Plus: Making commercial satellites more accessible for military needs
| By Dan Robitzski
Welcome back to our weekly newsletter highlighting the opinions and perspectives of the SpaceNews community.
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In the months since the Trump administration first announced the Golden Dome missile defense initiative, commercial space firms have been all in on finding ways to contribute. Details are still scarce (though the Pentagon is already contracting for space-based interceptor prototypes), but the space industry has more or less treated the Golden Dome as a matter of when, not if.
But writing this week in our opinions section is Najam Ul Hassan, a research assistant at the Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies in Lahore, Pakistan, who argued that there's a reason space-based interceptors never took off in the past and that "the fundamental hurdle — physics, not technology — remains to be effectively overcome." He argued that the absenteeism problem — the fact that a given spacecraft housing interceptors cannot stay "parked" over a point of interest — makes the economics and logistics of launching an effective boost phase defense far too complicated to be worth overcoming.
As Hassan put it, the emphasis on "space-based interceptors thus reflects a recurring faith in technological solutions to strategic problems that are, at their core, governed by physics and deterrence. Rather than investing in an orbit-based missile shield that risks instability and imposes exorbitant costs, pursuing balanced security arrangements may offer a sustainable path toward long-term stability."
Read the full opinion here. | | | |  | | An illustration of the Golden Dome. Credit: Arcfield
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Let's stick with the Golden Dome theme. Charles "Chuck" Cynamon, president of Telesat Government Solutions, made his case for how to make Golden Dome — and other military space programs that will depend on the commercial industry — more feasible.
He argued that the Pentagon has neither the time nor the money to build everything it needs from scratch — as evidenced by the military's growing emphasis on buying first and building only when need be — and said that a new approach to procurement can solve the Pentagon's headache when it comes to adopting commercial technology.
Cynamon argued that the Pentagon should embrace a "a contractual model known as indefeasible rights of use. This long-term lease model, which required Congressional approval, has been used by the Defense Information Systems Agency since the early 2000s to acquire terrestrial fiber optic telecommunications capacity without having to own the fiber itself. The same model could also be applied to the acquisition of commercial network bandwidth from space."
Read the full argument here.
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