Sirotin Intelligence Briefing: March 15–21: Golden Dome Hits $185B, Space Force Stands Up Orbital Warfare Portfolios, and Blue Origin Files for 51,600 Satellites

This week's Sirotin Intelligence analysis tracks the most significant restructuring of U.S. space acquisition since Space Force's creation — SSC's Tom Ainsworth confirmed all nine Portfolio Acquisition Executives are now operational, with Space Control, Electronic Warfare/Cyber/Orbital Warfare, and Enterprise Integration formalized for the first time, and cislunar designated as an operational rather than experimental domain under the new Integration PAE. Golden Dome director Gen. Guetlein disclosed a $10 billion supplemental targeting HBTSS, AMTI, and the Space Data Network, pushing the official architecture cost to $185 billion while independent estimates range to $3.6 trillion over 20 years. MDA Space closed its $300M NYSE IPO targeting a $40B pipeline, Japan and France opened space-defense data-sharing negotiations aimed at Chinese and Russian counter-space threats, and Israel struck Iranian military space installations for the first time in history. Blue Origin filed its Project Sunrise FCC application for 51,600 orbital compute satellites while K2 Space prepares to launch Gravitas, a 20kW high-power demo designed to prove space-based data center economics on Falcon 9. The Air Force issued a $16B APAC solicitation for next-generation propulsion, and our interview this week is with Rick Ward, the Marine veteran and OrbitsEdge founder building radiation-shielded edge computing platforms for in-orbit data processing — and asking whether the biggest bottleneck in the space economy was never the rocket.

