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The provision to Canada of access to the Mobile User Objective System for six years is the U.S. Space Force’s largest foreign military sale yet.
The U.S. military is increasingly taking an allied approach to space. Washington is linking arms with NATO and is ready to support what officials see as a coming surge in space-related foreign military sales.
The U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC) saw a 500% increase in foreign military sales (FMS) requests between 2023 and 2024, representatives from the command’s international affairs office shared at the annual Space Industry Days conference Oct. 23-24 in Los Angeles.
- Standards sharing and interfaces still pose challenges
- Interest in space-related foreign military sales increased 500% in 2023-24
The U.S. Air Force recently established a new space technology and resources baseline document that includes a list of “predetermined” capabilities ready for export, SSC International Affairs Director Deanna Ryals told reporters during the conference.
The document, developed with feedback from Ryals’ office and managed by the Air Force secretary’s International Affairs Office, will allow the Defense Department to streamline space-related FMS requests for which technical and security analysis has already been completed, she said.
Allies are interested in a range of capabilities, from full spacecraft—which would be fulfilled by industry—to cameras, mirrors, ground radars and data collection, Ryals said.
The U.S. military has long shied away from exporting its sovereign space technologies. But as allies and partners prioritize the domain in greater numbers, they are turning to Washington to bolster their capabilities, Ryals said.
“As the dual use of space technologies and capabilities comes into play, it’s harder to say that we shouldn’t be selling these capabilities or we shouldn’t be providing them to friendly nations,” she said.
The Space Force recently finalized an agreement to provide the Canadian Armed Forces with six years of access to the Mobile User Objective System, which provides ultra-high-frequency satellite communications (satcom). The $126.2 million contract, approved in March, is the Space Force’s largest FMS sale yet.
The Space Force and Canadian Armed Forces kicked off the contract’s operations and sustainment phase in October; the initial operating capability was approved in June. Ottawa has become the first Five Eyes member state to achieve international interoperability with the Mobile User Objective System.
The surge in FMS interest reflects a broad call across Space Force leadership to make the nation’s youngest service “allied by design.” With a smaller footprint and a more vast, disparate area of responsibility than its fellow services, the Space Force must take a more collaborative and global approach to maintaining space security, Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein has stressed.
The service is seeing “a demand for capabilities that far exceeds capacity and far exceeds resources,” Guetlein said at the annual MilSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, on Oct. 23. “This drives partnerships with commercial [companies] and partnerships with our allies.” The Space Force plans to release a new allied space strategy in the spring of 2025, he said.
Some insiders are skeptical that the service can deliver. A January 2024 report by the RAND Corp. warned that a lack of adequate, interoperable communications standards and infrastructure across multiple levels of classification prevents such collaboration.
Ryals stressed that the Space Force is working to address that challenge. “We’ve got to be building things that can communicate with each other,” she said. “We have to be sharing those same kinds of interfaces and standards with every nation’s industrial base. We’ve got to be thinking about how we’re going to plan to communicate and do command and control with each other early on and thinking about that now.”
The service’s Space Systems Integration Office is looking to make end-to-end communications as well as networking and refueling standards more shareable, Claire Leon, the office’s director, said at the Space Industry Days media roundtable. The office manages service acquisition programs and ensures that independently operated capabilities are also interoperable.
The Space Force is focusing on its Unified Data Library as an opportunity for increasing interoperability. The library is a centralized repository for data from disparate commercial and military satellite sources.
The Unified Data Library could have graduated security levels, starting with data accessible to foreign nationals and progressing to tiers that include secret or “not releasable to foreign nationals” markings and classified data, Leon said.
New partnerships are emerging at NATO, which first published a space policy emphasizing interoperability in 2019. In early October, multiple member nations signed letters of intent to explore two new space-related efforts within the alliance.
The Starlift initiative—which 14 countries, including the U.S., have expressed interest in pursuing—aims to build a preapproved group of allies that could help one another launch assets on short notice, maneuver spacecraft or procure commercial data in times of crisis, officials said during NATO’s Oct. 17-18 gathering of defense ministers in Brussels.
The Northlink initiative—with 13 letter-of-intent signatories, including the U.S.—would establish a dedicated commercial satcom service over the Arctic, a region that has long posed communications challenges. Allies could make their own sovereign capabilities available to other NATO members, and a proposed framework contracting mechanism could also allow members to access commercial multi-orbit satcom services.
France and Germany in October also became the latest partners to join Operation Olympic Defender, a multinational initiative led by U.S. Space Command to strengthen international collaboration in space against hostile actors and debris-based threats. Australia, Canada, the UK and New Zealand are also members.
In their announcements, French and German military leaders stressed the importance of increasing space domain awareness and strategic solidarity among allies.
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