Report: U.S. Space Security Too Reliant Upon Foreign Assets, Weak Commercial Base

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has released a report saying that U.S. security is increasingly dependent upon foreign satellite services and launch providers and a weak domestic commercial space base.

Defense News has a good summary of the report’s main points:

Saying that that “U.S. dominance in space is eroding,” the draft report highlights several primary concerns:

â–  The “commercial access to U.S. launch capabilities is limited.”

â–  The CSIS team found that U.S. policies have “restricted access to foreign launch.” If U.S., French or Russian policies are altered, “access could become more difficult or even narrower.”

â–  Launch prices are up globally over the last five years, but CSIS found the causes are unclear. In the U.S., launch prices are “much higher than foreign launches.”

â–  “The U.S. space industrial base is fragile,” it states. “In the future, the industrial base may not be able to support critical U.S. military or commercial needs.”

â–  Experts CSIS interviewed say there could be a security risk if Washington relies on foreign launch providers to send sensitive satellites into space.

â–  Two foreign launch firms provide most commercial payload lift. If one goes under or suffers a failure, CSIS calls a single-launcher system “a dangerous circumstance.”

However, Space News reports that some believe the concerned raised by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank are overblown.

Phillip L. Spector, Intelsat executive vice president and general counsel, rejected that analysis.

“Intelsat has been providing services to the U.S. military for 40 years,” Spector said in a July 27 interview. “While we have changed ownership, we have always been at the top a foreign company, while we have created a subsidiary [Intelsat General Corp.] that deals directly with the U.S. government.”

The report picks up on arguments made by Intelsat, SES and Eutelsat, among other satellite owners, that the market dominance of ILS and Arianespace has created a de facto duopoly that could raise prices. If one of these rockets were to fail, the entire industry could suffer, these satellite operators say.

An ILS official said July 27 that recent studies have shown that commercial launch prices have actually decreased over the past 10 years and that the recent rise in prices was after a period in which commercial prices dipped to levels that were not sustainable.

“Arianespace continues to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure and billions of dollars in large bulk buys of Ariane 5 and Soyuz launch vehicles,” Clay Mowry, president of Arianespace Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Arianespace, said July 28. “We shoulder significant risk. Arianespace has made these financial commitments to ensure that we can more than meet the market demand for commercial launches from our secure facilities in NATO territory.”

Aviation Week spotlights criticism of the U.S. commercial space industry, which is dominated by one consortium that is focused on government launches. This focus means that many satellites that the military relies on are launched overseas. The monopoly has also meant high domestic launch prices.

The commercial market behind the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) approach that produced the Atlas V and Delta IV rockets never materialized, leaving the Boeing/Lockheed Martin United Launch Alliance (ULA) joint venture the sole provider of government launches in the medium and heavy-lift classes.

“ULA supports the Boeing and Lockheed Martin commercial launch companies when it is able, but many of those interviewed suggested that it has minimal incentive to provide for commercial launch,” the report states. “This contention appears to be validated by the fact that ULA has supported only two commercial launches in the past four years.”

The report also contains criticism of the Obama Administration’s new National Space Policy, which the document says is not “executable” in its announced form:

Problems identified earlier with government support for the commercial space launch industry that provides major support for U.S. national security interests have not been addressed in the Obama administration’s new National Space Policy, and threaten future military operations if they are not addressed, suggests the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

The final draft of the CSIS report “National Security and the Commercial Space Sector,” released here this morning, finds the space policy issued last month fails to back up laudable goals with a way to reach them. Instead, the policy adopted by President Barack Obama “remains largely consistent with that of previous administration,” the independent think tank reports.

“Many of his commercial space guidelines are almost verbatim those of President [George W.] Bush,” CSIS found. “Like previous administrations, however, the policy was issued without an executable strategy, the absence of which may render accomplishment of the policy’s goals problematic.”

You can download the full report here.