AFRL Space Vehicles Directorate: The Art Of The Possible & Beyond
Learn how the prestigious Air Force Research Lab is going above & beyond to improve resiliency, increase domain awareness, and develop next-generation technologies to maintain our nation’s space capabilities and deter conflict. We’re joined by Col. Eric J. Felt, Commander of the Phillips Research Site and Director of the AFRL Space Vehicles Directorate, who leads a team of over 1,000 personnel comprising the nation’s center of excellence for military space technology research, development, integration, and demonstration.
Eric, welcome! Let me start by asking about your background and what led you to your current role with the AFRL Space Vehicles Directorate?
Thank you, Tim. I’m thrilled to be here today to talk about this exciting time in space and the exciting work we’re doing at the Air Force Research Laboratory. In terms of my academic background, my training is in electrical engineering, with a Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Ph.D. in that specialization.
In terms of career experience, the first part of my Air Force career was as a flight test engineer, working first on the F-16 and later the airborne laser out at Edwards Air Force base, but the pivotal moment in my career came when I was assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds our nation’s spy satellites.
At the NRO, I learned just how important space is for providing support capabilities to our nation’s warfighters. The NRO sparked my excitement about space and launched me on the path to my role today at the Air Force Research Lab Space Vehicles Directorate, also called “RV”, short for “Research, Vehicles”.
I want to jump right in to ask about the big shakeup that happened this year with the creation of the Space Force. What are your thoughts on it, and what role does your organization have in supporting it?
Well, I think it’s the most exciting thing that has happened in my career, and it shows just how important space is and that we’re committed to opening up new opportunities in this domain.
Creating the Space Force certainly wasn’t a new idea, but I’m glad that political forces finally aligned for it to happen last year. Honestly, it caught a lot of us by surprise because we’ve been talking about it for a long time, but I don’t know if anybody thought it was going to happen until it did.
I think it was inspired by a realization within the DoD and Congress that space is no longer a safe haven and that if we lose in space, then we lose period. That’s why it’s important to have a service run by professionals who wake up every morning thinking about how to best deter conflict in space and maintain our nation’s space capabilities.
We’re just coming up on the first anniversary of the Space Force’s creation, and so far it’s been quite a whirlwind nine months. However, our job at AFRL is the same, and our focus is on maintaining the technology pipeline to deter conflict in this domain both today as well as a decade from now.
I’m very focused on the next 10 years, and my goal is to provide the right enabling tools and latest technologies to ensure we’re not technologically surprised by our adversaries and able to maintain our capabilities. So, in that sense, the technology we work on hasn’t changed, but organizationally there truly has been been an immense & exciting shift in the last nine months.
Now, the creation of the Space Force was accompanied by a vision for Space Power that USSF Chief Gen. Raymond outlined as supporting both multi-domain operations on Earth as well as defending American interests in space. What is your vision of Space Power, and how does it fit into our existing military structure & force doctrine?
I’m pleased with the Space Force Capstone document published this summer because it promotes a forward-thinking approach to space strategy. It also helps me shine a guiding light on the types of technologies I need to enable the goals for space defense established in that document.
To use a naval analogy, there are two key roles to consider. The blue-water navy is out at sea protecting the lines of commerce and, the brown-water navy supports the coastal operations close to land. The same roles apply to space.
We did a flight experiment competition at AFRL last spring that highlights the importance of both blue & brown-water roles. We started with 27 different concepts that we matured through an internal accelerator, and at the end of the competition, we had two leading concept finalists.
Our first of those two concepts exemplified blue-water thinking, with a focus on maintaining space domain awareness around the moon. The other was very much brown-water, focused on how to use very low earth orbit to better support our terrestrial warfighters. Both of these roles are very important, and it led us to a dilemma at the end of the competition.
So, how do you choose between blue-water and brown-water goals? The answer to this dilemma is in General Raymond’s capstone document. We need to support both blue-water & brown-water roles, and in the competition, we selected both concepts to design a new flight experiment to support his vision.
As I understand things, some of your primary mission areas include space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, navigation, and communications, as well as space domain awareness and defensive space control. Can you tell me a bit about how you provide support across such a wide scope of domains?
If we start with the National Defense Strategy as our guiding light, then it’s straightforward to review the areas that it addresses and look for potential game-changing technologies that we can apply to the type of high-end conflict specified in the strategy document. When you do this, it highlights a couple of common elements that are important across all our mission areas.
One of our needs is resilience. We’re very focused on ensuring the capabilities that our nation depends on remain available when we need them the most — which is precisely when an enemy is trying to deny us the use of them. That’s why I’m highly focused on ensuring the resilience of our capabilities.
Here’s an example: Our Global Positioning System offers powerful capabilities but it’s very easy to jam. That’s led us to the development of what we jokingly call “China beating PNT” because it will work even when somebody is trying to deny your use of that particular GPS spectrum or waveform.
