General B. Chance Saltzman (CAS’91) is only the second person to hold his Space Force title. As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he’s also a military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council. Photo by Jimell Greene

Space

The Next Space Race

US Space Force General B. Chance Saltzman, a BU alum, is charged with securing our access to the stars and defending critical space infrastructure like GPS satellites from would-be assailants

To meet General B. Chance Saltzman at his office requires a clean background check, a valid government-issued ID, and a sponsor—a Department of Defense employee who cannot let you out of their sight during your entire stay. Visitors must pass through three security checkpoints at the main entrance—one of them much like the screening at an airport and another where visitors input their Social Security numbers. 

Saltzman (CAS’91), chief of space operations for the US Space Force, works at one of the world’s largest, and most secure, office buildings: the Pentagon, that famously five-sided building in Arlington, Va. Saltzman’s office is up a few floors and through a set of automatic glass doors, but you won’t see it. Those doors open only with the proper credentials—visitors’ passes don’t cut it here. 

In some ways, the building feels like any large office campus might: the tantalizing smell of fried food wafts into the main lobby from its food court, a florist shop offers bouquets for last-minute gifts or employment anniversaries, and staffers hurry through the long corridors that connect its five concentric rings while typing on their phones. 

Still, it’s impossible to forget that you’re at the headquarters of the US Defense Department and within sight of the nation’s capital. Many employees are dressed in full military regalia and deliver curt but polite greetings indicative of one another’s rank. A small stack of phones on the ledge outside a conference room indicates the meeting happening on the other side of the door is sensitive enough that participants cannot bring their devices. The hallway walls are filled with paintings, photos, artwork, and narrative descriptions of America’s military history. One particularly striking piece of artwork illustrates every single model of military plane the US has ever used, arranged along a visual timeline as if each one is in flight, surging toward some common goal that’s just out of sight. 

So it’s within this context that Saltzman—only the second person to hold his Space Force title—is situated. 

In his day-to-day operations at the Pentagon, Saltzman wears his military fatigues, featuring his four-star general status, a Space Force seal on one shoulder and an American flag on the other. The name on his uniform reads, simply, “Saltzman,” but he also goes by his call sign, “Salty.” He has a firm handshake, authoritative but not aggressive—and there’s a quiet intensity about him. You get the sense that he is attentive to the big picture and the smallest details, that nothing is beneath his notice. 

Saltzman is acutely aware of his own place in this storied military history, and perhaps to a greater extent, his place in the relatively short history of the US Space Force, which marks five years in 2024. 

“I’m very conscious of the fact that the decisions I make every day—a lot of them, at least—are unprecedented,” Saltzman says, as we sit for an interview in a stately conference room adjoining his office. “And that therefore, they will have an institutional inertia behind them. I’m cognizant that I’m setting a foundation.” 

Sixth Branch of the Military

The Space Force was formally established on December 20, 2019, by President Donald Trump, who signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act. It became the sixth branch of the US military, and the first new branch since the Army Air Forces were reorganized as the US Air Force in 1947. 

Vice President Mike Pence, in a 2018 speech at the Pentagon to announce its formation, said, “Just as we’ve done in ages past, the United States will meet the emerging threats on this new battlefield. The time has come to establish the United States Space Force.”

The Space Force mission statement, which has evolved alongside it over the last four and a half years, is to “secure our nation’s interests in, from, and to space.” 

Saltzman says he thinks about the force’s core mission as having three parts: maintaining assured access to the domain of outer space, exploiting that domain for its military advantages, and controlling the domain in the event it’s contested by an adversary. 

That final piece, Saltzman says, is the newest. It’s “a different way of saying we have to protect our assets in space, and we have to deny an adversary using space against our joint force. 

“And so that access, exploitation, and control become kind of the three core functions of what the Space Force does,” he adds.

Although the Space Force is still fairly new, the US use of space for military purposes is not. Even before NASA was created, US officials recognized the vast potential of the final frontier. The Air Force created a dedicated space division as early as 1954, with the Army and the Navy following closely thereafter. 

During the Cold War, Army and Navy units were responsible for maintaining satellite-powered communication and navigation systems. During the Vietnam War, the Air Force used its weather and communications satellites to support US troops on the ground and in the air. Indeed, satellite capabilities have been essential to every US-involved conflict after World War II. 

Now, tasked with overseeing the country’s first new independent military service since the 1940s, Saltzman has command of more than 14,000 active military and civilian members (called “guardians”), 77 spacecraft, and 6 military bases, in Florida, Colorado, and California. He’s in charge of an organization that is actively tracking nearly 500,000 objects whizzing around Earth’s orbit at a mind-bending 22,000 miles per hour. That includes 31 GPS satellites, without which we would, quite literally, be lost. 

