Spain and 23 other nations coordinate their outer space surveillance with US Space Command

The Spanish Air and Space Army was one of the 25 aerospace forces from four continents that took part in the largest multinational training exercise dedicated to surveillance of the outer space environment.

The national presence was provided by officers from the Space Surveillance Operations Centre (COVE), whose missions include supervising and controlling outer space within the framework of the National Space Surveillance and Tracking System or S3T (Spanish Space Surveillance and Tracking), controlling and cataloguing objects orbiting the Earth and analysing threats from space.

COVE maintains cooperative ties with NATO, the European Union and the United States, which has led to some of its personnel taking part in Global Sentinel 22, an exercise led by Washington Space Command and led by Army Lieutenant General James Dickinson, 60, which brought together at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California some 150 airmen dedicated to monitoring what is happening in outer space in their respective nations.

Along with military personnel from the host nation, teams from 13 other NATO nations - Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and the United Kingdom - and from the two soon-to-join NATO aspirants, Sweden and Finland, participated.

Space control technicians from Washington's strongest allies in Asia - South Korea, Israel, Japan and Thailand - and in Oceania, Australia and New Zealand, also attended. From Latin America, Brazil and Peru, whose armed forces have control centres for their reconnaissance and observation satellites, were present, but Chile was conspicuously absent. A team from Ukraine attended, but none from any African country.

The annual Global Sentinel exercises are focused on increasing the interoperability of space operations between the armed forces that have signed collaboration agreements with the Pentagon for surveillance of the outer space environment, as is the case of the Spanish armed forces and those of the aforementioned countries. 

The aim is to improve cooperation and training of users of the ground segment dedicated to continuously inspecting the space environment, as well as to harmonise the procedures governing their rules of conduct and data transfer.

In short, each edition of Global Sentinel aims to update and share knowledge in order to increase security and offer similar responses in real situations of international cooperation in the face of risks or threats in the operation of space systems.

The military units invited to attend the training, including the Spanish COVE, sent teams made up of between four and half a dozen highly qualified officers and NCOs, who had to share, follow and react to the eight different scenarios they were presented with.

Distributed by nation, they have faced a wide range of operational situations with satellites, spacecraft and different objects in space, both cooperatively and on a national basis. They have also formed eight Regional Space Operations Centres to facilitate the integration of multinational teams.

They have all had to solve simulations "of aggression and denial of satellite services, detection of electronic warfare attacks, mitigating intentional actions against ground infrastructures and communication disturbances resulting from solar storms". They have also resolved incidents of controlled and uncontrolled re-entry of spacecraft into the atmosphere, assessed the risks of space debris on collision trajectories with satellites and of different types of manoeuvres of orbiting platforms and constellations. 

The American liaison officers have broadened the attendees' experience in the use of aerospace software. This is the case of STK (Systems Tool Kit), a tool used by the civil and defence aerospace community on a global scale for in-orbit analysis and calculations, planetary and interplanetary missions and orbital collision avoidance.

The presence of Spanish military personnel in Global Sentinel has taken place in previous years and is expected to continue. The COVE is due to reach full operational capability in June 2023 and its DNA includes continuous training. The Centre was created in 2021 and "due to its high disruptive potential" has gained "great relevance", as space assets "constitute critical infrastructures on which a country's security relies", explained Air General Juan Francisco Sanz, head of the Aerospace Surveillance and Control System, to Defence Minister Margarita Robles on her first visit to the Centre.

The 2022 edition of Global Sentinel took place from 25 July to 3 August at the Combined Space Operations Centre (CSpOC), an organisation belonging to the Combined Forces Space Component (CFSCC) of the US Space Force. Senior exercise leadership has been under the purview of Air Major General DeAnna Burt, head of the CFSCC.

Leading a collective of 17,000 military personnel, General DeAnna Burt, 53, has for nearly two years and until 22 August been ultimately responsible for planning, integrating, directing and assessing US joint and combined space operations. She is also responsible for coordinating space traffic management, the operation of the GPS navigation system and making military satellite communications available to US senior combatant commanders and their allies.

To take a more senior position within the Pentagon's space forces, General DeAnna Burt was relieved less than a week ago by Major General Douglas Schiess, 52, who until then was the Chief of Space Operations and Lieutenant General Dickinson's right-hand man.