🛡️ Defense Highlights

• Space Force completes its nine-PAE acquisition architecture — Space Control and Orbital Warfare get dedicated portfolios for the first time: Tom Ainsworth, performing duties of the Air Force Assistant Secretary for Space Acquisition and Integration, told the McAleese Defense Programs Conference on March 16 that the Space Force has now put into place all nine Portfolio Acquisition Executive (PAE) offices mandated under Defense Secretary Hegseth's acquisition reform initiative. The six announced PAEs cover Space Access; Space-Based Sensing and Targeting; Infrastructure; BMC3 (Battle Management, C2, Communications and Space Intelligence); SATCOM/PNT; and Missile Warning and Tracking — while three additional unannounced PAEs cover Space Control; Electronic Warfare, Cyber and Orbital Warfare; and Integration (the last of which will serve as the cross-cutting enterprise architect and the entry point for cislunar capabilities flowing from Trump's Space Superiority EO).
• Japan and France formalize space-defense cooperation — satellite data sharing and joint drills target Chinese and Russian threats: Japan and France are opening negotiations toward a formal space-defense data-sharing agreement, covering intelligence from reconnaissance satellites, SSA sensors, and missile-warning assets, following Japan's first-ever participation in France's SparteX military space exercise earlier in 2026. The collaboration is framed explicitly around Chinese and Russian threats to satellite communications and command networks — both countries have documented ASAT development and electronic-warfare programs — and mirrors the Five Eyes nations' model of tiered intelligence sharing, with French officials noting that Japan's ISR constellation and its JxSS space situational-awareness network would complement France's CERES SIGINT and CSO reconnaissance satellites.
• Golden Dome's price tag climbs to $185B after $10B space acceleration plus-up — HBTSS, AMTI, and Space Data Network move left on the schedule: Golden Dome director Gen. Michael Guetlein disclosed at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference that the DoD's homeland missile-defense shield has received a $10 billion supplemental injection, raising the total "objective architecture" cost estimate to $185 billion through the mid-2030s. The extra funding is narrowly targeted at three space-layer programs: Airborne Moving Target Indication (AMTI), the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) — whose infrared tracking layer is essential for intercepting maneuvering hypersonic glide vehicles — and the Space Data Network that knits the entire sensor-to-shooter chain together; Guetlein framed the plus-up as a deliberate schedule pull-left to ensure tracking capacity is in place before anticipated threat timelines from China and Russia converge, with Lockheed Martin, RTX, and Northrop Grumman now formally confirmed as primary contractors for the architecture.
• Space Force completes its PAE overhaul with nine mission portfolios — Space Control and Orbital Warfare formalized for the first time: The U.S. Space Force has officially stood up all nine Portfolio Acquisition Executive (PAE) mission areas under Secretary Hegseth's Pentagon-wide acquisition reform, consolidating the legacy network of disconnected Program Executive Offices into integrated, mission-focused organizations with unified authority over funding, requirements setting, and cross-program integration. The nine PAEs cover: Space Access; Space-Based Sensing and Targeting; Infrastructure (data, test, training, and personnel systems); Battle Management, C2, Communications and Space Intelligence (BMC3SI); SATCOM and Position, Navigation and Timing; Missile Warning and Tracking; Space Control; Electronic Warfare, Cyber and Orbital Warfare; and Enterprise Integration — the last of which is specifically designated as the acquisition home for future cislunar capabilities, with SSC's Tom Ainsworth signaling close coordination with NASA and AFRL on cislunar technology development as that domain formalizes.
• MDA Space closes $300M NYSE IPO and rings the Bell as a dual-listed global prime — targeting $40B pipeline and doubled production by 2027: MDA Space (TSX: MDA; NYSE: MDA) officially closed its $300 million U.S. IPO on March 16, becoming dual-listed on the NYSE and the TSX, and CEO Mike Greenley rang the NYSE opening bell on March 17, telling investors: "We want the full capability of the space investment community to be able to easily invest in us as we pursue our $40 billion pipeline." The IPO timing is deliberate: MDA is ramping satellite manufacturing for both Telesat Lightspeed and the Globalstar constellation and is finalizing a new Quebec production facility to double capacity by 2027, while its new subsidiary 49North pursues terrestrial and multi-domain C4ISR capabilities under Canada's updated defense strategy; MDA is also already on the Missile Defense Agency's SHIELD IDIQ (shared $151B ceiling), positioning it to capture Golden Dome subcontracts directly through its U.S. technical footprint.
• Golden Dome cost grows to $185B with 2035 delivery — but independent estimates range from $252B to $3.6 trillion: The Hill and Breaking Defense confirm that the official Golden Dome cost estimate has risen from $175 billion to $185 billion — the $10B increase specifically funding acceleration of three space-layer programs: the Space Force's AMTI, the MDA's HBTSS, and the Space Data Network. Gen. Guetlein acknowledged the full objective architecture won't deliver until the "2035 timeframe" — contradicting Trump's original "before the end of my term" pledge — while independent analysts note that the $185B figure dramatically understates real costs: the Congressional Budget Office estimates $542B, Bloomberg pegs a high-capability version at $1.1 trillion, and AEI's Todd Harrison puts the 20-year lifecycle cost at up to $3.6 trillion, depending heavily on how many space-based interceptors are deployed and how frequently their decaying low orbits must be refreshed.
• Space Force formalizes cislunar as an operational — not experimental — domain, assigns it to the new Enterprise Integration PAE: Air & Space Forces Magazine reports that SSC's Thomas Ainsworth made the clearest public statement yet that Space Force is "serious" about cislunar operations, actively integrating the Earth-to-Moon regime into mission planning, acquisition structures, and exercises rather than treating it as a theoretical future challenge. Cislunar capabilities will flow specifically through the Enterprise Integration PAE — the ninth and cross-cutting portfolio announced last week — which is designed to coordinate NASA technology development (Oracle-M, DARPA LASSO, AFRL cislunar demos) with Space Force operational requirements, closing the gap between science-mission lunar orbiters and militarily useful persistent presence, tracking, and deterrence across the 2.6 million cubic kilometer cislunar volume.
• Air Force launches $16B APAC vehicle to turbocharge next-generation and adaptive propulsion for F-47 era platforms: The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center's Propulsion Directorate has issued a solicitation for an IDIQ contract vehicle worth up to $16 billion called the Advanced Propulsion Acquisition Contract (APAC), designed to rapidly develop, field, and sustain novel propulsion technologies across everything from early-stage R&D to production and sustainment. APAC has no dedicated funding yet — it will draw on "future Air Force, interagency, and outside agency funding" — with proposals due April 13 and multiple awardees planned; the vehicle builds on investments in the Next-Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) and Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP) that are designed to power next-generation platforms including the F-47 next-generation fighter, and allows the Air Force to rapidly onboard innovative new entrants to the propulsion industrial base after an initial two-year period.