In the ISR area, an example of a technology we’ve explored is hyperspectral imaging, which entails splitting up the spectrum into thousands of bands, which enables some really neat characteristics for identifying material properties and a few other capabilities you can’t do with traditional ISR.
Then, just in the past two years, we flew a hyper-temporal payload that shows that by using very fast time-sampling we’re able to see missile plumes through clouds. It sounds crazy, but the physics works, and we’ve proven that it’s a workable new technology in space ISR.
Those examples all result from our process of reviewing the challenges for each mission area and trying to apply an “art of the possible” approach to maintain our tech edge and contribute to war-fighting capabilities.
Would it be fair to describe RV as being the Space Force Laboratory? How does RV work with DIU, DARPA, Space Rapid Capabilities Office, the SMC, and other organizations that need the organic know-how and cutting edge technology development that you provide?
Yes, AFRL is absolutely the Space Force’s research lab. We embrace a concept called “one AFRL, two services”, which organizes all 10 directorates in AFRL to support both the Air Force and the Space Force.
The DIU and DARPA are fellow innovators, which is wonderful because it gives us other groups to collaborate with. Having a healthy competition of ideas when in the initial phase of development is powerful, and they provide a diversity of ideas that helps all of us create better solutions. So, we’ve got a good innovation ecosystem in place.
The other organizations you mentioned, such as the Space RCO, SMC, and the Space Development Agency are our primary transition partners. After we get a technology matured, we give it to one of them to migrate into a program to provide a sustained long-term capability for our warfighters. Our joint inter-agency relationships are crucial to making sure that this innovation ecosystem works the way that it’s supposed to.
Admittedly, our innovation ecosystem is a little chaotic compared to a more traditional program office with systematically defined processes for engineering, test, and delivery — but that chaos is intentional. If you want to be successful, you need a system that’s less rigid & dogmatic so that good ideas don’t get suppressed. This is a very important part of what makes our system work.
The other part of our secret sauce is that we maintain organic expertise and the capability to build technologies ourselves. That is something that helps us, not only when we execute organically, but also working with our external partners. We don’t just outsource our innovations for construction — we can build them in-house, and that makes a big difference.
The larger AFRL organization works with a wide-scope of breakthrough technologies, but the Space Vehicles Directorate seems to have been more focused on satellite technology until recently with projects like the Boeing X-37, right? Are we seeing a diversification happen in terms of areas of focus?
I wouldn’t say that the focus or core competencies of the Space Vehicles Directorate are changing. Again, AFRL is split up into 10 different directorates and each one has core areas of technical competence and capabilities. Ours has always been space vehicles and that hasn’t changed.
However, changes at AFRL are happening at a higher level, and it’s led to more collaboration and better teamwork across the whole laboratory. That’s is being driven in part by the Science and Technology 2030 Initiative which restructured our business processes. Today, instead of selling an idea internally to three different directorates and hoping that they all agree, we have a much more corporate evaluation process that’s more efficient.
The advantage of this new approach is that it incentivizes cooperation with other teams, organizations & directorates to bring the best ideas together — and this helps us to better serve both the Air Force and the Space Force. None of these things have changed our core mission, we’re just becoming more efficient in how we create solutions.
The X-37 also flew a mission recently for the SSPIDR project, and I understand you took some experimental hardware for Paul Jaffe up to study the concept of space-based beamed solar power. Can you tell me about that project and what kind of progress you’re making with it?
Beaming power from space is an idea that’s been around for decades, but we’ve only recently had the capabilities to attempt it. One of the key technologies is a wafer that directly converts the solar to RF-energy, and Paul Jaffe built an early version of that wafer and we flew it on the X37 to make sure it could survive in the space environment.
So, SSPIDR stands for Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research, and what we’ve done is to decompose an operational system into critical technology elements that need to be demonstrated before we can attempt to build a full-scale system.
Keep in mind, a fully operational system will be very large. It might require a thousand square meters of these solar panels to beam significant amounts of power. Before we attempt that, we need to understand the real-world performance of these components on an individual level first.
The SSPIDR program will culminate in an on-orbit demonstration of power beaming, where you will be able to see a light bulb glowing on the ground when your satellite goes overhead to prove the basic technology. If that works, we’re confident we can scale to the larger structures that are needed to enable the operational concept.
You know, having energy on-demand is operationally very useful to our Department of Defense, no matter which domain you’re operating in. This is a technology the Army, Navy, and Air Force all love for providing power to assets on the ground, at sea, and in the air.
Space-based solar power also lets us beam power to satellites in orbit, so that they don’t require battery power when they’re in eclipse. This is a big idea that enables all kinds of new operating concepts, and we finally feel like the technology is at a point where we can build it and make it useful.
