Intelligence About Russia Puts Focus on New U.S. Satellite Push

The Pentagon is in the early stages of a program to put constellations of smaller and cheaper satellites into orbit to counter space-based threats of the sort being developed by Russia and China.

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a military missile tracking system, lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Wednesday.

Hours after the news broke on Wednesday that the United States had picked up worrisome intelligence about Russia’s capacity to strike American satellites, the Pentagon sent a missile-tracking system into orbit, part of a vast new effort to bolster the military’s growing presence in space.

The timing was coincidental. But it underscored how concerns about advances in Russian and Chinese capabilities in space have led the United States to embrace innovative ways of protecting vital communications, surveillance and GPS systems on the battlefield of the future.

The system put into orbit on Wednesday was a prototype developed to test a new plan, named Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, that aims to blanket low-Earth orbit with hundreds of smaller, cheaper satellites. The approach is like a version of the Starlink internet communications system that Elon Musk’s SpaceX already has in orbit, with more than 5,000 satellites. (The Pentagon prototype on Wednesday was launched on a Space X rocket.)

The idea is that even if enemies of the United States could knock out some of its satellites — or even more than a dozen of them — the system could keep operating by shifting to other units in the orbiting web.

“For a long time, you could count our space constellations by the handful — satellites the size of school buses that took decades to buy and build, years to launch,” Kathleen H. Hicks, the deputy defense secretary, said last month at U.S. Space Command, which is responsible for coordinating the Pentagon’s military operations in space.

But now, she said, the United States is shifting to “proliferated constellations of smaller, resilient, lower-cost satellites” that can “launch almost weekly.”

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