LONG BEACH, Calif. - As U.S. dependence and reliance on space grows, the development community has a "serious obligation" to deliver on its commitments, an Air Force lieutenant general told the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics space conference on Sept. 19.

"Truly space has become integral to every aspect of what we do in military operations today," Lt. Gen. Michael Hamel, commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) and program executive officer for space, told the Space 2007 Conference & Exposition. The ability of U.S. forces to know what's happening in space is "critical" to having assured mission capability, he said. "Space situational awareness (SSA) is now the means by which we intend to knit all those capabilities together."

Air Force Space Command has been conducting a review of space situational awareness assets, many of which are a legacy of the Cold War, particularly in terms of sensors. "Our priority is to look at ways to knit and net together sensors in a much more operationally responsive fashion so we can maintain continuous knowledge as events and situations change," Hamel said. A program called Integrated Space Situational Awareness has been submitted as part of President Bush's fiscal 2008 budget. "What you'll see in FY '09 and beyond is increased investment in the architecting and netting together of sensors," Hamel said. "New and advanced sensors...like SBSS [Space-Based Space Surveillance system] will become part of that architecture as that satellite is completed and launched."

Hamel acknowledged that many of today's sensors are "still fashioned around the geography of the Soviet Union." Space situational awareness will deal directly with this by "freeing you from the Earth's geography" via space- and ground-based sensors designed to detect where and when launches are occurring around the globe, which Hamel called "event-related space situational awareness."Missile defense could play a possible support role, he said, mentioning recent discussions with the Missile Defense Agency "about how to accelerate bringing data from missile defense into this integrated space situational awareness architecture."

For many years, missile warning radars have been used as collateral sensors for a space surveillance network, Hamel said, and "there's no reason in my mind we shouldn't be doing the same thing with our missile defense systems as collateral sensors for our SSA capabilities."