From the Crows' Nest

Brian Weeden [00:00:02]:
A particular quirk of the current framework for international space law is that while no one owns outer space and outer space is sort of free of national appropriation, states do have jurisdiction over their own satellites in space. So U.S., France, China, Japan, whoever, they still have, they call it jurisdiction control over their own satellites.

Ken Miller [00:00:34]:
Hey everybody, thanks for listening to From the Crows' Nest. I'm your host Ken Miller from the Association of Old Crows. Please check out our new Instagram page and follow us @fromthecrowsnestpodcast. We'll be posting polls, taking questions, and show ideas for future episodes in the comments. So if you want to get more involved in the show, please follow us again @fromthecrowsnestpodcast. Thanks for listening. All right, let's get to my conversation with Brian Weeden. In today's episode, we are going to dive into space operations and the US Space Force mission to project, achieve and sustain space superiority.

Ken Miller [00:01:11]:
Very complex issue, our listeners will know. In the past, we oftentimes will talk about space, various capabilities, various topics that relate to space operations, whether it's GPS jamming, counter UAS and so forth. But I really wanted to spend some time to bring together a complete picture of where we're at today in 2025, some of the recent developments. It's a very complex mission set and help me with that. I am pleased to be here with Brian Weeden. He is the Systems Director in the center for Space Policy and Strategy with the Aerospace Corporation. He has a long career as a subject matter expert in space operations. So Brian, thank you for taking time out of your schedule to join me here on from the Crows Nest.

Ken Miller [00:01:52]:
It's great to talk with you.

Brian Weeden [00:01:53]:
It's my pleasure, Ken. Happy to be here.

Ken Miller [00:01:55]:
So just for our listeners background a little bit, can you tell us a little bit about your history as an expert in space operations and a little bit about the work of the Aerospace Corporation?

Brian Weeden [00:02:06]:
Sure. Happy to do so. Like many people in the space world, I have a bit of a varied background. I studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate, went into the Air Force as an officer, spent about nine years doing nuclear and space operations. And specifically the last job I had was working for the Air Force unit that at the time was tracking all the things in space and doing catalogs of space debris and new launches and that sort of a thing. I then got out and I spent the next 15 years working for a nonprofit that was focused on long term sustainability of space things like space debris, space traffic management, space governance issues and really got much more into policy issues. Picked up a PhD in Public Policy and public administration along the way. And then a roughly year and a half or so ago, I joined the Aerospace Corporation.

Brian Weeden [00:02:57]:
We are an FFRDC federally funded research development corporation. We do a lot of technical work and technical support for the various parts of the US Government on space. I specifically work in the center for Space Policy and Strategy, which does what the title suggests it does. We look at sort of this intersection of technology, economics, policy, regulatory, how that impacts space capabilities. And within the center, I lead the team that focuses on primarily on commercial and civil space policy issues. But of course, we also. Those tie into a lot of what's going on the NASCARI side as well.

Ken Miller [00:03:34]:
When you look out at the world today and it's hard to talk about any matter touching on global security without recognizing the complexities of the world that we live in. Networks, how our economies cross pollinate, everything is connected. And once you start to dive into it that you realize that at every point, how we operate in space and how we integrate both military operations as well as civilian commercial operations, it's at the forefront of every conversation. When we were talking a little bit earlier, before we came on air, one of the things that kind of jumped out to me was at least in the, in 2025, there's been a lot of developments with the Space Force. A lot of initiatives put out, put out, put out there in terms of a lot of their budget priorities, but also partnerships, commercial space, a lot of different steps. So can you give us a kind of a big picture of where we're at here in 2025 as we try to look at some of the, some of the key issues that are driving space operations today.

Brian Weeden [00:04:35]:
There's a lot going on when we think about it from inside the space world. There's been a lot of growth across all three sort of general areas we think of in space, both civil, commercial and national security space. That growth has been happening last several years. I'll start on the commercial side. Right. We've seen just incredible increase the number of satellites being launched primarily from large constellations. We went from something on the order of 1500 active satellites in orbit back when I was tracking that stuff 15 years ago to now more than 10,000. And several thousand of those are one company, Starlink SpaceX, that is operating large constellation, and there's plans to launch tens of thousands more satellites.

