Thor Corporation: The Role of Space in Multi Domain Operations

Paul Day, Head of Space Business Development at Thor UK, discussed at the recent Space Comm Expo how to integrate space for multi domain command and control. He explained what this means for the defense and commercial aerospace sectors.

Before joining Raytheon approximately ten years ago, Paul Day worked in the Royal Air Force for 25 years, engaging in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance work. He described his role as understanding the space business and defense markets in the UK, as well as the range of British capabilities and skills that can achieve this goal. This involves collaborating with parent company Raytheon Technology to explore space capabilities suitable for the UK market.

Berenice Healey: You gave a speech on Multi Domain Command and Control (MDC2) at Space Comm. What information would you like the attendees to obtain from it?

Paul Day: As a nation and a part of global space civilization, we need to be able to operate safely, which may sound grand, but it just means we have to do things we haven't considered before. We need to understand space weather and spatial situational awareness so that we can operate safely in that environment.

One theme proposed by Space Comm is spatial sustainability. This is congestion, especially in low Earth orbit, whether in terms of the number of satellites in the constellation or spectrum congestion. You need to be able to resolve these conflicts.

Then you add potential malicious actors - countries or other parties - bad operators and poor operational practices, all of which create an insecure environment. When you view it as a commercial and military mission, you must be able to operate safely in space. This has been a key theme of the past 18 months, which will guide our research on multi domain command and control to achieve this goal.

Multi domain is not a defensive term for me, but an operational term that integrates multiple domains in the air, land, sea, space, and network. But multi domain increasingly means that the defense, civilian, and commercial sectors operate together, with different standards and levels of assurance. We must consider this, especially when defense and government want to leverage the commercial sector.

By importing these into a wider range of businesses, not just in the UK, you can inherit risks. You need to understand the level of risk you are inheriting and where you are inheriting the risk from in order to form a delta between civil, commercial, and defense.

Finally, we discussed many things that run in the cloud, but in reality, you have an environment that is non confidential, confidential, task confidential, and above confidential. You are using the entire infrastructure and effectively breaking it down into different categories. So how do you ensure that information rises and falls in the correct way? Everything can cross this structure, so I think MDC2 is a rather complex concept. The cooperation between defense, commerce, military, and government departments requires a set of correct standards to ensure that it takes place in the operating environment.

How should the military industry view space as an independent field and support all other fields?

Space is largely invisible, so it is sometimes difficult to see the person on the battlefield with edge devices looking at their position on the map, their physical location, and the time it takes for their devices to work from space.

The entire industry has the opportunity to educate on why space is so important, and in the field of national defense, you only have two choices. One is that you must assume that you must operate in an environment that denies space services, or that you protect the basic services required to operate within an environmental protection zone.

Why is space becoming increasingly important as a part of MDC2?

The most important thing is the demand signal generated by the government's announcement of location, navigation, and timing (PNT) as critical national infrastructure, so where will our future space-based PNT plan go. By 2030, the UK aims to occupy 10% of the global export market share; We have only completed half of it, so this is an ambitious work, but it is a technological leader.

This, in turn, is driven by what we see from crowded environments and the fact that potential competitors have been investing in high-tech fields with anti satellite capabilities such as hypersonic and networking. They realize how dependent we are.
This forces us to carefully examine the vulnerabilities of systems and services originating from that environment. It is necessary to protect them and invest in them. I think we will see all of this in some form in the final published National Space Strategy.

How does Raytheon balance the needs of civil defense space activities?

We are in a rare position in the supply chain of the UK aerospace industry. The government needs to incorporate commercial and civilian sectors into its corporate architecture, but must fulfill its mission criticality and mission assurance responsibilities as both government and defense departments.

In the delta between these two, Raytheon Company can play a crucial role. This is about establishing partnerships; We have this defensive skill, but it also means we can help smaller or commercial companies understand the increment. Compared to engaging with suitable business participants, it is more difficult for them to reconfigure their production methods to meet this requirement.

In the business world, task assurance is not necessarily given too much consideration. That's about the security of your supply chain; From your chip manufacturer to your intellectual property and everything related to it. We look forward to providing advice and identifying areas where we can play a key role.

Source: Cyber Space Warfare