, including its payload, objective or launch date. However, fiscal 2025 budget documents say the mission could launch in late 2025 or 2026, and the service has indicated that 2026 is it..

U.S. policies around weapons in space, its over-classification of space capabilities and a lacking “warfighting ethos” are undermining public perception of the Space Force and “subverting” its legitimacy as a separate military service, according to a new study from the Mitchell Institute.
The study, released Wednesday, is the byproduct of a two-day workshop the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Advantage Center of Excellence held in October. The event convened 55 space experts from across the military, industry and academia to consider how the Space Force’s current operational concepts might hold up amid a range of potential crises over the next 25 years — from a deployed Russian nuclear antisatellite weapon to an attempt by China to hijack a futuristic “luxury space hotel.”
The workshop highlighted gaps in how the general public, and even some in the Defense Department, perceive the role of the Space Force and a disconnect between rhetoric that labels space as a ..

The Space Development Agency will recompete a contract awarded last year to Tyvak, a small satellite manufacturer, following a lawsuit claiming the agency violated procurement rules.
Last August, SDA awarded contracts to Tyvak and York Space Systems to develop prototype satellites to demonstrate advanced tactical satellite communication capabilities that could inform future technology development within the agency. Tyvak received $254 million and York $170 million to build and operate 10 satellites each.
The next month, Viasat, one of the losing bidders, filed a protest with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims alleging SDA did not fairly consider its proposal and that other firms were given an unfair advantage in the process.
As part of an internal review, the Air Force determined that an SDA official violated the Procurement Integrity Act in its communication with Tyvak and other contractors, and in an update filed Feb. 14, SDA said it would re-compete the firm’s contract but leave..