Brian Weeden [00:05:20]:
So you have this huge commercial growth in use of space, numbers of satellites looking to do all sorts of new things in Earth orbit, commercial space stations, and then going out to Cislunar on the civil side, you've got NASA's renewed efforts to go back to the moon with the audience program and then on to Mars. There's a whole set of activities going on with that. And then the national security side, which I think is what you primarily wanted to focus on. You know, a lot of significant change over the last several years with the creation of the Space Force, the renewal of US Space Command, which is a combatant command, and we can get into the difference between the Space Force and Space Command at some point in time. And really they're trying to figure out how do we do the. Or how do they do the protect and defend mission for all of the US Activities that are happening in space. And that includes both the traditional role of how do we use space to support terrestrial military operations, but then what does it look like for the future of military activities in space itself? So all of that is happening and there's just lots of, as you mentioned, lots of activities going on on the policy side, on sort of the capability side, on budget side, all sort of being mixed in at the same time.

Ken Miller [00:06:36]:
You know, when we talk military technology, obviously, you know, this podcast is about electromagnetic spectrum operations primarily, and a lot of our mission area overlaps with the space operations. Obviously, the, the nature of, of space is, is largely driven by electromagnetism. So there's a lot of connection, a lot of alignment on that front. We always talk about the challenges of keeping pace with the private sector, with private development technology. It seems that, you know, with the rapid increase in commercial and other satellite constellations out in space and what they can do, what they're trying to seek to do, that puts a lot of pressure on the Space Force to not only keep up with the technology, but keep up with what the technology can do. And then, of course, to align policy, budget, everything that seems to be annually kind of up in the air, a lot of times with the budget. How does the Space Force uniquely have to address keeping up with the commercial sector?

Brian Weeden [00:07:39]:
That is absolutely something that, something they're looking at. Space is, is different than other domains in that that strong commercial element was not always there. In fact, the first several decades, through much the Cold War, it was primarily governments doing government things in space, national security, science, that sort of a thing that's been changing slowly since the 1990s. And yes, in the last 10 years, 15 years or so, there's been this huge growth, as I mentioned earlier, in commercial space activities. And yes, the government is trying to figure out, including the Space Force, how do they make use of that. Last year, the Space Force unveiled what they called their commercial space strategy, which was their plan for how they are going to tap into and leverage what's happening in the commercial space sector. Because there's a recognition that the innovation happening in US private sector is one of the huge strengths that America has in the growing competition with potential adversaries other countries around the world. So absolutely huge question about how do.

Ken Miller [00:08:41]:
We tap into that, pertaining to that commercial strategy. I think one thing that jumped out at me was the focus on, on balancing government with commercial solutions. Usually it's what, how can we learn from them, how can we integrate, how can we take it? But there, there's a, there's a different approach you don't oftentimes see in these, these types of strategic documents that's talking about the balance between the two.

Brian Weeden [00:09:04]:
Yes. And that gets, I think, some of the unique challenges the Space Force has. On the one hand, they are responsible to the US public for a set of really important missions. And so they're trying to figure out which missions, which activities can be kind of turned over or largely done via commercial methods versus which activities we call inherently governmental that still need to be owned and operated by the US Government. So they might be purchasing commercial capability or pulling in a commercial technology, but for whatever reason, because of the importance of the mission or the sensitivity of it, it still needs to be owned and operated by the US Government. So if you look in that document, they talk about going through these different areas of military space capabilities and where they think there's a big role for commercial, where they think there's a slight reroll, and where they think it's still going to be mostly governmental activities because of, again, going back to some of the unique missions that the military does where you just can't turn everything over to commercial all the time.

Ken Miller [00:10:12]:
And for that strategy, it was released, I believe, last year, was it spring of last year, 2024. I want to stick with that, that a little bit because that kind of precedes two other important documents that were released since then talking about international partnerships, you know, obviously space, another one on space, operating space. So looking back at the commercial strategy, a few lines of effort, obviously transparency, operational integration, risk management, things that you'll typically hear in a lot of strategies. But I think the collaborative transparency is actually a key piece of that that jumped out at me because when you're dealing with collaboration between commercial and military sectors, you're dealing with two completely different mindsets, paradigms. And oftentimes what we see in the military sector is that that ability to size and scale everything and adapt for a military purpose is really getting much, much harder these days than it was in the past. As you mentioned earlier, we kind of DOD oftentimes drove that innovation. So it was the commercial sector scaling from that. Now the roles have been reversed.

Ken Miller [00:11:28]:
Can you talk a little bit about some of those challenges of scaling or, you know, that collaborative transparency that needs to happen so we fully can leverage the commercial capabilities as well as commercial leveraging what military can and needs to do?

Brian Weeden [00:11:43]:
Yeah, a couple different things that I would point out there. One, a lot of these companies, they're, they're new, they're startups, they haven't really interacted with the government before. So just them getting up to speed on government acquisition processes, on the far process, on how do they deal with the government and how does the government communicate to them the needs they, they have and the capabilities are looking to have? That's a huge challenge. A second really big challenge is classification. Historically, the space sector, particularly national space sector, has been very highly classified. Even we'll get to a seglib second talk of international partners, even among those. It's just a historical legacy of the space community space sector. And again, a lot of these companies, especially the newer ones, the more innovative ones, the startup ones, they don't have huge numbers of people with clearances.

Brian Weeden [00:12:33]:
They aren't really used to dealing with classified data. And so there's been a series of, you know, leaders of the Space force and the DoD who have been talking the last several years about the need to declassify or reduce the classification of some of these areas just so they can then reach out to industry better and say, hey, here's the problems we have. How can you help me solve the problems? So I think those are two really big things. The space that the space world is trying to deal with. You know, how do we get these companies integrated into the procurement acquisitions process? And then the second piece of that is how do we actually communicate to them what we need? Because of the historical classification issues, how.

Ken Miller [00:13:12]:
Challenging is it for nations to work together on, on space matters? When you consider, you look at, you know, land, air, se, there, there's lines are demarcated. Who, who has territorial sovereignty over within those domains is pretty clear. But when you get into space and you're just dealing with thousands of satellites in orbit, I mean, how, how do we ensure that, how do we fully understand kind of how we're working with other countries, both allied and adversary, in that Domain.

Brian Weeden [00:13:43]:
Yeah, it's a huge challenge just thinking of Earth orbit, right? So the area of space right around Earth out to what we call geosynchronous geostationary orbit, where a lot of important satellites are, you know, that is many, many, many thousands of times bigger volume than the entire oceans or the entire atmosphere. And you think, oh, we need to view all of that all the time to see what's going on there. That'd be a hard challenge for the Air Force or the ARM or the Navy to do. And yet that is the challenge that, that U.S. space Command has when it's doing what we call space domain awareness or the Space situation awareness mission. So a big part of it is using networks of radars and telescopes, both ground based and space based, just to see what's going on in the domain. Particular quirk of the current framework for international space law is that while no one owns outer space and outer space is sort of free of national appropriation, states do have jurisdiction over their own satellites in space. So us, France, China, Japan, whoever, they still have, they call it jurisdiction, control over their own satellites.

Brian Weeden [00:14:45]:
And there are what we call norms of behavior of how those satellites are operated. There's kind of things we haven't put in place for what happens when two satellites are predicted to come close to each other. It's all still being developed because things are happening very fast. And as you said, it's, you know, it's not quite where air traffic, where, you know, exactly, I'm flying into this airport, I'm in this country's airspace and I can be seen and be heard. It's more like the high seas or international airspace where it comes down to what are those rules of the road that everyone sort of commonly understands so they can react together. And frankly, in the space world, we're still fleshing those out. Right. That's still a work in progress.

Ken Miller [00:15:26]:
So you've been tracking this for, not to date you in any way, but you've been tracking this for decades, sitting here in 2025, just kind of to tee up. When you look back at the evolution of space force especially, but over the last 15, 20 years, what are you most excited about in terms of US Space operations and what they've accomplished to date? And likewise, what is one particular challenge that you've got your attention on that kind of keeps you up when you look at, at where we're, where we are headed on this topic.

Brian Weeden [00:16:00]:
It has been a long, a long challenge, right. And a lot of things have happened. It's, it's really interesting as someone who's been deep into this. You know, we've been talking about a lot of these things for decades, but a lot of the community outside the space has not because we were sort of, you know, wasn't like people paid a lot of attention to this done the general public, until big things like the Space Force happened. I think one of the things that excites me about the creation of the Space Force is they have an opportunity to. To really rethink how things are done. One of the things that does not get as much attention is what they're thinking of on the human capital side. What does the Space Force need for people? How do they train those people? How do they organize those people? And that seems minor, but it's big because space is different, right? We don't have tens of thousands of guardians in space like we do Marines or aviators or, or sailors or.

Brian Weeden [00:16:59]:
Or soldiers. And it's mostly technology. It's machines. And so do we still need to have this very hierarchical structure of, you know, officers and enlisted and one to one hundred or one to a thousand ratios in a general and a private? What kind of skill sets do we need? How are they trained? It's really different. And they have an opportunity, and they're putting a lot of hard work into thinking about that. Looks like, what does retention look like? What does training look like? What does career progression looks like for a job where you're mainly looking at technical skills and sitting behind a desk working on a computer that's controlling satellites or is, you know, working with spectrum or, you know, signals on the fly? So it's really interesting, really big challenge. But again, the, you know, with the creation Space Force, they have an opportunity to do things differently than what they had when they were still, you know, firmly part of the Air Force.

Ken Miller [00:17:57]:
So I want to dive into that a little bit because, you know, you mentioned the role of the Space Force is to man train and equip for space operations. And we, we talk about this a lot on the show with regard to Spectrum operations. And in our current MSO strategy, the services are responsible for man training, equip functions for the CO comms who actually fight the war. And one of the challenges we always have is how do you sync up what the CO comms need, what our warfighters need with what the services can provide. We have a Space Command, same thing. And you have Space Force. Do you see the interaction or the collaboration between Space Force and Space Command working well, or how does it compare to some of the other challenges of the services, man training equipped for the other combatant commands.

Brian Weeden [00:18:49]:
This is a great issue and it's, it's really challenging. I'm glad your audience is familiar with that split between the, the services and the combatant commands. That's really difficult concept a lot of people get their heads around. It's even a little more challenging in space because they're largely the same people, right? Yes, the Space Force is the service with the operate, train, equip authorities. But a lot of them, they then when they, when they go to do their job, they just kind of change their patch out from Space Force Space Command when they're doing their job. In fact, when I did this back when I was doing it, I was Air Force Space Command and the Combatant Command at the time was US Strategic Command. So when I was doing my training job, I was technically reporting to Air Force Space Command. But when I was pulling crew operations duty, I was technically under US Strategic Command.

Brian Weeden [00:19:42]:
So there is that weirdness in that we sort of, at least for the moment, the space forces, they deploy in place as opposed to being sort of geographically changed over from a home unit here in the United States to some geographic combatant command overseas. That is a little bit of a difference. There's also another really interesting wrinkle here in that the U.S. space Command is both a supported and a supporting command. Now, I'm not sure listener, if you know what that is, but for example, CENTCOM Central Command largely is a supported command and that it says I have operations happening in my theater, in my domain. I need forces from other commands from other areas to help support that. A supporting command is someone who provides those forces. So the space US Space Command.

Brian Weeden [00:20:35]:
There are certain circumstances where there are military operations going on in the AOR for EUCOM or CENTCOM or somebody else, and the Space Force is providing capabilities to support those. There are other times when the operation is happening in space commands. AOR, which is defined as everything 100 km and up and the other combatant commands are providing things to them. That is an extremely unusual and very complicated relationship. One that's still being worked out, adds into things we're still trying to figure out here.

Ken Miller [00:21:09]:
Are there other examples of that? My thought is something similar to Strategic Command might be another one that's kind of is on both sides of the fence. But that's a very interesting. And look into that challenge. I haven't thought about it that way.

Brian Weeden [00:21:22]:
So think of it this way. There's a ground based jammer that is interfering with gps. GPS is satellite. The jammer is located on the ground, let's say it's somewhere in Eurasia. So it's in Yukon's theater. So is that a Yukon problem or is that a US Space Command problem? And then you get into the question, what do we do about it? Do we use an airstrike? Do we counter jam? Do we alter the way the satellite behaves to try and counter that? So what, what is done about that jammer could be done on the Space Command side or on the EUCOM side. And got to kind of tease out who's in charge, sort of who's directing that, who's making the decisions. Again, these are all things that are currently being worked out.

Ken Miller [00:22:10]:
And I would imagine that there isn't a lot of history in terms of oh, here's best practices for doing this. So in addition to trying to keep up with the unknown, you also have a lack of history or examples from which to provide yourself the best foundation to address the unknown.

Brian Weeden [00:22:30]:
There is some of that. It's interesting the space community, there's always a discussion of when are we going to have the first space war? And you start to unpack that.

