SPACE, INNOVATION, AND THE LA SMC
BY JUSTIN CHAPMAN
The Pacific Council recently hosted a webcast discussion with Lt. Gen. John F. Thompson, commander of the LA-based Space and Missile Systems Center, on the U.S. Space Force, the economic and military value of the United States’ space infrastructure, and the investments the United States is making to maintain its edge over its competitors. The conversation was moderated by Marissa Moran, Chief Communications Officer at the Pacific Council.
The Council presented this event as part of its Global LA series, which aims to highlight and promote Los Angeles’ important role in global affairs.
Here are takeaways from the discussion:
“The economic, military, and international aspects of space have been on the rise considerably over the past 20 years, including the emergence of new threats,” Lt. Gen. Thompson said. In establishing the U.S. Space Force, “the United States has finally acknowledged that space is really a war-fighting domain because of some of the actions we’ve seen our adversaries take. It’s a unique environmental challenge that requires specialized knowledge and skill. From the standpoint of putting experts into a new service that is entirely focused on that domain, it’s absolutely the right thing to do.”
“For many decades, we’ve treated space as a benign environment that’s not populated with assets, but it has exploded here over the last decade or so,” he said. “There are so many more space-faring nations and satellite vehicles. We need to determine basic norms of behavior in terms of how satellites interact with one another, who has the right of way, how do satellites communicate, how do we avoid satellite collisions with a growing population? Eventually that also applies to the moon itself: how will we as the people of Earth treat the settlements, mining, and use of resources on the moon and how will that be structured over time?”
He added that that will not exclusively be a military issue to resolve. “That needs to be a civilian-led discussion in terms of how resources will be allocated toward and resource mined from other celestial bodies for use of people on Earth,” he said.
Regarding space entrepreneurship and the cooperation between the government and private sectors, he pointed to a couple every day examples. “How did you get where you were going a couple days ago when you hadn’t been there before? You used an app on your phone to navigate you,” he said. “The app was developed by someone else, but the little blue dot on the phone was provided to you by the U.S. Space Force via GPS that we helped along with industry to design, develop, build, and field that now fly in a constellation of over 30 satellites above the planet every day to make sure you know where you’re at.”
“Every day, there are missile warning satellites that are staring at our adversaries so we know what our adversaries are up to in terms of launches,” he said. “If on a really bad day there’s a launch towards the continental United States, we would know and be able to assign who launched that missile with that payload and be able to respond in a way that is commensurate to what was launched at us. Those kinds of capacities come to you every day from the LA basin and the Space and Missile Systems Center.”
If you are a Pacific Council member and would like to watch the full conversation, contact us at engage@pacificcouncil.org.
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The views and opinions expressed here are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.
