Gen. John Hyten, the commander of Air Force Space Command, said in a speech here at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference that the Air Force spent the past year defining a follow-on program to the Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) Block 10 pathfinder satellite launched into a 630-kilometer, sun-synchronous low Earth orbit in 2010 aboard an Orbital Sciences Corp. Minotaur 4 rocket. The next iteration, he said, would likely use three smaller satellites in low Earth orbit to keep tabs on objects in the geosynchronous belt. Located 36,000 kilometers above the equator, geostationary orbit is home to critical U.S. communications and missile warning satellites.

“What do we need from SBSS that we really can’t get anywhere else? We need that real-time, all-weather access,” he said. “You can do that from an equatorial orbit looking up. You don’t need a big satellite to do that. You can do that with small satellites. You can do that fairly affordably.”