AFRL Space Vehicles Directorate
Written by Eva Blaylock
The Space Vehicles Directorate is located primarily at sites at Kirtland AFB, N.M; Hanscom AFB, Mass.; Holloman AFB, N.M.; Sunspot, N.M.; and Gakona, Alaska. Two-thirds of its approximately 900 employees are government, of whom 15 percent are military. Among government employees, Ph.D.s, M.A.s, and B.S.s are one-third each. The directorate has an annual budget of approximately $378 million, with an additional $45 million in Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funds.
The directorate is co-located with the Space and Missile Systems Center’s Space Development and Test Wing and the Operationally Responsive Space Office. The three DoD organizations form the core of a major initiative to revolutionize DoD’s role in space.
Space Vehicles consists of three technical divisions. The Battlespace Environment Division detects and understands aerospace environmental threats to warfighting systems, then provides active and passive means to eliminate or mitigate such threats. Its main research areas include space weather, data exploitation, imaging and surveillance. The Spacecraft Technology Division develops next-generation spacecraft bus and payload technology elements to reduce cost, improve performance and enable new missions. Its main technology research areas include electronics, components, sensing and communications. The Integrated Experiments and Evaluation Division works to prove advanced technologies and concepts through flight experiments, simulation and technical assessment, and integration and test facilities.
The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate emphasizes technology transfer—the sharing or transferring of information, data, hardware, personnel, services, facilities or other scientific resources for the benefit of the private or public sector. Congress passed specific legislation encouraging technology transfer in 1980 and has continued to strengthen this program. Many of Space Vehicles-related technology developments are by their very nature applicable to both the military and the commercial world—they are “dual use.”
The Small Business Office promotes acquisition policies, procedures and practices that provide maximum opportunity for small businesses to compete for contract awards and to assist small businesses in selling to the Air Force Research Laboratory. The Technology Transfer Office uses a multitude of ways to accomplish the transfer of technologies to the private or public sector and to work with the Air Force, especially cooperative research and development agreements, education partnership agreements, patent license agreements, partnership intermediaries agreements, and commercial test agreements.
In January 2006, the Air Force Research Laboratory, in conjunction with the Kirtland AFB’s 377th Air Base Wing Civil Engineering organization, created the Air Force’s first enhanced use lease, known as the Kirtland Technology Park. KTP consists of approximately 300 acres of government land within Kirtland’s west side and is adjacent to both the AFRL campus and the Albuquerque International Sunport. The lease can provide up to 4,000,000 square feet of laboratory, industrial, educational and administrative facilities occupied by as many as 15,000 workers.
Additionally, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy and Space Vehicles Directorates at Kirtland Air Force Base have established the Phillips Technology Institute to promote collaborative research between government, industry and academia. The vision of the Phillips Technology Institute is two fold: to provide an innovative collaborative enterprise and to provide work force development. The SBIR program funds early-stage research and development at small technology companies and is designed to stimulate technological innovation, increase private sector commercialization of federal research and development, increase small business participation in federally funded R&D and foster participation by minority and disadvantaged firms in technological innovation. Among other requirements, a firm must be a U.S. for-profit small business of 500 or fewer employees.
Some of the premiere current technologies and systems being worked on at the laboratory include the TacSat-3, -4, and -5, the High Altitude Balloon Experiment, the Communication and Navigation Outage Forecast System, the Demonstration and Experiments Satellite, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, the Solar Mass Ejection Imager, plug and play avionics, cryocoolers, nanosatellites, space structures, and other space technologies and aids.
The Space Vehicles Directorate works with contractors, universities, and public and private businesses to enable collaborative efforts for new and existing technologies. Among these are the Space & Missile Systems Center, NASA, the Naval Research Laboratory, the Aerospace Corp., Raytheon, the MicroSat Systems Inc. and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Concerning space-based command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, the directorate will provide persistent, ever-present global access and connectivity. Regarding the concept of responsive space, the organization will rapidly respond to evolving and unanticipated military need. Finally, for counterspace, the unit will ensure the survivability of friendly space forces and deny the adversary’s use in the cosmos. ♦
(Editor’s note: Eva Blaylock is assigned to Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Corporate Communications and may be contacted at 505-846-6315, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .)