Enlarge / Artist's illustration of two satellites performing rendezvous and proximity operations in low-Earth orbit. (credit: True Anomaly)

The US Space Force announced Thursday it is partnering with two companies, Rocket Lab and True Anomaly, for a first-of-its-kind mission to demonstrate how the military might counter "on-orbit aggression."

On this mission, a spacecraft built and launched by Rocket Lab will chase down another satellite made by True Anomaly, a Colorado-based startup. "The vendors will exercise a realistic threat response scenario in an on-orbit space domain awareness demonstration called Victus Haze," the Space Force's Space Systems Command said in a statement.

This threat scenario could involve a satellite performing maneuvers that approach a US spacecraft or a satellite doing something else unusual or unexpected. In such a scenario, the Space Force wants to have the capability to respond, either to deter an adversary from taking action or to defend a US satellite from an attack.

Enlarge / Aerial view of the Pentagon on March 31. (credit: Photo by Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images)

A strategy document released by the Pentagon this week lays out where the US military can most effectively rely on the commercial space industry and what missions should remain in government hands.

"This marks a new effort to harness the remarkable innovation of the commercial space sector to enhance our resilience and strengthen integrated deterrence as a department," said John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy.

The Space Force already buys a lot from the commercial space industry. The military doesn't build or own satellite launch vehicles—those come from commercial companies. While the Space Force operates government-owned reconnaissance and surveillance satellites, it also buys supplementary data and imagery from the commercial industry.

Enlarge / File photo of an X-37B spaceplane. (credit: Boeing)

It turns out some of the informed speculation about the US military's latest X-37B spaceplane mission was pretty much spot-on.

When the semi-classified winged spacecraft launched on December 28, it flew into orbit on top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, which is much larger than the Atlas V and Falcon 9 rockets used to launch the X-37B on its previous missions.

This immediately sparked speculation that the X-37B would reach higher altitudes than its past flights, which remained in low-Earth orbit at altitudes of a few hundred miles. A discovery from Tomi Simola, a satellite tracking hobbyist living near Helsinki, Finland, appears to confirm this suspicion.

Enlarge / A delegation of French military officers visited the Combined Space Operations Center in 2022 at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. (credit: US Space Force/Tech. Sgt. Luke Kitterman)

Late last year, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks signed a memo to overhaul a decades-old policy on how the Pentagon keeps sensitive military space programs secret. However, don't expect defense officials to openly discuss everything they're doing to counter China and Russia in orbit.

John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, revealed the policy change in a roundtable with reporters on January 17. For many years, across multiple administrations, Pentagon officials have lamented their inability to share information with other countries and commercial partners. Inherently, they argued, this stranglehold on information limits the military's capacity to connect with allies, deter adversaries, and respond to threats in space.

In his statement last week, Plumb said this new policy "removes legacy classification barriers that have inhibited our ability to collaborate across the US government and also with allies on issues related to space."

Enlarge / The Morrell Operations Center at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. (credit: Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

A lot goes into a successful rocket launch. It's not just reliable engines, computers, and sophisticated guidance algorithms. There's also the launch pad, and perhaps even more of an afterthought to casual observers, the roads, bridges, pipelines, and electrical infrastructure required to keep a spaceport humming.

Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, commander of the Space Force's Eastern Range at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, calls this the "non-sexy stuff that we can't launch without." Much of the ground infrastructure at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the military's other launch range, is antiquated and needs upgrades or expansion.

“Things like roads, bridges, even just the entry into the base, the gate, communications infrastructure, power, we’re looking at overhauling and modernizing all of that because we really haven’t done a tech refresh on all of that in a very long time, at least 20 years, if not more," said Col. James Horne, deputy director for the Space Force's assured access to space directorate.

Enlarge / SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off Thursday night from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

It seems like SpaceX did everything this year but launch 100 times.

On Thursday night, the launch company sent two more rockets into orbit from Florida. One was a Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket in commercial service, carrying the US military's X-37B spaceplane from a launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 8:07 pm EST (01:07 UTC). Less than three hours later, at 11:01 pm EST (04:01 UTC), SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 launcher took off a few miles to the south with a payload of 23 Starlink Internet satellites.

The Falcon Heavy's two side boosters and the Falcon 9's first stage landed back on Earth for reuse.

Enlarge / A Long March 5 rocket, the largest launcher in China's inventory, deployed a classified Chinese military satellite into orbit Friday. (credit: CASC)

China's largest rocket apparently wasn't big enough to launch the country's newest spy satellite, so engineers gave the rocket an upgrade.

The Long March 5 launcher flew with a payload fairing some 20 feet (6.2 meters) taller than its usual nose cone when it took off on Friday with a Chinese military spy satellite. This made the Long March 5, with a height of some 200 feet, the tallest rocket China has ever flown.

Adding to the intrigue, the Chinese government claimed the spacecraft aboard the Long March 5 rocket, named Yaogan-41, is a high-altitude optical remote-sensing satellite. These types of surveillance satellites usually fly much closer to Earth to obtain the sharpest images possible of an adversary's military forces and strategically important sites.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is seen outside the company's hangar at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX and the US Space Force thought they were ready to launch the military's mysterious X-37B spaceplane this week, but ground teams in Florida need to roll the Falcon Heavy rocket back into its hangar for servicing.

This is expected to push back the launch until at least late December, perhaps longer. SpaceX and Space Force officials have not divulged details about the problems causing the delay.

SpaceX called off a launch attempt Monday night at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to resolve a problem with a ground system. A senior Space Force official told Ars on Wednesday that additional issues will cause an additional delay in the launch.