As the Department of Defense moves toward utilizing more commercial partnerships, building a resilient space-based commercial field is contingent on several factors, according to industry leaders at the annual Warfare Symposium in Aurora.

The symposium features businesses of all sizes from around the world to showcase advancements in aerial, cyber and space warfare. During a panel discussion on Tuesday, executives from Viasat, Radia and SAIC, all of which have a presence or headquarters in Colorado, took on the challenge of answering how to “harden” commercial space in the event of a future war.

Hardening commercial space means enhancing its resilience and survivability if a hostile nation attacks. But it means more than just building satellites that can survive an attack, said Mark Lundstrom, CEO of Boulder-based Radia.

“(When) you think about battle hardening, you have to start to think about a system which starts from the factory and goes all the way to orbital insertion,” he said, adding that it requires flexibility on the ground as well as in space.

 “Being able to reposition things terrestrially is as important as being able to position things in space,” he said.

Radia is building a plane that might enable that earth-based mobility. The aircraft can carry roughly 10 times as much cargo as a Boeing 777. It would dwarf the C-5 Galaxy, a large cargo airplane used by the Air Force.

Lundstrom said Radia envisions fleets of the airplane, named Windrunner, transporting all the pieces of a launch facility — antennas, gantries and even rockets — to a new location.

Renderings show it carrying helicopters, fighter jets and rockets. It enables mobility, which itself is a part of survivability, Lundstrom said.

Communication relies on networks like GPS-3 that connect cell phones to satellites to banks, according to past coverage by The Gazette. Cyber-attacks that could cripple various networks – such as power grids – are a major threat, and reinforcing them will be critical if the U.S. is ever facing a grave national security threat, the panelists said.

One way to ensure networks, including the internet and communication used by civilians and the military, survive a war could be to close the commercial and civilian use of that network entirely.

But David Schmolke, the vice president of mission connections and cybersecurity at Viasat does not favor this approach. Rather, he thinks there could be an advantage in a hybrid system, one that handles military and commercial traffic.

This way, he said, it’s harder for an adversary to see where and how sensitive information is being networked, because there would be too much data to sift through. It’s a form of camouflage.

Shutting off a network to some users is just bad business, and the businesses need to remain commercially viable, all three panelists agreed.  

“It inhibits our ability to get the investment from the purchase space that allows us to scale our satellite network,” said Schmolke. “If I purely just focus on a government customer and ignore commercial all together, then the government has to bring forward all the investment.”

Building a commercial network that the military can use and possibly prioritize in times of need gets the company hundreds of thousands of people on the network. This offsets costs and can result in a more robust and advanced network in the future as companies upgrade their networks, he said.