The space domain has seen rapid commercialization and a myriad of new entrants in the last few years. As the newest warfighting domain and a fast-growing realm of opportunity, space has become a top priority for United States government and industry leaders alike.
General Dynamics Mission Systems President Chris Brady sat down with Executive Mosaic in a new video interview to talk about how proliferated space is changing the way we operate and innovate in the domain.
“Space used to be all about launch and satellites — it was very expensive to do a launch and therefore, you put everything you possibly could on board that satellite, typically positioned it way up in a geosynchronous orbit, and it did a wide variety of communications or intelligence functions. But now there’s much more of a threat in space,” the 2023 Wash100 Award winner warned.
“We think about space as a potential warfighting domain, and so we have to be a little smarter and not have just a small number of large targets for all of our capability,” he elaborated.
Brady said now, with the reduction in launch costs and the increase of private equity capital in the space industry, there are more satellite buses being launched, creating more opportunities to put important payloads on satellites and have them perform certain missions.
The GDMS president highlighted the Space Development Agency’s new acquisition and deployment model as one that more space agencies and industry partners should harness in order to innovate at speed and scale.
“It’s really a new dawn,” Brady shared. “They’re deploying much larger networks of low Earth orbiting satellites… and they’re really positioning themselves for a proliferated network that is much less vulnerable because you can take out one, two, three, four satellites and still have a large constellation available to continue to prosecute their mission of gathering intelligence and communicating and whatever else is required.”
Find out what else Chris Brady had to say about proliferated space and other C5ISR trends by watching his full video interview here.