Achieving maritime domain awareness is vital to the United States economy, to keep threats at bay and to find solutions when threats arise. But the mission isn’t just along the world’s bodies of water. A large part takes place in space, and relies not just on defense assets, but commercial partners whose missions may be different from the Navy’s.
Alan Hope, head of the mission development branch at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) inside the Naval Center for Space Technology, said the “maritime mission is a global mission, and as such, that requires access to parts of the globe that aren’t easily accessible by any other means.”
According to Hope, the Navy has invested in space for communications, but it doesn’t just rely on DoD assets in space.
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