The US space force, an independent branch of the US Army charged with safeguarding US “interests in, from and into space,” canceled a multibillion-dollar program to develop a classified military communications satellite.
The termination of the Northrop Grumman program was made due to increased costs, problems with payload development and a schedule delay, Bloomberg reportsciting a regulatory filing and people familiar with the decision.
Last month, Northrop’s CFO David Keffer appeared to allude to the project’s cancellation in an earnings call when he mentioned that a decline in space unit sales partly “reflects declines in a constrained program due to shifts in government priority”.
Reports of the cancellation of the classified program come a day after the head of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Turner, called on the Biden administration to declassify information about what he called a “serious national security threat,” which was later reported to involve Russian plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space.
ABC News and the New York Times cited unnamed sources as saying that the security threat Turner referred to involves Russia’s potential deployment of an anti-satellite nuclear weapon in space. It has also been reported that US allies have been briefed on the intelligence and the alleged Russian capability is still in development and not a current threat.
“Russia has conducted several experiments with maneuvering satellites that could be designed to sabotage other satellites,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.
Kristensen warned that the placement of nuclear weapons in space the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and that any Russian threat to put nuclear weapons in space could be designed to increase pressure on the US and its allies to end their military support to Ukraine.
Still, the announcements indicate an increasing focus by countries’ militaries to jam space communications and develop space-based targeting. David Burbach, a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College, described the Russia-Ukraine war as “perhaps the first two-sided space war” and “a potential harbinger of the future”.
The decision to cancel the $841 million Northrop Grumman program — described in Pentagon nomenclature as a “termination of convenience” — was reportedly led by Frank Calvelli, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for space acquisition.
Earlier this month, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall revealed A 24-point plan to reform the Air Force and the Space Force to ensure “continued supremacy in those domains while also better placing the services to deter and, if necessary, prevail in an era of Great Power competition”.
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“Investments in space capabilities have increased the effectiveness of operations in every other domain,” Space Force administrators announced. “The US military is faster, better connected, more informed, more precise and more lethal because of its ability to use space effectively.”
Among the re-optimization goals, it said, was to implement “Space Force readiness standards that reflect operations under contested conditions rather than those of a favorable environment”.
