Without better space weather information, America’s space aspirations will be grounded

America’s leadership in the Space Age that marked the second half of the 20th century is clearly making a comeback. The Trump administration established space as a national priority, reviving the National Space Council, releasing the National Space Strategy and Nation Space Policy, as well as working with Congress to create the U.S. Space Force. The Biden administration has followed suit, releasing the United States Space Priorities Framework and continuing the oversight of the National Space Council.

NASA’s Artemis Program, which intends to land a person on the moon by 2025, is the marquee feature of this resurgence. Other agencies are contributing to our whole of government approach as well, such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) plan to begin tracking space objects and United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) program for observing the Earth from space. Unlike the past, these government-led efforts are joined by commercial space initiatives that are increasingly taking a leading role. The transformation of space transportation by SpaceX is the obvious example, but solutions from private companies are proliferating for applications as diverse as backing up GPS to forecasting earthquakes.

A critical component of American ascendancy in space is the ability to monitor and predict space weather. Space weather is the term used to describe the solar-generated variations in the space environment between the sun and Earth that interfere with high frequency radio communication, satellite electronics and the electrical grid on Earth. Space weather monitoring was deemed so important to the Obama administration that it established the Space Weather Operations, Research, and Mitigation (SWORM) Interagency Working Group. The Trump administration continued the working group and also released the National Space Weather Strategy and Action Plan in 2019 (which the lead author contributed to). Even Congress weighed in by passing the Promoting Research and Observations of Space Weather to Improve the Forecasting of Tomorrow (PROSWIFT) Act, which was signed into law by Trump in 2020.

The problem is that we are failing to advance our space-weather capabilities at the pace of the rest of the American space sector. Case in point: the recent fall from orbit of 40 SpaceX Starlink satellites due to two solar-generated geomagnetic storms. The storms were relatively weak, but they were strong enough to increase the atmospheric drag on the satellites by 50 percent compared to previous launches, preventing them from getting into a stable orbit.

With all the advances we have made in commercial and military space rocketry, satellites and sensors, one would think that surely we monitor space weather to the same fidelity that weather is observed closer to the Earth. Regrettably, we do not — not by a longshot. While atmospheric observations from NOAA, NASA and commercial satellites track conditions at kilometer-scale resolution and below, space weather measurements and support products are far more coarse. Space weather sensors are flown on several NOAA, NASA and international spacecraft, but the observational density pales in comparison to atmospheric sensors on orbit or in situ. The result is that predictive models for space weather have relatively far fewer inputs than their atmospheric counterparts, and this is compounded by the vastly greater volume of their domain. Additionally, because the uncertainty in these models are not well known, they simply do not characterize well what is actually happening in the space environment.

Fortunately, a method exists to increase the resolution of the baseline observation, or nowcast, for space weather: Ionospheric tomography using global satellite navigation systems, beacon satellites, ground based radar and ionosondes can characterize space weather variability at less than a 10 cubic kilometer resolution and in near real-time. Not only are the systems that can do this already in operation, the machine-learning enabled data assimilation techniques required to produce such a nowcast have been developed and are available to provide a near real-time data as a service. With such a high-fidelity snapshot of current space weather, NOAA’s SWPC could provide predictive support products that are vastly more informative and impactful than their current global-scale versions.

Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites falling out of the sky should be a wake-up call. Although NOAA predicted the geomagnetic storms that took the satellites down, the agency clearly needs to improve its decision support service to industry. The government, private sector and research community are investing billions of dollars to secure American space supremacy. Without investments in space weather research, development and transitions, America’s aspirations in space will remain grounded.

Rear Admiral (ret.) Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D., is the CEO of Ocean STL Consulting and host of “The American Blue Economy Podcast.” He formerly served as the deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the assistant secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. Prior to NOAA, he served for 32 years in the U.S. Navy completing his career as the oceanographer of the Navy and director of the Navy’s Task Force Ocean.

Clive G. Cook is the CEO of precursor SPC, which provides space weather forecasts that characterize the Geodynamic environment.