Major Contract Awards This Week:

• General Dynamics Electric Boat Corp. – Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program: A $15.38 billion cost-plus-incentive-fee and cost-plus-fixed-fee modification for additional Columbia-class SSBN design, class lead yard support, sustainment, and submarine industrial base supplier development, bringing the program into serial production alongside the Virginia-class attack submarine program, through June 2035.
• Raytheon Co. – SM-3 Block missile variants sustainment ceiling increase: An $8.41 billion noncompetitive ceiling increase to a previously awarded IDIQ contract for sustaining engineering and product support services for SM-3 Block missile variants for the U.S. and Foreign Military Sales partners, raising the total ceiling from $3.33 billion to $11.74 billion, through October 2029.
• Pratt & Whitney (RTX Corp.) – F100 engine module remanufacture: A $470 million firm-fixed-price requirements contract for remanufacture of F100 engine modules supporting Foreign Military Sales to 13 partner nations, through March 2029.
• Utah State University Space Dynamics Laboratory – Missile Defense Agency UARC technical support: A $414 million contract modification extending the sole-source University Affiliated Research Center contract for systems engineering and integration support to MDA, raising the total ceiling to $714 million, through November 2031.
• Advanced Technology International – Navy ManTech Composites Manufacturing Technology Center of Excellence VI: A $349 million IDIQ contract for the operation, management, and sustainment of the Composites Manufacturing Technology Center of Excellence, developing and transitioning composite and polymeric manufacturing technologies for key naval platforms, through June 2036.
• AAR Manufacturing Inc. – Legacy 463L air cargo pallets: A $289.7 million requirements contract for manufacturing and production of legacy air cargo pallets supporting military airlift operations, through March 2032.
• AeroVironment Inc. – P550 Long Range Reconnaissance systems: A $117.3 million firm-fixed-price contract for procurement and delivery of P550 long-range reconnaissance UAS systems, through July 2026.
• KBR Wyle Services LLC – AFRL Space Warfare Directorate digital engineering and enterprise decision support: A $95.1 million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for digital engineering and model-based system engineering support to the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Warfare Directorate at Kirtland AFB, through March 2031.
• L3Harris Interstate Electronics Corp. – Kineto tracking mount sustainment for DoD, DOE, and NASA test ranges: A $77.8 million cost-reimbursable and firm-fixed-price IDIQ contract for sustainment of precision optical time-space-position-information tracking systems used by DoD, DOE, and NASA test ranges, through March 2031.
• Raytheon Co. (Collins Aerospace) – Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI): A $74.0 million modification bringing the total contract value to $125.7 million for the Air Force Research Laboratory's program experimenting with commercial space internet for defense applications, through August 2028.
• Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control – JASSM/LRASM large lot procurement: A $22.8 million firm-fixed-price modification to the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile and Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile large lot procurement contract, bringing total cumulative value to $9.65 billion, through August 2029.
• Accion Inc. (Revolution Space) – Propulsive adaptor for long-duration orbital maneuvers: A $20.0 million fixed-price contract awarded by the Air Force Test Center for an in-space propulsion system with twice the thrust of existing Hall thrusters at equivalent power, through July 2027.
• Hadrian Automation Inc. – Advanced automation manufacturing for Army aviation: A $39.2 million firm-fixed-price action (cumulative $80M) for advanced automation manufacturing supporting Army aircraft procurement, through March 2027.
• LeoLabs Federal Inc. – Advanced Ultra-High Frequency Phased Array Radar: A $9.9 million contract modification bringing the total value to $24.0 million for Space Systems Command's advanced UHF phased array radar program supporting space domain awareness, through September 2029.