He’s responsible for organizing, training, and equipping the people who serve in the Space Force at home and abroad, with a departmental budget close to $30 billion (the smallest among the armed forces). He oversees Space Force missions that include securing and maintaining the GPS satellite network, the Space Fence (a space surveillance system), military satellite communications constellations, X-37B spacecraft, and the US missile warning system.

As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he’s also a military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council. 

When he met with Bostonia at the end of April, Saltzman was in the middle of a grueling congressional budget season, traveling frequently to the Hill to make the case for essential Space Force funding while maintaining respectful neutrality in the face of many a grandstanding politician. 

Satellites and the Global Economy

It’s not just military operations that rely upon satellite information—almost every moment of modern life pings a satellite for one reason or another. 

From the minute you wake up in the morning, you’re pulling information from a satellite. The clocks displayed on cell phones, and the alarms they power, are calibrated by satellites. The TV you watch or stream, and the calls you make or texts you send are enabled by communications satellites responsible for television, telephone, radio, and internet capabilities. When you check the weather forecast, that’s satellite information. When you pull up directions to a new place—satellites. 

“It’s so pervasive—and this is the toughest part about space capabilities because they’re literally out of sight, out of mind, so it’s hard to realize how integrated they are into everyday life,” Saltzman says. 

Take the GPS satellite constellation. Most people understand that they can use it to call up directions on Google Maps, Saltzman says. But that network of satellites powers so much more of our online lives. 

In addition to longitude, latitude, and altitude, the global positioning system of satellites provides information about time. Atomic clocks onboard each GPS satellite add precise timestamps to the data packet that’s beamed down to receivers on Earth. When that data is decoded by the receivers, the timing information is used to synchronize anything from wireless cell towers to financial transactions. 

“When you click ‘buy’ on your Amazon account, that purchase is time-tagged based on a GPS timing signal,” Saltzman says. “Withdrawing money from an account—that’s timestamped with a GPS signal. Banking transactions, ATMs, all of that is governed by that timing signal. Without it, there would be a collapse of that economic structure.”

There are newer applications too, says Brian Walsh, a BU College of Engineering associate professor of mechanical engineering who is part of the Center for Space Physics at Boston University. Say you’re running an organization that maintains some sort of critical knowledge base—a bank, with its ledger of financial transactions, perhaps. You could send a digital copy of those records into space aboard a satellite and ensure that a version remains even if a hurricane or a flood damaged the original copy on Earth. 

“You can imagine a data center getting blown up, and suddenly you lose all those records,” Walsh says. “So even though it sounds like kind of a wacky idea at first, it is actually pretty reasonable to store digital data in space.” 

Or consider farming. Nearly two million farms dot the country’s rural landscape, and in 2023 almost $175 billion worth of American agricultural products were exported around the world, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. Farmers get “a tremendous amount of data” about critical factors such as moisture content and soil quality from remote sensing satellites in orbit, Saltzman says. 

And for Saltzman and the Space Force he commands, these uses of satellite information are just as important to protect as the essential military uses they enable. 

“I want to protect your ability to use a cell phone,” Saltzman says. “I want to protect your ability to buy goods and services via the internet. So there’s a national interest to maintain space capabilities because of the economic and agricultural—not to mention the national security—benefits we derive from it. I take all of that seriously.” 

Launching “Swarms” of Small Satellites 

All this usefulness is packed into big, beautiful satellites that were launched into space at a time when few were thinking of the domain as a possible theater for war. Those early satellites, some still very much in use today, are robust loci of capabilities, because they had to be. Flinging something into orbit was wildly expensive, so these satellites needed to be able to do a lot, and to function with little to no intervention for decades. 

But then, in 2007, China blasted one of its own satellites to smithereens. Russia did the same in 2021. Suddenly, these necessarily bloated satellites looked like sitting ducks. 

“It was a bellwether event, to some degree,” says Saltzman, who was working at the Joint Space Operations Center at the time of the Chinese missile test. “It was a wake-up call. I don’t want to make it overdramatic—it wasn’t like the president was on the phone saying, ‘Give me Saltzman.’ But I think those of us in the business saw that this space domain was never going to be the same again. A country has demonstrated the ability and an intent to destructively take out a satellite, and you can only draw certain conclusions once that happens. There’s no peaceful need for that. The only reason you’re doing that is because you want to take out another country’s satellites to try to achieve a military advantage. That’s the only conclusion you can draw. And we just hadn’t seen that activity before.” If you were to really trace back the origins of the Space Force, Saltzman says, “you could probably tie it back to that event.” 