Ken Miller [00:22:37]:
Aren't we already kind of having that at a low, at least a low level?

Brian Weeden [00:22:41]:
Well, I would argue we are the first space space capabilities have been used in conflicts for quite a long time. The one that got the most attention was the first Persian Gulf War. But then it was the NATO campaign in Kosovo at the end of the 90s when first time GPS got ammunitions were operationally used. Then you move into operation during Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Those were had space capabilities fully integrated throughout sort of the full range of operations. But what you did not see there was a lot of adversary ability to interfere with or counter those space activities.

Ken Miller [00:23:18]:
We had such a huge advantage that we didn't even have to really put too much time and energy into thinking about that.

Brian Weeden [00:23:24]:
Correct. Fast forward to the Syrian civil war, starting with 2011, 2012, into invasion of Crimea, into Ukraine currently going on today, and what's happening in Gaza. That's where you start to see both sides having not only space but also counter space capabilities being and especially what's happening in Ukraine. So I think there's an argument to say that what's happened in Ukraine is maybe the first space war in terms of both sides having both space and counter space capabilities. And that now looks more like what you see in other domains where there's sort of that action reaction cycle and both sides are trying to figure out how do we, how do we counter what somebody else is doing? And then they adapt and you have to adapt yourself. And that, that's happening quite a lot.

Ken Miller [00:24:12]:
The Russia, Ukraine war is changing a lot of things very rapidly. We, we talk about that on the show a lot about the drone, counter, drone evolution that's taking place, but just the innovative space that Ukraine is occupying right now where companies can go in and basically test in real world environments. And, and I'm sure that's the same with space. I think what's one of the, the lessons that, that is interesting that we're seeing is it seems to be that Ukraine is ahead of Russia in terms of how it integrates data from space throughout to its forces. That's something that training with U.S. and allied forces is, you know, teaches them in terms of that decentralized execution and, and that ability to harness some of the, a lot of the positives of space assets and capabilities and then get that out to the force. They seem to do that a little bit better than Russia. What are some of the, the, the lessons that you're seeing coming out of the Russia Ukraine war and how's that affecting our global approach to space operations?

Brian Weeden [00:25:11]:
Really great point. I think going into the conflict, I think everyone was assuming that Russia would have the advantage when it comes to space. There are space power, they have a lot of their own space capabilities. Ukraine did not. Yet that is not what we saw, at least through the war so far. My colleague Mick Gleason published something last year on this and noted that Ukraine has done a much better job than Russia in integrating their ability to use space into their war fighting operations. And down to the, down to the tactical level that was very surprising to many people. I, I think a big part of it was because Ukraine didn't have sort of a legacy.

Brian Weeden [00:25:56]:
They didn't have like an old way to overcome. It's almost like sort of the second mover advantage or, or you know, a fast follower and took them in technology development where you just don't have some old thing you have to use. You have the freedom to go out and come up with something new. A big part of what you mentioned, I think that their military was empowered to do that innovation and to, to bring that into play. But another big one is the availability of those capabilities. Ukraine is primarily using commercial capabilities for space. They're not relying on government owned and operated things they built themselves. And so I think another big part of this is for one of the first times this was just available to be used right Ukraine could go out and with a checkbook, they could buy huge amounts of space based imagery and other intelligence capabilities.

Brian Weeden [00:26:46]:
You know, that access to Starlink, which was game changing in many levels, and then find ways to integrate all of that into their stuff. So sort of a perfect storm with those three enablers is what sort of my sense of why they've been able to do what they do.

Ken Miller [00:27:01]:
You mentioned reason, you know, just previously, that in many ways we are currently at war in space. We're already experiencing that. It seems that with the Russian Ukraine war, one of the things, your colleague who wrote the lessons Learned on Ukraine mentions this a little bit quite in depth in the piece. But with Ukraine's access to Starlink and that commercial satellite capability technology, do you think that we as a country, as a world are starting to understand how vulnerable are commercial and civilization elements are in space when it comes to conflict? You know, a lot of times when we think about conflict, we think about something happening over there between one country's military and our military, but it's really about all of country capability versus all of country capability, including civilian, commercial and so forth. Are we starting to understand that, yeah, commercial is just as close to the front lines in many ways as our war fighters when it comes to space?