🌐 Policy, Geopolitical & Legal Developments

• Opinio Juris: GPS jamming, satellite spoofing, and cyber-EW are "silent signals" living in a legal no-man's-land the Outer Space Treaty never anticipated: A new post by researcher Berfin Deniz Çabuk argues that modern electronic warfare operations — GPS spoofing, uplink jamming, dazzling, and cyber exploitation of satellite ground stations — sit in a profound legal grey zone because the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits weapons of mass destruction and the placement of military installations on celestial bodies, but says nothing specific about disabling, blinding, or spoofing satellites through electromagnetic or cyber means. The post contends that existing IHL distinctions between attack and interference are difficult to apply when a jamming pulse simultaneously disrupts a commercial navigation service relied upon by civilian aviation and a military precision-guidance system — and argues that the absence of a "non-use of force" threshold specifically calibrated for reversible, non-kinetic counter-space operations creates escalation risks that informal norms and unilateral self-restraint cannot reliably contain.
• NASA sets April 1–6 window for Artemis II after flight readiness review — first humans to the Moon in 53 years: Following a successful two-day Flight Readiness Review in which all teams voted "go," NASA has officially targeted April 1 as the opening of a six-day launch window for Artemis II, the first crewed flight of SLS and Orion and the first human mission to cislunar space since Apollo 17 in December 1972. The crew — NASA's Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will enter quarantine at JSC on March 18, travel to KSC on March 27, and if all goes well, spend 10 days on a free-return trajectory around the Moon before splashing down, with SLS rolling back to Pad 39B on March 19 for final countdown preparations.
• NASA's MADCAP lunar traffic office reveals a near-miss between Blue Ghost and Chandrayaan-2 — and a growing crisis above the Moon: A NYT investigation reveals that NASA's MADCAP (Mission Design and Conjunction Assessment Program) team at JPL issued a "red alert" — collision probability exceeding 1-in-100,000 — on March 1, 2025, when Firefly's Blue Ghost lander, in its pre-descent polar orbit, appeared likely to cross paths with ISRO's Chandrayaan-2 orbiter. The alert was ultimately stood down after refined trajectory analysis, and Blue Ghost landed safely on March 2 — but MADCAP's logs show near-daily red alerts in 2023 among four orbiters simultaneously, no international framework requires spacecraft to respond to MADCAP warnings, and the article calls out the "100-km round number" orbit preference as a structural collision risk that could be reduced with trivial altitude changes — a preview of the coordination failures likely as lunar traffic multiplies ahead of Artemis.
• SpaceWar/The Conversation op-ed warns the U.S. has no credible "Plan B" if SpaceX faces a financial or leadership crisis: Johns Hopkins SAIS scholar Svetla Ben-Itzhak argues in a widely shared op-ed that U.S. space policy has achieved its commercial-integration goals so completely that it has created a single point of failure: SpaceX controls the vast majority of U.S. crew transport capacity, a dominant share of launch, and a growing share of military satellite connectivity, meaning any serious disruption — financial distress, technical failure, or a conflict of interest between Musk's government role and SpaceX's commercial incentives — could cripple national space strategy. She argues that Madison's Federalist 51 logic applies to space infrastructure: durable strategic systems require competing forces and redundancy, not efficiency-maximizing consolidation, and that while the current NASA Authorization Act's mandate for multiple commercial station providers and diversified lunar-lander sources is a step toward a real Plan B, "Plan B exists on paper — but in reality is still under construction"as Artemis, commercial crew, and cislunar logistics all remain operationally dependent on SpaceX through at least 2030.
