(GRAND FORKS, ND) – The Vice Chief of Space Operations for the United States Space Force and Director of the Space Development Agency joined Senator Kevin Cramer in Grand Forks Monday for a tour of the John D. Odegaard School of Aerospace Sciences and the UND College of Engineering and Mines.
Space Development Agency Director, Dr. Derek Tournear, in his first media interview since returning to the Space Development Agency, says he loves when he has an opportunity to make the trip to Grand Forks – where the Space Development Agency has an operations center at the Grand Forks Air Force Base.
“Partnering with Grand Forks to make one of our ops centers here is definitely not a mistake,” he said. “It’s paid dividends. The community supported us, the air base has supported us, and the university has just been a great partner.”
Growth of the Space Development Agency
Dr. Tournear says a lot has happened since the Space Development Agency was formed.
The agency, a direct-reporting unit of the United States Space Force, was established in 2019 by the appointment of Mike Griffin, then-Under Secretary of Defense.
In its six years of existence, a lot has happened.
“We’ve demonstrated that we can actually field capabilities on these very fast time scales,” Dr. Tournear said. “We’ve demonstrated that we can actually communicate to existing radios that are already fielded. That’s a big deal, because in the space community, they typically operated in stove pipes.”
He said there was doubt as to whether or not the work could actually be done – but they demonstrated it could be done.
Innovation opportunities in North Dakota
There are a lot of opportunities for innovation in North Dakota, according to Tournear.
“The Grand Forks community has really built a good ecosystem based on unmanned air systems,” he said.
Tournear pointed to an old adage that all offices, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, would eventually go paperless.
“Well, nowadays it seems like we run through reams of paper,” he said. “Much more quickly than we ever did back in the nineties. And the reason is, is because of the computer infrastructure that we put in place. it’s so much easier to print now. We can see things, we can print things much easier than it was back in the early 1980s.”
He said the same goes for space and unmanned air systems.
“If I’m really going to proliferate and cover the world with systems that are unmanned, whether they be in space, whether they be in air, under sea, on the ground, I’ve got to be able to network them together in some way to be able to, to really enable this to work as a good ecosystem,” Tournear said. “Space enables that. Space does not supplant; space enables the things that unmanned air systems will do.”
He said space enables systems to act global in nature – not just regional.
The innovation has to happen from outside, Tournear said.
“They can move much more quickly than the ones within existing customer because. To keep the lights on for a company with an existing customer, they have to please the existing customer outside,” he said. “If you’re starting with no customers, you can do anything that’s disruptive.”
Senator Cramer says there are many big opportunities that exist in North Dakota – but it’s also an opportunity for entrepreneurs across the United States.
“It’s an investment opportunity for investors looking to help solve problems in the national defense,” he said. “I think we have to find ways in the government to incentivize properly innovation, both for the startup in the garage as well as for the big companies that have the capabilities.”
Cramer said ‘stagnant just will not work.
“Other countries are innovating very, very quickly, obviously, but that’s always been the American edge,” he said. “I don’t want to give up. If we lose space, you lose. If you lose your innovative edge, you lose space.”
Space’s importance to defending the country
Residents across the country, Tournear said, ‘have to realizes there are enemies that want to completely change the American way of life.’
“We have a lot of people around the world that do not want the American way of life, or American values in particular, to be promulgated across the rest of the world,” he said. “The United States is able to promulgate that freedom and make sure that we have a stable world.”
Tournear said the only way to project power is to maintain space superiority.
“It’s so fundamental that the ability of the U.S. to project power around the world is intimately tied to our space power,” he said. “That cannot be understated and it cannot be overstated. And the fact that there are people out there and countries out there that want to knock the US off of that, uh, position means that space has to be protected.”
China’s trying to project power
Tournear said China is attempting to proliferate systems and attempting to project power.
“This is where we win and this is where we have to beat down bureaucracy,” he said. “It can take away the fundamental advantage that the U.S. has.”
Dr. Tournear says the United States has an advantage in that it has capitalism and competition.
Golden Dome
President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the improvement of the United States’ defenses against advanced adversary missile threats – called the Golden Dome.
Tournear said the order is ‘taken to heart within the Department of Defense.’
“There’s a lot of really smart people that are coming together to put together what the plan is for that,” he said. “But that plan is not concrete or defined yet, and when it gets defined, then it will be submitted to the President and then the Department of Defense can run with that. So, I can’t come up here and say definitively this is the role the Space Development Agency will play in Golden Dome.”
He did say, that the order calls out the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, which is the Space Development Agency’s space architecture.
“It calls that out as an exemplar of what could be used for Golden Dome,” Tournear said. “Everything that we’re building, uh, whether it be our transport, which is our calm layer, or our tracking, which is our missile tracking fire control layer, everything in that is geared towards being able to get global fire control solutions for those threats, moving targets and advanced missiles. All of that feeds into Golden Dome and all of that will be some part of Golden Dome.”
