WASHINGTON — Members of Congress can watch tanks maneuver, tour warships and see combat aircraft fly. Space Force leaders have no comparable way to demonstrate the battlefield they oversee — one where satellites travel at thousands of miles an hour, but the maneuvers that determine an encounter can unfold over days.
Satellites can be inspected while they are being assembled, but a spacecraft on a factory floor reveals little about how it will operate in orbit, support military forces on Earth or become the target of an adversary. That problem led the Space Force Association to develop a visual environment that could make military operations in space more comprehensible to policymakers and the public.
The result is the National Spacepower Center, an industry-backed education and simulation center organized by the association. Its developers are building an unclassified digital environment that combines orbital tracking data, spacecraft engineering models, command-and-control software and immersive displays to illustrate how satellites operate — and how a confrontation in orbit could affect a military campaign thousands of miles below.
The center’s first integrated prototype, demonstrated July 21 at the Arlington, Virginia, offices of simulator software company Sedaro, took on a concept known within the space community as “dogfighting.” Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman and Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess, who is expected to succeed him, watched a simulated encounter in which an adversary spacecraft approached a U.S. missile-warning and missile-tracking satellite.