Brian Weeden [00:28:04]:
Yeah, and I think that's another one of these sort of implications of the increasing role of commercial is now we have to think about what does that mean for, you know, use in a conflict? What does that mean for protection of those assets? Do we, you know, does the government indemnify them against losses? What are the rules of how we use them and when they use them and sort of what the procedures are. It's not entirely new. So for example, in the aviation world, the government's had that they've bought chartered aircraft to fly troops in and out of war zones in the past. And so had thought about these. We have the merchant marine program where the government has used sort of commercial ships in a way that wasn't owned, operated by the government all the time to again to do naval maritime operations. So it's not new overall, but it is a bit new in space that we have not really thought, thought about that as much in the past. I will say during the, the global war on terror, a lot of the UAV operations, nearly all of that data that was being routed around was happening over commercial satellites, commercial geostationary satellites. So we did have that experience.

Brian Weeden [00:29:14]:
But as we talked about, no one was really interfering with those satellites. No one was actively trying to attack those on the scale that we're seeing with sort of the operations that are happening today. So, you know, this is prompting a lot of questions, a lot of discussions. It goes back to some we talked about earlier about the strategy of how do you integrate commercial. You have to think if you're going to leverage commercial. These questions about how do you protect it, how do you defend it, you know, how do you rely on it. Those are sort of both technical questions. They're also policy questions and legal questions that everyone is trying to sort through.

Ken Miller [00:29:46]:
I know from an MSO perspective, you know, we oftentimes have these conversations about policy needs to catch up a little into technology. It seems to be the thing that lags. And so it's always a challenge to make sure everything is kind of moving at the same pace and kind of keeping up with each other. I wanted to kind of go in, talk a little bit about this interoperability or integration of commercial and military a little bit more. One of the topics that, you know, obviously when you talk mso a lot of people might not know exactly what MSO is, but definitionally, of course, it is combining electromagnetic warfare, traditional electromagnetic warfare, and spectrum management. That spectrum management piece has been giving us fits as a country for a long time. We obviously know that the usable portion of the spectrum is finite and it's crowded, complex, I use the word chaotic a lot of times. We don't always know what's happening.

Ken Miller [00:30:37]:
And I'm sure you've seen from the space perspective, you know, when you're trying to look at notions of interference from between ground station, satellite, a lot of that has to do with how we operate in the spectrum, especially terrestrially. That's, you know, from the ground station perspective. So I know about five years ago there was a whole, they are now legato, but they were formally light squared, trying to get licensed and they were held back because they might interfere with, you know, certain space assets. They are operating that the interference is, is under control. We understand what's going on. But that development really kind of opened up a big issue in our community about how we are not managing the spectrum properly. We're not keeping pace with how we need to use the spectrum for both military and commercial purposes. From a space perspective, what do we need to do differently or better in terms of spectrum operations to kind of understand how that interference between space systems and other ground based systems operate.

Brian Weeden [00:31:42]:
So it is one of the hardest problems that we're dealing with in the space community. And I'll say up front, I don't have Any easy answers. If I did, I probably wouldn't be talking to you about them. I'd be in charge of something important. Let me just add a couple more years of complexity here. When we think about spectrum operations in terms of space, nearly every satellite needs RF radio frequencies to talk to the ground or to do its job of a communications relay or something. So nearly every satellite needs RF access in some way. We have challenges in how do we do the space allocation because we now have satellites that are out in geostationary orbit, which is 36,000 kilometers, 20,000 miles above the equator, that are trying to use spectrum that is also being used by these new constellations of satellites in low Earth orbit around 500, 600, 700 kilometers.

Brian Weeden [00:32:40]:
So there's a spectrum sharing between different space services that's happening. There's also then this competition between space and terrestrial activities because some of that same spectrum is being used or wants to be used by a company's treasure companies for broadband rollouts, for wireless networks, all that other kind of stuff. And then there's the international component on it, right, where all these spectrum allocations globally are decided at the itu, the National Telecommunication Union. And that is a very long and complicated process to figure out new allocation. So it's complicated at many levels. It's very, very challenging and there's a lot of competition for it. You have between space actors, between space and terrestrial, and that's not even taking into account the adversary trying to do something to the spectrum. I would say one area where I, where I've seen a little bit of promise we could probably do a lot more is just getting a better idea of what's being used in different areas and what's being able doing.

