Communications satellite orbiting above Earth (Getty Images/ Adastra)
AFA WARFARE 2025 — For several years, the Space Force has had a secretive, orbital tool that can gather information on China’s own network of sensors that monitor American satellites, according to a key service official.
Calling the project a “quasi-operational success,” Kelly Hammett, director of the Space Rapid Capabilities Office (SRCO), said in a briefing with reporters today at the AFA Warfare Symposium that “situational awareness indications and warning payloads” have been “collecting all kinds of very interesting data on the Chinese SOSI [Space Observation Surveillance and Identification System] network” — Beijing’s rough equivalent to Washington’s Space Surveillance Network.
The space-based monitoring technology was launched as payloads aboard Northrop Grumman’s LDPE-3A spacecraft in 2023, Hammett disclosed. The project was the first from the SRCO to enter orbit, and the Space Force said at the time [PDF] that the payloads would provide “enhanced situational awareness.”
“These are sensors that can tell whether you’re being observed, tracked, targeted, those types of things,” Hammett said. “And that’s a capability that we’re trying to drive into the larger Space Force. We’ve done the prototypes, and it’s working.”
Although the Space Force has several ways to monitor Beijing’s orbital activities — from the current Space Surveillance Network to the forthcoming SILENTBARKER constellation — many American satellites themselves aren’t able to tell when they’re similarly being watched, Hammett explained. The secretive payloads launched aboard the LDPE-3A aim to fix that problem.
However, as a small organization with roughly 50 civilian and 20 military employees, some in at-risk categories like probationary workers, Hammett warned his office could be disproportionately affected by labor cuts that are underway by the Trump administration.
“I’m losing people,” he said, referring to employees who took the administration’s deferred resignation offer and others who left on their own volition. “And I cannot hire people back because we’re under a hiring freeze, and we’re having to figure out a hiring plan. We can try to hire contractors and FFRDCs [Federally Funded Research and Development Centers], and that’s the vast majority of my workforce because we’ve never been given any additional government employees since the organization was stood up in 2018.” Hammett added the SRCO has about 200 contractors and FFRDC employees that “supplement” the office’s workforce.
“I have … billion-dollar programs that are run by seven people. If you go to the rest of the DoD, you’ll have a program office of 500 people to run one of those programs,” Hammett said. “So we’re very lean, and we are, therefore, inordinately impacted when we lose one, two, three people” who aren’t able to be replaced.
