Eyes on The Sky: Space Force Struggles To Track Objects in Orbit.

• Author: Luckenbaugh, Josh

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado -- Space is an increasingly crowded domain, with governments and commercial companies across the globe launching more and more systems into orbit. Meanwhile, the Space Force is struggling to keep tabs on what's happening up there, service officials say.

In the last 15 years, 53 nations have begun operating satellites in space, increasing active satellites orbiting the Earth by nearly 500 percent, Space Force's Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said during a keynote address at the Space Foundation's Space Symposium.

With more countries and companies operating in space, the number of orbital launches is expected to go up exponentially in the coming years. Dr. Chris Scolese, the director of the National Reconnaissance Office, said at the symposium the NRO alone is planning to quadruple the number of satellites it has in orbit over the next decade.

Saltzman said along with the operational systems in space, "the amount of trackable debris has dramatically risen." The International Space Station has had 1,500 close approaches and taken six debris avoidance maneuvers in the last year, he said.

"Obviously with human life on orbit, we spend a tremendous amount of time making sure that we understand as best we can anything that could endanger the lives of those astronauts," he said.

Despite the need for improved space domain awareness as the number of systems and debris in orbit has risen, the Space Force's monitoring systems are "still lagging," Saltzman said.

Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of Space Operations Command, said while the Space Force has the world's best capabilities, they aren't good enough. It's not just about tracking the increasing number of objects in orbit, "but it's about knowing about what the threats are on orbit, maintaining custody of those threats and then doing things about that," he said.

Saltzman said it takes too long to get data and make sense of it. "When I hear about a breakup that occurred of a rocket body, where one rocket body became five pieces of rocket body, but it took us a couple of days to put all that information together--okay, that's probably not the kind of timeline" that would allow the Space Force to take meaningful action.

Legacy space domain awareness systems were designed merely to "catalog objects in space, so we knew what was there and could basically account for if things were going to run into each other," he said. "That's just not going to be...