• Week of March 8–14: Matt Anderson NASA confirmation, Cygnus-23 ISS departure, ESA Celeste launch, and AAS Goddard Symposium dominate a packed schedule: SpacePolicyOnline's weekly digest highlights Thursday, March 12 as the most consequential day — Senate Commerce Committee vote on Matt Anderson's nomination as NASA Deputy Administrator, Cygnus-23's departure from the ISS (7:00 a.m. ET), and the ESA pre-launch briefing for the Celeste LEO-PNT demonstration satellite at 9:00 a.m. EDT. The AAS Goddard Space Science Symposium runs Thursday–Friday in D.C. with headline speakers including NRO Director Chris Scolese (also receiving the Goddard Memorial Trophy), NASA's Casey Swails, GSFC acting director Cynthia Simmons, and White House OSTP's Charlie Powell; the week concludes Friday with a Schriever Spacepower virtual seminar featuring Lt. Gen. Dennis Bythewood and the National Space Club's Goddard Memorial Dinner.
• Project DisCo argues space-based data center hype demands urgent AI policy attention — FCC spectrum allocation is the immediate bottleneck: A new Project DisCo analysis at George Mason University's Mercatus Center argues that the proliferating proposals for orbital AI data centers (from SpaceX, Google's Project Suncatcher, Starcloud/Crusoe, and others) are advancing far faster than the regulatory frameworks needed to govern them. The paper identifies FCC spectrum allocation as the most immediate chokepoint — orbital data centers require massive inter-satellite and downlink bandwidth that current allocations don't accommodate at scale — and calls for coordination across the FCC, FAA, and OSTP before a wave of 2027 pilot launches creates conflicting precedents in spectrum, orbital debris rules, and international telecom treaty obligations.​
• Eutelsat terminates two Russian satellite capacity leases, shrinks GEO fleet to 31 after Express AT1 failure and AT2 relocation: France's Eutelsat has ended its capacity agreements on the Express AT1 (56° East) and Express AT2 (140° East) satellites, both operated by Russia's RSCC (Russian Satellite Communications Company) — AT1 after a satellite failure and AT2 following RSCC's planned relocation out of its contracted orbital slot. The move reduces Eutelsat's GEO fleet from 33 to 31 satellites, with only a low single-digit million euro revenue impact and "virtually no" EBITDA effect on the current fiscal year, but it represents another erosion of the Russian-European commercial satellite relationship that began unraveling after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and adds to RSCC's growing portfolio of distressed or degraded orbital assets.
• China maps its most ambitious space year ever — 2026 schedule includes two crewed Tiangong missions, a year-long solo endurance record attempt, Chang'e 7, and the Xuntian telescope: China's China Manned Space Agency has laid out an extraordinary 2026 flight manifest beginning with Shenzhou-21 (the replacement crew already aboard), Shenzhou-22 (a second crewed mission), and Tianzhou-9 cargo resupply — while one member of the outgoing Shenzhou-21 crew will remain aboard alone for an extended year-long solo endurance experiment, a first in Chinese spaceflight history. Beyond LEO, Chang'e 7 targets a mid-2026 launch to survey the lunar south pole for water ice in preparation for a crewed landing, and the Xuntian space telescope — a Hubble-class instrument with more than 300 times Hubble's field of view — is set for late 2026 launch from the Tiangong complex, alongside the historic first spaceflight of astronauts from Hong Kong or Macao as Beijing extends the symbolic reach of its space program.
• ESA's Kourou spaceport closed 2025 with Ariane 6's fourth flight and Vega-C's first commercial Korean satellite launch — a fragile recovery from years of launcher disruption: After years of delays from Vega-C's 2022 in-flight failure and Ariane 6's 2024 inaugural flight, Europe's Spaceport in Kourou concluded 2025 with an accelerating cadence: four Ariane 6 flights (including the first commercial mission in March carrying CSO-3 for France's DGA) and four Vega-C flights capped by the KOMPSAT-7 Korean EO satellite on Dec. 1 — the sixth Vega-C launch ever and a major confidence-builder for European launcher competitiveness. Looking ahead, ESA has authorized Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, PLD Space, and Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) to use Kourou for new small/medium launchers, positioning the spaceport as a multi-vehicle European hub while Ariane 6 and Vega-C progressively ramp toward their annual flight rate targets of 8–9 and 4–6 missions respectively.
