Here's what U.S. Space Force will do at Fort Huachuca in Arizona

A new mission is coming to Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, and it’ll involve the U.S. Space Force. The Defense Department announced the site this spring.

Col. Brandon Alford is commander of United States Space Forces Southern, based at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson.

He came by the studio recently to talk about the new mission and started with what they’ll be doing at Fort Huachuca.

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Full conversation

COL. BRANDON ALFORD: The best way to describe that mission is it’s called Space Domain Awareness, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. When you think about military or civil space applications, everything from GPS to communications to early warning, everything that depends on space-based assets, we have to start with the foundation of understanding the environment.

And so, most importantly, is knowing where satellites are, what those satellites are, what they’re doing, and where they’re supposed to be at a certain time. And so, all that information is informed by sensors typically on the ground, sometimes in space, sometimes by communicating with the satellites themselves. But it all contributes to a mission where we understand the space domain and understand where the satellites are, what they’re doing. So, that’s what the mission area is that Fort Huachuca is going to be taking on soon.

MARK BRODIE: It sounds like a lot of tracking stuff.

BRANDON ALFORD: Exactly. That is the fundamental basis of how we keep track, is sensors, right? Whether it’s telescopes or radars or other types of, other types of sensors. But it’s all about tracking.

MARK BRODIE: So, does that mean that you’ll be like planting trackers in the ground in Sierra Vista? Like, how will Fort Huachuca play into what it is that you have to do? What will be happening there that will allow you to be able to track all this stuff?

BRANDON ALFORD: The unit there is going to — I don’t know if they’ll actually have sensors there at Fort Huachuca, but a typical Space Domain Awareness or Space Defense unit, that’s the team that’s taking all that information and building the picture.

And so, you know, based on the information that the sensors are taking, feed it back to a processing center, for lack of a better term. And then the team there will sort of make sense of it, and that will be part of what goes into the overall database.

Mark Brodie

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MARK BRODIE: And do you have a sense of what is up there that you are looking for? Are you figuring out what’s up there and then tracking it?

BRANDON ALFORD: Yes, that’s a great question. It’s all based on orbital mechanics. And so, it’s a great thing whenever I go to classrooms to talk about STEM and the importance of science and technology and math, is that everything in space that’s orbiting the Earth is accounted for. And that’s all based on where we believe it’s supposed to be, and then where we observe it to be.

And so, that’s how we build the catalog. That’s how we build our understanding. Everything is given a number, and everything is tracked through its orbit so we understand where it’s supposed to be at certain times, and then we go look for it.

MARK BRODIE: Does this include things like comets or meteors or space junk, anything like that? Or is it mostly stuff that you kind of know what’s there and have a general sense of where it is?

BRANDON ALFORD: In the case of comets and meteors, not as much, but still very important because what we’re tracking is typically stuff that’s orbiting the Earth. And you mentioned space junk, which is a very important thing to think about because we talk about the space domain now, we talk about it in terms of being congested as well as contested.

And so, the — I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie “WALL-E,” but there’s a funny little scene where WALL-E’s leaving the Earth on a rocket, and before he gets into space, he bumps into all this huge cloud of satellites and junk. So, that’s obviously not to scale and not quite what would happen, but that is the idea.

We have to keep track of everything that goes into space, and a lot of that is not active payloads. A lot of that is just pieces of satellites or

MARK BRODIE: Decommissioned satellites, things like that.

BRANDON ALFORD: Exactly.

MARK BRODIE: So, why Fort Huachuca? Why is that the right place to be doing what you’ll be doing?

BRANDON ALFORD: The area, all the areas here in Arizona are almost perfect for us to be able to do our mission. Some of it was actually just blind luck. Our unit is located at Davis-Monthan because we were standing up the space component to SOUTHCOM, and that happened to be where Air Forces Southern, the air component, is located. And so, that’s how we got our start.

I was an airman for 16 years before I transitioned into the Space Force. And before there was a Space Force, the space career field was under the Air Force. And so, that was very natural as we start to build these components.

And with the local economy and a lot of the local innovations and technology, very, very big and important in the topic of space exploration, astronomy, optics, all here in our backyard. And so, Fort Huachuca, being as close as it is to Tucson and the space enterprise up there, just a very natural selection.

MARK BRODIE: It sounds like kind of a combination of lots of parts of Arizona sort of having dark skies, which leads to a space industry, and also having a space industry here. It sounds like that was kind of what led to, or at least a component of, why Fort Huachuca got this mission.

BRANDON ALFORD: Yes, sir. That’s absolutely a part of it. I mean, when you are looking at placing sensors, obviously an important part is, can we see what we want to see? And the physical environment here, being a dry climate and being dark skies, is very good for that sort of thing.

MARK BRODIE: Is there a chance that the mission that happens at Fort Huachuca could be expanded to include other things?

BRANDON ALFORD: I think the answer to that has to be yes. Anytime you start with a certain mission and you see how things play out, and I think really the — I don’t want to say the sky’s the limit, that’s a silly, that’s a weird pun — but, yeah, I think that’ll be a good partnership and really nowhere to go but forward there.

MARK BRODIE: What appeals to you about this kind of work?

BRANDON ALFORD: This type of work, if we’re talking Space Domain Awareness specifically, it is fundamental to everything that the Space Force, and I would argue that the military, now does. When we talk about our mission, we frame it up in terms of its important to civilian life as well as military operations.

One lesson that we always like to try and drive home is that — your listeners can’t see it, but I’m holding up a smartphone — virtually all the technology that has to do with that smartphone, whether it’s helping us to communicate or navigate, that’s all enabled by on-orbit capabilities. And so, anything from how your ATMs work to how the gas pumps work, and then when we get into military operations, how we’re given early warning in the case of a threat, that’s all enabled by space operations.

And so, none of that is possible if we don’t have an understanding of the space domain. And so, when we talk about Space Domain Awareness, we really are talking about the foundation of all other military operations.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Col. Brandon Alford, commander of U.S. Space Forces Southern. He’s based at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. Col. Alford, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

BRANDON ALFORD: Thank you, sir.