Space Speech

By John Liang / June 13, 2011 at 5:37 PM

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Frank Rose earlier today spoke about U.S. space policy during a trip to the Czech Republic. In his speech, he highlighted "conducting regular Space Security Dialogues with both established, as well as emerging, space-faring nations." Specifically:

This is important not only for our broader national security and foreign policy concerns, but also in carrying out our diplomacy and public diplomacy responsibilities under the President’s National Space Policy. A key stimulus to establishing these dialogues was the collision of a commercial Iridium communications satellite and an inoperable Russian Cosmos military satellite in February 2009. This collision -- and China’s 2007 anti-satellite test -- created significant amounts of dangerous debris in low Earth orbit and further increased the future risks to human spaceflight and satellite services. Consistent with legal and policy requirements, the United States Strategic Command, known as USSTRATCOM, has begun to provide notifications of potential orbital collision hazards to all government and private sector satellite operators. . . .

For example, over the past year, USSTRATCOM’s Joint Space Operations Center, or JSpOC, has provided Russia with 252 notifications and China with 147 notifications regarding close approaches between satellites. Furthermore, notifications have been provided to government and commercial owners/operators approximately 677 times since May 2010 due to Chinese ASAT debris alone. After receiving those and other notifications, satellite owners and operators maneuvered their satellites over a hundred times in low Earth orbit since the beginning of 2010. Such notifications are themselves an important confidence building measure, and they also provide the basis for pursuit of other bilateral TCBMs in diplomatic, military-to-military, and scientific channels. Another example of a TCBM is conducting familiarization visits of satellite control centers such as the JSpOC. The United States actively conducts these reciprocal visits and looks forward to hosting Russia later this year at the JSpOC at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

65113