U.S. Space Force may call on sci-fi writers, futurists to define future operating environment

Guardians observe orbital data at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., Oct. 4, 2024. Credit: David Dozoretz, Space Force

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — As Space Force enters the second half of its first decade of operation, planners and technologists are looking to nontraditional partners to help them define current needs and future priorities.

Gillian Bussey, Space Force’s deputy chief science officer, told an audience at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Conference that the service is in the process of “institutionalizing its forward-looking formal process” to guide investments beyond the current budget. A fundamental part of that, she added, is defining the future operating environment.

“One thing that has me excited about space is that there’s a lot of possible futures. And some of those futures are very divergent, which as [a science and technology] person, is very exciting, because there’s a lot of great possibilities,” she said. “So we have to define, what are the military problems that we’re going to face? How is technology trending?”

Based on the answers to those and more questions, “we develop candidate concepts,” she said. “That’s influenced by technology in terms of what’s possible, and that’s an area where industry can plug in.”

The process of defining that future operating environment will involve an array of voices from beyond the defense and aerospace communities, she said.

“You want to have the intelligence community involved, you want to talk to futurists. You might even want to talk to science-fiction writers,” Bussey said, “so we have creative ideas of where the future could go.”

She added: “It’d be worth looking at kind of where the venture capital community is investing to help us understand trends and technology that we may be missing, because we’re looking at things from a military perspective, and there are trends out in the wider world with technology that could not impact use.”

In a follow-up conversation, Bussey told me that process has already begun and will likely be ongoing and iterative. She said expects the voices she mentioned to be brought in to Space Force via special government employee, contractor and cooperative research and development agreement relationships.

“Look at Wall Street, because it’s kind of like when you look at the elections. They have these prediction markets, and they can be pretty accurate. It’s thousands of people individually making decisions based on the knowledge they have,” she said. “None of those individuals is going to predict the future, but collectively, they have a good chance.”

Space Force is also refining and defining its top technology priorities. Earlier in August, she said, top service officials held a science and technology workshop, reprising a 2023 summit that outlined the service’s initial priorities. While Bussey said she couldn’t share the eight new technology priorities to be developed from the workshop — and didn’t know if they’d ever be made public as the 2023 prioritization list was — she did describe how they were developed.

Officials, she said, ran an expected future scenario in the year 2040, using expected challenges to narrow down and add to an initial list of 10 technologies. Power beaming, weather monitoring and space environmental monitoring were among the technologies removed from the list because there were other agencies that could fulfill those functions.

Some of the previously outlined priorities remain on the list, she said. While she didn’t specify which ones, the 2023 list included greater automation; improved space domain awareness; ground system flexibility; robust, ubiquitous command, control and communications; cyber dominance; and dynamic space operations in relevant domains.

While Space Force appears to be becoming more secretive about its technology priorities even as it seeks to more clearly define them, officials want to communicate clearly with industry about what they’re after. For known government contractors, Bussey said, Space Force maintains a “Book of Needs” with some 180 listed technology needs that can be reviewed on request.

“But generally, we’re not going to be very open about these things,” she said. “Because there’s a need to kind of protect what our gaps and vulnerabilities are, and where we intend to go, from our adversaries.”