• West Point Lieber Institute maps a new legal research agenda for warfare in cyber, space, and AI — arguing the law itself must evolve: A new volume edited by West Point's Lieber Institute, reviewed in a March 17 post, argues that international humanitarian law, space law, cyber law, and human rights law are now simultaneously operative in every modern conflict, but were designed as separate regimes and increasingly generate contradictory obligations. The authors call for a unified "International Law of Military Operations" (ILMO) framework — using systemic integration rather than lex specialis prioritization — and identify four research frontiers that require urgent scholarly attention: autonomous systems accountability, domain-specific regulation of outer space operations (particularly the Outer Space Treaty's gaps exposed by SDA and orbital warfare), non-state-actor combatancy thresholds in cyber, and the sub-threshold coercive activities (jamming, spoofing, dazzling, and cyber intrusion) that now characterize day-to-day great-power competition below the armed-conflict threshold.
• NASA quietly opens the door to non-South-Pole Artemis landings to unlock speed and commercial flexibility: Speaking at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in The Woodlands, TX, NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said the agency has "opened up the performance specifications for early landing missions in as many ways as we can" — relaxing constraints on lunar orbit type, illumination requirements, and landing-site latitude to let commercial lander providers (Intuitive Machines, Firefly, Astrobotic, SpaceX) propose faster, simpler approaches that their vehicles can actually execute. Kshatriya was careful to say the South Pole remains the ultimate objective — the target for water-ice prospecting and eventual base construction — but acknowledged that over-constraining initial missions to land precisely at the pole may be slower than landing nearby and walking or driving toward the pole with robotic precursors; he also asked the planetary science community directly to "own" the program rather than merely critique it, offering to co-design mission science packages.
• Week of March 15–22: Artemis II SLS rollout to pad, ESA Council results, LPSC Kshatriya briefing, and Robert Goddard centennial highlight a packed schedule: SpacePolicyOnline's weekly digest flags Thursday, March 19 as the central moment — SLS/Orion rolls back to LC-39B at Kennedy for final countdown operations, coinciding with the 345th ESA Council Meeting results briefing from Interlaken, Switzerland, and Firefly Aerospace Q4 2025 financials. The week also marks the 100th anniversary of Robert Goddard's first liquid-fueled rocket launch (Auburn, MA, March 16, 1926 — running Sunday through Sunday in and around Goddard's original test site), the LEAG Town Hall on Artemis science priorities, and an Earth Observation at a Turning Point virtual panel by GSOA; the House and Senate are in session, keeping legislative pressure on the NASA Authorization Act in play.
• ASEAN SSA/STM workshop in Manila advances a regional space-traffic framework — Philippines proposes historic ASEAN Space Cooperation Declaration: The Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA), UNOOSA, and Thailand's GISTDA convened the ASEAN Space Situational Awareness and Space Traffic Management Seminar-Workshop (March 12–13, Manila), bringing together all 10 ASEAN member states, commercial operators including Digantara, ABS, and Asia Satellite, and representatives from Japan's Cabinet Office and NOAA's Office of Space Commerce. As 2026 ASEAN Chair, the Philippines is proposing a landmark ASEAN Declaration on Space Cooperation — the region's first — covering SSA data-sharing protocols, STM standards, space weather monitoring, and disaster-response coordination; PhilSA and UNOOSA simultaneously signed a new MoU covering space law, capacity-building, and disaster risk reduction, with PhilSA's children's space-law activity book Si Tala at ang Kanyang Lakbay Kalawakan! being adapted into all six official UN languages as a public-engagement initiative.