Brian Weeden [00:33:40]:
I advised a really great dissertation a couple of years ago from a student who looked at satellites in the geostationary belt and asked the question are they actually where they're supposed to be when they're broadcasting? Comparing their ITU filings of I'm going to be at this location broadcasting on this, with where are they actually in space? And some really interesting stuff came out of that. And now they're starting to be more companies that are starting to use ground network to track who's broadcasting on what. Sort of a new term that's come along the last couple years is PNT Domain awareness. So positioning, navigationing, navigation timing, you know, we think of traffic, gps, gnss, how do we know what's happening in that frequency domain? Who's being broadcast, who's being tracking. So to me, I would say first we probably do a lot more effort into just seeing what's happening and who's doing what and who's actually using this stuff that then might help us make some better decisions about how we allocate that stuff.

Ken Miller [00:34:42]:
And one of the issues, related issues that we're tracking here is the World Radio conference that happens every few number of years and the next one is going to be in Shanghai. And everyone's kind of got their eye on that because when you're looking at how the, how the world's going to collaborate on, on spectrum and regul commencer regulations and so forth, what happens at these radio conferences, oftentimes no one pays attention to outside of who attends. And you, you know, it might be happening, but it's done with very little fanfare until it comes out. Some regulations come out on the other end, but it's very unique. That interesting. That's going to be in China in two years. And so we're already kind of watching about how we are going to engage in that and of course work with our allies and partners. The international partnership aspect has been a major priority for the current chief of space Operations, General Saltzman.

Ken Miller [00:35:33]:
He's put out some guidance on on international partnership strategy. What do you see changing from the US Space Force perspective on international partnerships and the role that they play for achieving space superiority?

Brian Weeden [00:35:49]:
That is an area where you've had some of the biggest change in the last few years. When I was in Air Force base command roughly 20 years ago doing some of these jobs, it was all entirely US only in fact, at the time my wife was a major in the Canadian Air Force and was assigned to the same unit and was not allowed even to go on the operations floor as a Canadian assigned to the unit because again, everything was labeled US only. There has been a process since then to bring in more of our allies and partners into space operations, starting with the five eyes. So us, uk, Canada, New Zealand, those countries. And then they've started adding and sort of expanding it, Germany, Japan, Norway, several others and brought into it to what you just mentioned, which is the international partnership strategy that the Space Force just put out back in June of 2025, which in, in the context of what way we did things in the past is a fairly radical document because it says the goal is to fully integrate allies and partners into not only military space operations, but also the acquisitions, procurement, the force development process to how we figure out what we're going to have in the future for military operations and space warfighting. That is a Huge goal. I think it's. I think it's good.

Brian Weeden [00:37:12]:
I think it's the direction we need to head into. But that means not only do we have to sort of change this culture of us only when in this comes to NASCAR space world, but also all these other allies and partners have to figure out on their end, how are they organizing their own space forces, how are they doing their own policies, what are their goals, so that then we can actually get together and sync up again for the other domains. We've been doing this for decades, right? Enable maritime, other domains. No problem in space. This is all brand new.

Ken Miller [00:37:45]:
As we're moving forward, obviously everything comes down to authorities and resources on some level. And like any good interview, Brian, you know, we go from, here's the best thing we're doing, and we have to end talking about resourcing and budget and just kind of the way ahead in terms of, you know, what the Space Force is investing in. And I have to say, from the MSO community, we're a little bit jealous because you have a combatant command, you also have a service, and those two are connected. And we always struggle with that in the MSO community because we don't have a service and we don't have an MSO combatant command. But still, it comes down to resources. Crazy times here with the budget. And I know that there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot through reconciliation that just happened back in July. We have the defense of appropriations, and obviously you have to watch some of the other appropriations bills that come out because there's national security and commercial implications on others.

Ken Miller [00:38:40]:
Where do you see generally just the investment of. As it pertains to space operations. Where do you see the investment going? It seems to have, you know, there's a lot of growth in the early years, understandably so, as you created the new Space Force. But, you know, the last couple of years has kind of been a little bit flat. But where do you see that investment going in terms of certain priorities that need to be addressed?

Brian Weeden [00:39:02]:
It's a really important question. I don't know if any of you remembers the Netflix TV show Space Force. I always tell people the most accurate episode of that was the budget hearing when they have all the service chiefs that are like, giving each other. It's kind of joshing each other and gives their hard times because they're all kind of fighting for a bigger slice of the pie. That happens, right? You know, we know that there's only a certain amount of defense money to go around, and there's just a lot of competition, different services. You know, so far the Space Force has had it pretty good. There's been a pretty significant increase in the Space Force's budget since it was created. Some of that is because they're taking budget lines that have been weather services and they're pulling them into the Space Force.