The challenge now is how to make these essential satellites more resilient to attacks. One solution, made possible only with recent advances in technology, is to send a fleet—tens or hundreds—of small satellites into orbit, instead. 

Space Force officials did just that, for the first time, in August 2023. They launched a “swarm” of 28 smaller, cheaper satellites that are focused on defensive activity: missile tracking, data transfer, and communications. The satellites in this swarm are about an eighth of the size of traditional devices. And while a ground missile or laser can still take out one or two of these satellites, such damage would do little to weaken the overall network. 

Saltzman’s job at the time of the Chinese anti-satellite missile test involved tracking the debris that came from China’s exploded satellite, a task he describes as a nightmare. The blast sent thousands of chunks of metal zipping through orbit at five miles per second. At that rate, even the smallest piece is capable of causing major damage to US satellites or any of the domestic or international spacecraft also in orbit at the time. 

That debris is still floating around. In a BU course about orbital dynamics, Walsh (GRS’09,’12) and his students dig into a long list of orbital debris. “A really big fraction of it came from that one explosion,” Walsh says. 

A significant part of the Space Force’s job to this point has been to serve as a kind of low-orbit air traffic control center, alerting the astronauts in the International Space Station when there’s junk metal or other satellites in their path. 

Building Up Capacity

Saltzman, who is in his mid-50s, has the sort of broad-shouldered presence you might expect from the military’s top brass. A once-bustling hallway in the Pentagon goes noticeably quiet when he’s in it. In conversation, he’s prepared. For example, he knew that my undergraduate degree was from the University of Connecticut. It’s a fact that’s easy enough to look up online, but nonetheless, one I hadn’t mentioned to him or his staff before our interview.

Yet he approaches his work unpretentiously, always seeking input from those around him. 

“To be asked to lead the military service is very humbling,” he says. “You’re honored. And then you’re immediately scared to death, right? Because in this line of work, all CEOs come from the mail room. We don’t ever come horizontally into this company. Everybody starts at the ground floor. You can look at any four-star who’s in charge and say that they were once a second lieutenant—a nobody along with everybody else.” 

Saltzman joined the Air Force right after he graduated from BU, where he studied history. Originally from Bowling Green, Ky., he says that his time at BU “opened his eyes” to new people, perspectives, and experiences. 

“Boston was about as far away as I could imagine from Kentucky at the time,” he says. Pamphlets for the University showed off its proximity to the Charles River and Fenway Park—which were certainly draws, despite the Red Sox having let the World Series title slip from their fingers in 1986, something Saltzman mentions even today. But the real awakening, he says, was in the late-night dormitory conversations—meeting people of different religious backgrounds from his own, with different upbringings and political ideology.

“It was so different from where I grew up that I instantly had to recalibrate everything,” he says. 

Saltzman served in the Air Force until 2020, when he was transferred into the Space Force, first as lieutenant general and then as general two years later, which is also when he was appointed chief of operations. He succeeded General John Raymond, who was named the first general and first chief of space operations in the Space Force and has since retired. With his four-year term at the helm nearly halfway over, Saltzman draws from his interest in history to understand and contextualize his impact in this service. 

“It’ll be a blip when it’s all said and done,” he says of his tenure as general. “But because John Raymond and I were so early in this process, we’re going to have an outsized impact. We are literally building the foundation.”

With that in mind, Saltzman takes pains to teach and explain his reasoning when it comes time to make big decisions. That will become part of the narrative passed down through generations of Space Force leaders. And Saltzman wants the people who come after him to understand why he did what he did so that they can continue to build upon his work and to build up the capacity of the force: “Am I documenting things properly so they understand the decisions I’m making? Am I setting the foundation in terms of resourcing and growth of the service?” 

Indeed the Space Force is bulking up. A mid-May report by the New York Times details Defense Department efforts to speed up the nation’s ability to wage war in space, as advancements in China and Russia rapidly make the two countries imposing threats. “Pentagon officials and a recent unclassified assessment by the director of national intelligence say that both Russia and China have already tested or deployed systems such as ground-based high-energy lasers, antisatellite missiles or maneuverable satellites that could be used to disrupt American space assets,” the Times wrote.

All this weighs on Saltzman—the urgent need to scale up, the organizational decisions, his place in history. But he still approaches each new day with vigor and excitement. 

“It’s a lot of work,” he says. “And it’s a lot of energy to expend. And it’s a lot of people [I’m trying] to orchestrate and make sure everybody’s going in the same direction. So I come home exhausted. But it’s the best kind of tired, because you really feel like you’re building something. Talking to young people [who] are looking at me expecting me to accomplish the world is daunting. But it’s exciting, too, because they’re all in, and I don’t want to let them down. That energizes me. It’s an exciting time to be in military space, and certainly in the Space Force.”