US Special Forces are Testing Cubesats for Communications, Other Roles

On November 19 of last year, the Department of Defense’s Office of Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) set a world record as a Minotaur 1 rocket lit up the sky at Wallops Island, Virginia, placing an unprecedented 29 CubeSats in orbit on a single launch. Among those were eight US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) CubeSats developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in Los Alamos, New Mexico. These eight “Prometheus” CubeSats are part a CubeSat technology development and demonstration effort to explore the viability of using a CubeSat constellation to meet existing Special Operation Forces (SOF) mission requirements.

USSOCOM is the Department of Defense’s lead combatant command for planning, synchronizing, and executing operations aimed at combating terrorism around the globe in coordination with and in support of other combatant commanders. It is USSOCOM’s responsibility to ensure SOF operators in the field are well trained and equipped to operate in the highly dynamic security environment. The ability to initiate and execute collaborative science and technology development efforts is a critical enabler to USSOCOM initiatives to rapidly field SOF peculiar equipment. The USSOCOM CubeSat effort is just one of a handful of initiatives that will continue to improve the responsiveness of space capabilities and provide SOF operators with tactically relevant information by reducing tasking and data dissemination timelines.

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