Vice Chief: Space Force Should Be Thinking About Cislunar ‘a Lot Right Now’

The Space Force’s small size has limited its capacity to consider what role it will play in future operations on and around the moon. That needs to change, according to Vice Chief of Operations Gen. Shawn Bratton.

The service is in the midst of distilling its future operating needs into an “objective force” that lays out what platforms, support structures, and manpower will be required to maintain space superiority between now and 2040. That document should be released sometime this year, and during a Jan. 21 event at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., Bratton said a plan for cislunar operations needs to be part of that discussion.

“We’re thinking about that a little bit, but we should be thinking about it a lot right now,” he said. “Some of that is capacity; we’re small, and we’re focused on first things first. … But we should be thinking about cislunar.”

Much of the U.S. government’s moon ambitions have centered on NASA and its Artemis program. The agency plans to launch a crewed lunar landing mission in mid-2027 as well as several moon-orbiting missions in the meantime. The first of those is slated to launch next month and will send four astronauts on a 10-day flight around the moon.

The Defense Department and the Intelligence Community have largely focused their attention on developing domain awareness and navigation capabilities to better understand cislunar space, the vast region between geosynchronous orbit and the lunar surface. The Space Force’s Oracle program, run by the Air Force Research Lab, plans to launch several space situational awareness satellites in the coming years. And the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is working with the Space Force and NASA to create the mapping infrastructure for a GPS-like capability to support lunar navigation.

Bratton said the Space Force should expand its cislunar planning and he challenged the companies supporting NASA and pursuing their own commercial moon endeavors to consider how DOD could leverage their work.

“There are a lot of companies going to the moon right now,” he said. “What is the national security implication of your work? And what do you need from the Space Force? Start to demand that, or at least help us think through that.”

Beyond Cislunar

Besides cislunar operations, Bratton highlighted two other areas the Space Force’s objective force will also need to address: satellite refueling and the implications of Guardians one day operating in orbit.

The service has for years been weighing how to invest in refueling capabilities, and Bratton said it’s still having active discussions about whether the military should lead the way or lean on industry.

“We have a really good hand on the cost curve of when it becomes economically beneficial to start refueling a constellation,” he said. “It has to do with the size of the constellation and the cost of each spacecraft. And so, we’re getting really good information on when it makes sense for economic reasons. I don’t know that that’s the exact same thing as military advantage.”

The Space Force and other DOD agencies have four missions slated to launch this year to demonstrate satellite refueling, servicing, and repair capabilities that will inform the service’s ongoing analysis.

In contrast to refueling and mobility, USSF talks very little about when and if it may one day need to have Guardians operating in space. While there are “some corners where people are writing papers about it,” Bratton said there should be more open discussion within the service.

“Where are we going with that? I don’t have the answer to that,” he said. “It would be tragic if that didn’t happen someday. Is that day 2030, 2040, 2050? I don’t know. We owe work on that.”