The SpaceCom Column

Next month, the “Reconstitution and Reinforcement - Sustaining Combat Power in Orbit” panel at the Space Mobility Conference, as a part of Commercial Space Week, will discuss the ability to reconstitute and reinforce space domain capabilities after degradation, loss, or attrition. There will be a lot to talk about as representatives from The Aerospace Corporation and Space Prep, a service of All Points Logistics, examine what the U.S. Space Force (USSF) and its partners can realistically execute today, what tools are ready, and what gaps remain.  

USSF needs to build a toolkit of logistical capabilities to support and sustain operations in space during wartime, including the ability to maneuver and repair assets in-orbit, capabilities that are currently limited without the ability to refuel as needed. Developing and deploying those capabilities are still a work in progress, making ongoing discussions at SpaceCom and other forums a necessity.  

Perhaps the easiest part of the panel conversation will be looking at proliferated constellations in LEO. “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” Donald Rumsfeld told U.S. troops in Iraq in December 2004 as they were asking for more armored vehicles.  

It’s a harsh statement but one that equally applies to space warfare. Space Force will have to work with the satellites, constellations and systems it has available, relying on in-orbit spares and any available dual-use commercial resource to make up for hardware losses and compensate for soft-kill mechanisms such as jamming and more sophisticated cyberattacks. Commercial and military PLEO operators will have to be able to quickly identify affected satellites and systems and make agile adjustments in minutes and hours, not days and weeks.  

Exactly what could go down if a hot war takes place in the heavens is highly speculative, depending on the adversary and how dependent they are upon their own space assets. The simplest solution discussed by one nation would be to use a large EMP device to kill everything in orbit and leave everything from VLEO to GEO dead, but such an indiscriminate approach would require a nuclear weapon and kill the attacker’s assets and probably their cosmonauts as well as our own.  

Other approaches discussed by adversaries include directed energy weapons to blind or cripple satellites without creating random debris and kinetic mechanisms which would render assets assuredly unusable and unrecoverable, with the latter falling into a category of “Space MAD” (Mutual Assured Destruction) with a non-zero chance that debris would result in damaging or crippling their own assets. Certainly China, given its continued investments in space assets, will presumably choose a more litter-free strategy. 

Reconstituting and supplementing existing orbital assets are where the discussion becomes speculative and opaque, but the requirements are clear. It cannot take years to build and launch satellites, but it needs to happen in days and weeks. The VICTUS NOX mission by Firefly in 2023 was a successful demonstration of launch on need, putting a ready payload into space on 24 hours' notice. Firefly continues to build its portfolio of responsive launch with its VICTUS HAZE and VICTUS SOL contracts, with VICTUS HAZE expected to take place in the first quarter of 2026 and VICTUS SOL coming in the second half of 2026.  

In time of crisis, one presumes that Space Force would be able to preempt reusable fleet operators’ commercial launch manifests to launch replacement satellites, but this brings up two questions, one hard and one harder. The hard question is where does Space Force get replacement satellites? It could, if it has not already, purchase a set number of ground-spares for rapid launch and carefully hedge replacement stock as needed, moving ground spares into orbit after a certain period of time as it purchased next-generation replacements.  

The harder question becomes protecting stateside launch facilities from disruption or worse. Slow-moving drones have made considerable mischief on both sides of the Atlantic for the U.S. and its allies, making air defense at the Cape, Wallops, and Vandenberg a topic of concern. Conventional attacks would also be of interest, given the coastal locations of all current U.S. orbital launch sites. 

Will the panel have deeper discussions for these issues? Come to Orlando and find out. 

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See the “Reconstitution and Reinforcement - Sustaining Combat Power in Orbit” panel at the Space Mobility Conference January 28, 2026.