{"id":48506,"date":"2025-08-29T20:02:52","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T12:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/vleo-under-examination-for-possible-use-by-us-space-force\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T20:02:52","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T12:02:52","slug":"vleo-under-examination-for-possible-use-by-us-space-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/vleo-under-examination-for-possible-use-by-us-space-force\/","title":{"rendered":"VLEO Under Examination for Possible Use by US Space Force"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

The U.S. Space Force<\/strong> is examining Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) for possible future use. LEO satellites typically orbit about 500 miles above Earth, while VLEO satellites are to operate at half that altitude and lower.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re seeing more domains within space becoming relevant, and I think VLEO is one of them,\u201d Gillian Bussey, the Space Force\u2019s deputy chief science officer, said during question and answer at a panel on service innovation at the National Defense Industrial Association<\/strong>\u2019s Emerging Technologies conference in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 27.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not really entirely clear exactly how we would use VLEO, or exactly what the threat is expected to be there, but there are some things about it that are interesting,\u201d she said. \u201cI can\u2019t go into all of those things, but one, in particular, is \u2018r squared\u2019 is less, and when \u2018r squared\u2019 is less you need less power. You have less losses for communications, for collection of signals, for imaging things so that\u2019s one potential advantage. It\u2019s also harder to do space domain awareness in VLEO because they just have a smaller ground track, and you need more assets to be able to track these things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cR\u201d is the variable for distance, and \u201cfree space loss\u201d of communications \u2014 FSPL denoted by distance squared \u2014 is less in VLEO because of the shorter distance between transmitting and receiving antennas.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut there are certainly some technology challenges [with VLEO],\u201d Bussey said. \u201cBeing in VLEO, you have to overcome the drag. It\u2019s a very toxic environment because of the disassociated oxygen, but it\u2019s something we are certainly looking at in terms of what we can get from operating there and also whether we need to be prepared to do space domain awareness of that regime. I\u2019d also say that when you look at Chinese writings and how they view space and air, they see it as a continuum. In the U.S., we say the Von Karman line, above that 100 kilometers you\u2019re in space, below that in air, whereas I\u2019m not sure our adversaries see it that way. They\u2019re pursuing technologies that blend those two domains and operate seamlessly between them. That\u2019s something that we may also need to consider in terms of taking advantage of those seams and taking advantage of that blended area, as well as being prepared for threats that come and use that space.\u201d<\/p>\n

Space Force has contracted with Rocket Lab USA for a VLEO mission and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has done the same with Redwire. In March, Denver\u2019s Albedo Space heralded the launch of the company\u2019s Clarity-1 VLEO imaging satellite as the first VLEO commercial bird.<\/p>\n

This story was first published by Defense Daily<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The U.S. Space Force is examining Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) for possible future use. LEO satellites typically orbit about 500 miles above Earth, while VLEO satellites are to operate at half that altitude and lower. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing more domains within space becoming relevant, and I think VLEO is one of them,\u201d Gillian Bussey, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48507,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48506"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}