Brian Weeden [00:39:44]:
But quite a bit of it has been significant growth. And this year, as you mentioned, it is especially complicated because not only do we have sort of the new normal budget process that happens every fiscal year, but then we had this thing called reconciliation, the one big beautiful bill act that added a whole bunch of additional money sort of separate from the normal budget spending. And Space Force worked out really well.

Ken Miller [00:40:06]:
And before you get into that, just for our listeners, you know, so when we talk reconciliation, a lot of times that's used your, your colleague Robert Wilson pointed this out in his budget analysis was that a lot of times, you know, reconciliation is unlike other budget bills because it can pass with just a 50% vote. But it's also oftentimes used to kind of align incoming administrations with existing budget priorities. When we talk in the military, we have the future years defense plan, so we have the budgetary request, but we have a five year plan that, that's one that annual request speaks to. And when the administration comes in, you try to align it. So this reconciliation that took place in July, it provides funding. What's confusing is it provides funding for about four or five years that aligns to that future years defense plan kind of moves certain resources around, provides some new money for 26, but then you have the 26 budget that also has to be informed by reconciliation. So you have these different layers moving at different paces. And, and the promise is at some point down the road they're all going to match up.

Ken Miller [00:41:13]:
But the reconciliation piece this year is not only kind of complicating FY26, it's going to impact future years as well because there's funding that's identified for 20, 27, 28, 29.

Brian Weeden [00:41:26]:
Yeah. So the administration for in the F226 budget, the normal process, they've requested 26.3 billion for the Space Force, which is roughly flat, a little bit increase. But then separately from this, the reconciliation includes it separately 21.6 billion for space related, space focused projects within the Department of Defense. So that's a pretty significant increase. And as you mentioned, the other change with reconciliation is it's not, it's not an annual appropriation. That money can be spent over the next several years. So Again, it's sort of, I think of it as a separate addendum sort of added on to what would happen in the annual appropriations. And it includes a lot of interesting things.

Brian Weeden [00:42:12]:
Looking through the different capabilities, there's a lot of that money and reconciliation was added to beep up classified space programs. The single biggest recipient of it was something called the moving target indicator, which is a new capability that the Space Force is trying to procure. Historically, the question has been how does the military track things that are moving around in the theater of operations? Vehicles, aircraft. We had things in the past called jstars, which is a big aircraft with radars looking sideways. The DOD has made a decision to not procure aircraft to do that in the future because they don't think that they can survive in a future contested air domain. So instead they want to do that mission from space, which means building a constellation of satellites with radars much more powerful than the current radar remote sensing we have today to, to collect that similar data. So there's a huge amount of money in reconciliation going towards that. And then there's also some money that's going to early warning and missile tracking, which again gets to the missile defense challenge that we've heard a lot about with Golden Dome and with other things.

Brian Weeden [00:43:19]:
So a lot of interesting things, really big plus ups to space in general and reconciliation. But as you pointed out, we don't know how it all fits together yet until we see what happens with the normal appropriations process and authorizations, which kind of has the, the broader plan over the next several years.

Ken Miller [00:43:40]:
And you mentioned new Golden Dome was kind of included in some of the space investment. A lot of that is just there's elements that are space related capabilities attached to that. It's not that the Golden Dome is a space program, but it does I think speak a little bit to that integration of ground based systems and space operations stuff that we talked about earlier that we see a lot happening in Ukraine. You mentioned that, you know, obviously we have to wait and see what happens in FY26, how those budget discussions pan out, that we won't know that until probably December of this year after we go through a few CRS and other stopgap measures with that. I think that's a good, good spot to end today's discussion. Obviously there's a lot more we can get into and hopefully we can have you back again, Brian, to go into depth a little bit more. But really appreciate you taking time to join me here on from the Crow's Nest.

Brian Weeden [00:44:30]:
Thank you, Ken. Been a pleasure.

Ken Miller [00:44:32]:
Well, that will conclude this episode of From the Crows' Nest. I want to thank my guest, Brian Weeden from The Aerospace Corporation. As always, please take a moment to review, share and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners. That's it for today. Thanks for listening.