Military Space
Military space news from Cosmic Herald — Space Force, satellite warfare, GPS, missile warning, and the growing role of space in national defense.
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Military Space
The Pentagon Just Committed $1.2 Billion to Secure the Rare Earth Minerals That Satellites and Missiles Depend On
Two massive conditional loans—$725M to Energy Fuels, $500M to Phoenix Tailings—mark the Pentagon's biggest bet yet on breaking U.S. dependence on foreign rare earth supply chains.
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Military Space
Rheinmetall and Vantor Are Building a Military Satellite ISR Network for Germany's Armed Forces
German defense giant Rheinmetall signs MoU with Vantor for a joint ISR satellite venture — its third military space partnership in months — as Berlin races to build sovereign orbital capabilities.
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Military Space
The Space Force Just Published a 15-Year Vision. Personnel, Simulators, and Survivability Top the List.
A 100-page roadmap called Objective Force lays out how the smallest military branch plans to quadruple its satellite fleet, grow headcount by 30%, and train for orbital combat through 2040.
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Military Space
Northrop Grumman Says It Can Scale Solid Rocket Production — But Washington Has to Commit First
The solid rocket motor maker argues the industrial base is ready to ramp up, but short-term government contracts make it nearly impossible to justify the capital investment needed to do so.
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Military Space
Space Force's Top Rapid-Acquisition Leader Decamps for Nuclear Weapons Center as Congress Rewrites the Playbook
Kelly Hammett's move from the Space Rapid Capabilities Office to Kirtland AFB comes as both chambers of Congress prepare to fold the agile procurement shop into a broader acquisition framework.
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Military Space
SpaceX Sends Classified NRO Payload to Orbit, Cementing Its Role as America's Go-To Military Launch Provider
A Falcon 9 launched intelligence-gathering satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office on June 18, underscoring how deeply the U.S. intelligence community now depends on commercial rockets.
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Military Space
Two More Jam-Resistant GPS Satellites: Inside the Space Force's $514M GPS IIIF Order
The Space Force ordered two more GPS IIIF satellites from Lockheed Martin for $514 million, pushing the next-gen order to 14 spacecraft and hardening the GPS constellation against jamming with M-Code, a digital payload, and regional power focusing.
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Military Space
The Air Force Wants to Launch and Catch Rockets from Old Oil Platforms at Sea
A new Air Force initiative would transform decommissioned offshore oil rigs into sea-based rocket recovery stations — extending Space Force launch flexibility and reducing dependence on a handful of fixed land-based pads.
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Military Space
Combat Surgeon, Record-Setter, Next: Army's Col. Rubio Named to Artemis III Earth Orbit Test Crew
Col. Frank Rubio — who shattered the U.S. record for longest single spaceflight — has been named to the 2027 Artemis III crew alongside ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano, in a mission that will test lunar lander docking in Earth orbit as the final dress rehearsal before the Moon.
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Military Space
One Outage Stopped Navy Drone Tests. The Pentagon's SpaceX Problem Is Bigger Than That.
When a Starlink outage last August left Navy unmanned surface vessels bobbing uselessly off the California coast, it crystallized a strategic anxiety the Pentagon had been managing quietly: the U.S. military is profoundly dependent on a commercial satellite network it does not own or control.
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Military Space
The SDA's Transport Layer: America's Proliferated Military Satellite Constellation
The Space Development Agency is building a mesh network of hundreds of small military satellites in low Earth orbit — a fundamentally different approach to space-based command and control than anything the US has operated before.
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Military Space
Anti-satellite weapons are real, tested, and leaving debris clouds that threaten everyone
China, Russia, the US, and India have all tested direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles. The debris those tests create persists for decades. The tension between military necessity and orbital sustainability is becoming one of the defining strategic problems of the 2020s.