🛰️ Technology & Commercial Developments

• K2 Space prepares to launch 2-ton "Gravitas" on Falcon 9 — a 20kW high-power demo designed to prove orbital data center economics: Founded by former SpaceX siblings Karan and Neel Kunjur, El Segundo-based K2 Space is targeting a late-March Falcon 9 rideshare launch for its Gravitas demonstration satellite — a 2-metric-ton spacecraft with a 40-meter solar panel wingspan capable of generating 20 kW, matching the power output of much larger and more expensive commercial GEO satellites like ViaSat-3. The primary goal is not operations but validation: demonstrating that K2's high-power bus architecture can sustain the compute loads required for space-based AI inference and data-center applications, using modular payload bays that customers can configure for sensors, transceivers, or computing systems — positioning Gravitas as the critical "existence proof" that orbital compute economics can be made viable before K2 pursues larger production-scale satellites.
• Stanford astronomer leads discovery of PicII-503, the most iron-poor star ever found outside the Milky Way — a direct fingerprint of the universe's first stars: Published in Nature Astronomy on March 16, a team led by Stanford Brinson Prize Fellow Anirudh Chiti has confirmed that star PicII-503, in the ancient ultra-faint dwarf galaxy Pictor II(~150,000 light-years away), contains only 1/40,000th of the iron in the Sun — the lowest iron abundance ever measured beyond our galaxy. Remarkably, PicII-503 also has a carbon-to-iron ratio more than 1,500 times that of the Sun, an exact chemical fingerprint matching the carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) stars scattered through the Milky Way's halo whose origins had been a 50-year mystery — now solved: they are second-generation stars born from the debris of a single, low-energy Population III supernova in a primordial dwarf galaxy that was later swallowed by the Milky Way, making PicII-503 the clearest window yet into the universe's first cycle of stellar birth and death.
• Space Tech Expo USA moves to the Anaheim Convention Center for its 14th and largest edition — June 2–4, 2026: Now part of Informa Markets, Space Tech Expo USA has relocated from its Long Beach home to the Anaheim Convention Center — the largest convention center on the U.S. West Coast — projecting 3,750+ attendees, 300+ exhibitors, and 70+ speakers over three days. The venue sits minutes from Rocket Lab USA, SpaceX, Boeing, Sonfarrel Aerospace, Verus Aerospace, and dozens of Southern California aerospace suppliers, and the move is billed as giving the show capacity to grow alongside an industry whose investment activity has more than doubled in two years; the Aviation Week Space Tech Challenge Award winners will also be showcased June 3 as part of the expanded program.
• Blue Origin files FCC application for "Project Sunrise" — 51,600 sun-synchronous satellites to rival SpaceX's orbital compute plan: Blue Origin has submitted a formal FCC application for Project Sunrise, a constellation of up to 51,600 satellites in sun-synchronous orbits between 500–1,800 km altitude, designed to provide space-based AI computing and data-center infrastructure powered directly by solar energy, relaying data to Earth via optical inter-satellite links integrated with the company's planned TeraWave broadband constellation. Project Sunrise joins SpaceX's one-million-satellite FCC proposal and startup Starcloud's 88,000-satellite application in a rapidly crowding regulatory inbox, drawing pushback from astronomers, environmentalists, and space-safety advocates worried about light pollution, atmospheric particulate from mass re-entries, and debris risk — while Blue Origin framed the initiative as pro-competitive, arguing that diverse orbital compute providers will drive down costs and improve resilience for U.S. AI infrastructure.
• UTA launches Center for Space and Data Science with $1.5M NSF grant, recruits UCLA plasma physicist Anton Artemyev to lead research: The University of Texas at Arlington has formally established its Center for Space and Data Science — funded by a $1.5 million NSF Faculty Development in GeoSpace Science grant awarded in 2024 — with a leadership team of Director Yue Deng, education associate director Ramon Lopez, and newly recruited research associate director Anton Artemyev, who left a decade-long post at UCLA to join the center. Artemyev, a multi-award-winning space-plasma physicist specializing in Earth's magnetospheric dynamics and radiation belt physics, will participate in the CINEMA CubeSat mission at UTA, and the center plans to build new undergraduate and graduate degree programs combining space physics, engineering, and data science to pipeline talent directly into NASA, Air Force, and commercial space-industry roles.