China has also been testing space-based solar power, along with plans for lunar industrialization, nuclear propulsion for asteroid mining, and competitive space industries. How is RV helping the Space Force keep up with this?
That’s true. China has ambitious plans and they’re very strategic about their approach to long-term technology development — but we are too. One of my jobs in AFRL is to focus on the art of the possible, which involves connecting the things we could do with the things we should do.
So, what are our most militarily useful goals? These are the technologies that we’re focused on developing, and we have a lot of strategy and planning that goes on between AFRL, the Space Force, and our scientific staff to think through our options and plan an effective strategy.
In terms of strategy, one example of this that’s pretty cool is the “lunar Catan” exercise that Peter Garretson over at Air University just came up with. It’s just like The Settlers of Catan board game, but it’d designed to help us brainstorm strategies for lunar settlement.
If you’re going to settle the moon, what should your strategy be? What resources do you need, and where should you locate them? Once we have strategic goals, my job is to ensure the technologies are in place to implement them effectively. It all fits together in terms of thinking about the future and then planning for technologies that will enable a wide range of options.
In addition to designing strategy, we keep abreast of China’s strategic plans, and when it’s appropriate we can incorporate their ideas into our planning and strategy. Exploring the art of the possible and strategic implementation is a crucial part of what we do at AFRL.
I understand that intelligence agencies believe that China is working on weapons development programs for direct ascent, co-orbital weapons, and directed energy ASATS. Is that something your group is developing countermeasures or deterrents for?
Yes. We’re very concerned about threats that are quickly developing against our space capabilities, and the reason that those threats are maturing is because our adversary has realized how important our space capabilities are. If they can disable those capabilities, it could give them a strategic advantage.
We don’t want adversaries to see any way to defeat US space capabilities as part of our policy of deterrence. We don’t want gaps to be available in the space domain, and we have several efforts underway to mitigate that threat.
For example, right now the Demonstration and Science Experiments (DSX) satellite is up in orbit with an 80-meter boom. It’s the largest unmanned structure in space, and it’s broadcasting very low-frequency radio waves to help us determine if that is an effective way to mitigate radiation in space.
Back in the ’60s, we learned on accident that detonating a nuclear weapon in space is about the worse possible thing you can imagine for space assets. We lost half our satellites back then because we underestimated how damaging it would be before we tested it. Today, it remains a concern due to North Korea and others threatening that kind of action.
So, we launched DSX because the physics tells us that very low-frequency radio waves will mitigate orbital radiation in days instead of years, which is a good response to the most severe threat that you can envision. Along with that, we’re also working to harden our satellites against radiation as well as threats from lasers & directed energy weapons.
Another means of mitigating threats on orbit is through proliferation. Having thousands of satellites and giving each of those satellites better propulsion makes it a lot more difficult to attack our satellites and provides redundancy in our space-based capabilities.
Another very important part of our deterrence policy is attribution. The key to that is space domain awareness, which is valuable to diplomacy and also foundational to all of our goals in space. These are all parts of a technology vision that’s guided by concerns about threats we’ve identified and strategies to deter adversaries from using those capabilities.
So far, we’ve focused on near-earth applications, but as I understand things, your team is designing a pathfinder satellite to find and track objects in cislunar space as well as those orbiting the moon, in what some are calling the “cislunar highway patrol”. Can you tell me a bit more about this project?
The pathfinder satellite is one of the two projects that we selected as our next flight experiment on the blue-water side of things. We selected it because the assigned area of operations for US Space Command has no upper limit, which means that wherever our adversaries are operating or we have commercial activity, the Space Force needs to be prepared to defend our interests.
Right now, we have a lot of commercial activity headed to the cislunar sphere, and our adversaries are planning to operate there as well. There are a lot of technical challenges involved with operating in the cislunar sphere, but we love technical challenges — we’re the research lab!
For example, in cislunar space, it’s difficult to even specify what orbit you’re in. Near the earth, calculating an orbit is simple because you only have the Earth’s gravity and the mass of your satellite to worry about. In cislunar space, you’re dealing with gravity wells for both the Earth and the Moon, and satellite orbital tracks look like drunken sailors stumbling around. Cislunar orbits are harder to calculate and there’s more uncertainty, so even specifying an orbit is a technical challenge that we’re eager to solve.
The size of our operating environment is also an issue. The moon is 10 times higher than geostationary orbit (GEO), which has traditionally been the top of our area of operations. In cislunar space, you’ve got a thousand times more volume that needs to be searched for activity — and you’ve also got to deal with something we call “the cone of shame”.
The cone of shame is the area behind the moon that you can’t see from ground-based telescopes, and it includes some visible space as well because the moon is so bright that it blinds our instruments. The only way to maintain domain awareness in the cone of shame is to have space-based assets monitor it — which led us to CHPS.
