Agrawal was also in the room. “I was in the crew who had to count the pieces: “He said to Ars.” I did not know the meaning of what happened after many years, but the Chinese had clearly changed the nature of the space environment. “
The anti-satellite test of 2007 also clearly changed the process of Agrawal's career. We present part of our discussion with Agrawal below, and we share the rest of the conversation tomorrow. The text is slightly edited for concise and clarity.
Ars: The role of the Space Force in monitoring activities in space has changed a lot in recent years. Can you tell me about these changes, and what is the difference between what you used to call Spatial Consciousness, and what is now called the awareness of the space domain?
Agrawal: We have just finished our fifth year as space frame, so as a result of the rise of a military service aimed at space, we have moved our activities to concentrate on what the Joint Force requires for combat space. We have done space operations to go seven decades. I think many people think it was a rebranding, unlike another focus for space activities, and it could not be further from the truth. In comparison with space domain consciousness (SDA), Space Situational Awareness (SSA) is a bit the knowledge we produce with all these sensors, and everyone can make spaces situational consciousness. You have that academy. You have commercial, international partners, and so on. But consciousness of space domain, Gen. [John “Jay”] Raymond came up with the term a few years before we got up the Space Force, and he tried to keep, how do we create a domain aimed at operational results? That is all we could say at the time. At that time we could not say warfighting domain because of the way our policy, but our policy shifted to being able to talk about space as a place where we don't want to wage war, but that we can achieve goals, and doing that with military objectives in mind.
We used to talk about detecting, characterizing, attributing, predicting. And then Gen. [Chance] Saltzman added the target to the construct for space-consciousness of the space domain, so that we are very much in the conversation of what it means to perform a space-compatible attack and to be able to achieve goals in, to and from space, and the use of space domain consciousness as a vehicle to do those things. So, with Mission Delta 2, what he did, he is the part of acquisition, software development, cyber defense, intelligence related to the consciousness of the space domain, and then all the things we did in space domain consciousness already, all that summarized under one command … and perhaps called us the only SSA. When I came under the command a few years ago, and we are now confronted with a real threat to having space -superiority in the space domain, I broke down what we just did in the 18th and spread through a few other units … So in this way everyone has a kind of Majors and other mission for the case.