💭 A Word From Christophe Bosquillon

In an extremely rare public statement, an IDF Unit 9900 intelligence official said this week that Israel had destroyed an Iranian ground base for military space focused on building attack capabilities against allies’ satellites and space assets. This operation follows a similar strike carried out the previous week against another space-related research compound belonging to the Iranian Space Organization. This primary space research center developed military satellites for surveillance, intelligence collection, and directing fire toward targets across the Middle East. 

Unit 9900, under the IDF's military intelligence directorate, analyzes satellite imagery, maps battlefields, and identifies targets across the Middle East. The unit guides Israeli military operations by providing realtime geospatial intelligence from space-based platforms. Space-based superiority is a critical layer of Israel's national security, as satellite surveillance enables the Israeli military to track hostile activity, detect missile launches, and identify targets across vast distances, providing the intelligence backbone for operations throughout the Middle East.  

Iran's ballistic and nuclear achievements are well covered. But Iran is also a seriously emerging military space power. In January 2024, for the first time, a Qaem 100 rocket from the Aerospace Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) launched a Soraya satellite to an altitude of 750 kilometers. Not long after this first success, a Simorgh (Phoenix) rocket launched 3 small satellites into orbit. The compound bombed this week hosted several military space programs, including the development of the "Chamran-1" satellite, which was built by the Iranian Ministry of Defense’s electronics industries and launched into space in September 2024 by IRGC. Its purpose was to demonstrate dual use orbital maneuvering technology, including evaluation of cold gas propulsion subsystems and performance evaluation of navigation and status control subsystems. 

Since the start of Operation Roaring Lion on February 28, 2026, Israel has carried out nearly 8,000 strikes against targets in Iran, systematically weakening the regime’s defense industry across all domains, including ballistic missiles and nuclear programs. Nuclear assets have been bombed before. However it is the first time in the tech-driven 21st century battlespace that a country's military space installations on the ground are being destroyed. 

Have a great Space Week ahead!

🎤 Our Next Guest: Rick Ward

Rick Ward is a United States Marine Corps veteran and the founder and CEO of OrbitsEdge, a space computing company building radiation-shielded edge computing platforms for in-orbit data processing. Before starting OrbitsEdge, Ward worked at Deep Space Industries — Rick Tumlinson's asteroid mining company — where he built regolith simulants for NASA and researched autonomous space mining, an experience that revealed the critical gap between what space systems needed to compute onboard and what their processors could actually handle. He founded OrbitsEdge in 2019 to close that gap, starting with a 10-watt edge module capable of 50 trillion operations per second and building toward a roadmap that extends to 250-kilowatt orbital data center nodes.

Key topics from the interview:

• Why the current Earth observation business model is broken — "gathering haystacks to find needles" — and how onboard compute flips the economics by processing imagery at the point of collection, compressing data by up to 10,000:1
• SpaceX's vertical integration as the most efficient since Andrew Carnegie's steel empire — and why reusable launch only works if you become your own customer
• The "digital space Pearl Harbor" scenario: why the opening move of a major conflict would be cyber, not kinetic, and why 12–96 hours of denied access to space assets could be strategically decisive
• How AI model economics face a commodity trap — expensive to train, cheap to consume — and why on-device inference scaling could undercut the case for massive orbital data centers
• The "now, near, next" roadmap: from Earth observation edge compute to rendezvous and proximity operations to in-space biopharmaceutical manufacturing
• Why SpaceX's direct-to-cell play is a steamroller moving half a mile an hour — and where independent infrastructure providers fit in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by one company

Watch Rick Ward's YouTube preview Tuesday on the Sirotin Intelligence YouTube channel. Full interview drops Thursday.