So, the Cislunar Highway Patrol System is a small spacecraft that will operate around the moon and the LaGrange points to maintain awareness of the activities that are going on up there. It’s a great training opportunity to help us get used to operating in cislunar space, and as the Space Force needs to move into that AOR they’ll have the technology that they need to do that.
NASA plans to return to the Moon by 2024, and Elon Musk wants to go to Mars — and both efforts involve a great deal of public & private sector collaboration. Is your organization involved these projects, and what are your thoughts on the public-private partnerships to develop technology & even habitats on the Moon & Mars?
We collaborate closely with NASA on technology development, and there’s often a lot of overlap in development that benefits both organizations. It’s important to remember that the DoD and NASA have different missions in space, but we share challenges such as the need to navigate and communicate in cislunar space, so there are lots of opportunities for close collaboration.
A great example of collaboration is our embracing the standard for optical communication in space that NASA has developed. It’s very important to maintain common standards for interoperability wherever possible, so we’ve adopted the NASA standard for that particular technology. That’s just one example among many where we’re working closely with NASA for joint solutions that benefit everyone.
In terms of Mars, AFRL currently has three different technologies that are flying to Mars right now on a NASA mission. So yes, we’ve thought about the kinds of technologies that we’re going to need to operate even beyond the moon.
Private-sector partnerships are going to be key here because I don’t see the US Government in the driver’s seat for manned missions to Mars. Commercial activity is driving this space renaissance, which makes this a very different model than in the past.
This new space race is just as exciting as the first one back in the ’60s, but this time around we need to focus on how to work appropriately with the private sector to get the synergies that we expect even though they’re they’re driving.
In the past, funding was an important tool for collaboration, but in cases where AFRL can’t provide direct funding support for commercial activities or the funding isn’t needed, then we’re looking at other avenues such as collaborative testing and evaluation of new technologies.
As we begin to move further out from Earth into cislunar & lunar space, the need for better propulsion systems will likely increase. Has your team looked into next-generation systems for propulsion such as fission, fusion, beamed-energy, or other advanced technologies?
Yes. We’re looking at all of those types of propulsion. On the commercial side of things, we’ve got 137 launch startups operating at various stages of maturity, and they’re working on a variety of solutions for getting from the Earth into space, so I expect to see novel solutions emerging there first.
Propulsion in space is incredibly important as well. Again, if you’re talking about operating in a thousand times the volume of space that we’ve needed to work with in the past, then we’re going to need lots of new technologies to make it happen. One example is the ASCENT “Green propellant” developed by AFRL out at Edwards Air Force base. It’s higher-performing and not dangerous when you’re assembling the spacecraft — so what’s not to like about it?
We’re also looking at electric propulsion, and we’ve seen huge advances that enable us to contemplate launching satellites with 6,000 meters per second of Delta-v — numbers that we would have thought were crazy in the past.
In terms of fission and fusion drives, it’s an area that we’re looking at, but I’m not going to be the leader in nuclear propulsion until I see the military need for that technology. Solar power is great for the vast majority of our Space Force mission, so it’s still our primary focus.
What’s interesting about nuclear drives is the possibility of new missions that could be enabled by these power sources. To that extent, those are very interesting to us, and we want to be the partner if someone else develops that kind of technology. These are just a few of the exciting advances in propulsion technology that will enable us to do new things in space.
Eric, let me close by asking what comes next for yourself and RV? Where can we expect to see your work in future headlines?
There are some transformational capabilities in our development pipeline right now, and if we were to talk five years from now, I would hope that even if several of them don’t pan out, at least two or three of them have gone on to change the world, which is really what we’re trying to do.
To come back to our mission goals, my job at AFRL is to ensure that the Space Force can deter destructive conflict in space. I want them to be capable of doing that tonight and also 10 years from now — and I’m always focused on the future to ensure that we’re able to maintain our technological advantage.
So, if we talk in five or 10 years, I hope we can still say we have not had a destructive conflict in space. That’s our number one goal, and ultimately that’s why we’re working on all these great technologies.
About Our Guest
Colonel Eric Felt is the Commander of the Phillips Research Site and Director of the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. He leads a team of 1,080 military, civilian and on-site contractors who comprise the nation’s center of excellence for military space science and technology, research and development, as well as advanced technologies integration and demonstration. His organization focuses on enduring Air Force space missions: communications; position navigation and timing, missile warning, space situational awareness, and defensive counter space.
Colonel Felt received his commission in 1991 from Duke University Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps. He entered active duty in 1996 after completing a master’s in science and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering. He is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and has served as a developmental engineer and program manager in lab, test, program office, and staff assignments. Prior to his current position, Colonel Felt served as the Senior Materiel Leader, Joint Mission Division, Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Systems Directorate, Hill Air Force Base, Utah. Learn more at his Kirtland AFB biography page.
