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The administration of US President Donald Trump risks weakening the country’s defence capabilities in space due to large-scale layoffs of federal employees. This was warned by Kelly Hammett, Director of the Space Operational Capabilities Directorate (SRCO), the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports.
According to him, the dismissal of employees poses a direct threat to the effective monitoring of Chinese satellite activity and the surveillance of the Space Observation and Identification System(SOSI), an ambitious project of China that is seen as a response to the US Space Surveillance Network (SSN).
“Our team is working to the limit to keep up with China’s growing space activities. But with the implementation of personnel cuts, our capabilities could be severely limited,” Hammett said during the Air and Space Force Association Symposium in Colorado.
What threatens the US:
– limiting the ability to track Chinese satellites and orbital activity;
– disruption of secret space missions worth billions of dollars;
– Increased risk of blind spots in monitoring potential threats.
Context.
SRCO is a division of just 200 specialists who oversee important space programmes, including a classified mission launched in 2023 aboard a Northrop Grumman spacecraft.
Hammett stressed that with China’s rapidly growing space ambitions, including an increase in the number of communications and surveillance satellites, a weakening of US defence capabilities could have critical national security implications.
At the same time, Beijing is actively developing its own orbital systems that can not only observe but also potentially block or disable foreign satellites, which is a cause for concern in the Pentagon.
US analysts are calling on the administration to reconsider the reduction policy and provide the Space Force with the resources to monitor China’s activities in space without interruption.
