Missile warning satellites protect U.S., ally assets in Middle East

United States Strategic Command

The United States is using satellites to intercept enemy missiles before they reach their targets.

The Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) uses a constellation of satellites with infrared sensors to detect the hot plume of a rocket as it launches, allowing U.S. and allied forces time to respond. The sensors can detect the missile type, launch origin and target location from tens of thousands of kilometers above Earth.

SBIRS is crucial in regions including the Middle East, where Iran-backed groups have launched more than 150 missile attacks on U.S. and international assets, including commercial vessels.

“Being able to provide missile warning, to say ‘there’s a missile inbound and here’s the location where it came from, and here’s where it’s headed,’ is valuable information to keep people safe,” said Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, U.S. Space Force chief of space operations.

“Not only do [the sensors] see heat, but they can see that the heat is moving,” Saltzman told The Wall Street Journal newspaper. “We have operators that are able to characterize fast-moving heat and say whether it is on the kind of profile that we would see with a particular ballistic missile, and then we provide that data out to everyone that’s interested.”

The SBIRS program provides multilayered, constant coverage by launching satellites into geosynchronous orbit (matching Earth’s rotation to stay focused on a specific location) and highly elliptical orbit (providing high latitude and polar coverage). This “global persistent coverage” cues other systems, such as a U.S. Army Patriot battery or a U.S. Navy destroyer, to intercept missile attacks.

“SBIRS can provide an estimation of where the missiles might land, which can be hugely valuable for mitigating casualties,” Masao Dahlgren, a fellow with the Missile Defense Project at the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Wall Street Journal. “The flight time of a ballistic missile at these ranges can be a matter of minutes. That’s why these capabilities are so critical, so you can detect the hot plume of the rocket exhaust as it launches.”

The final SBIRS satellite launched in 2022. Systems designed to expand the global missile warning satellite network are being developed, including the Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution Command and Control (FORGE C2), and the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next Gen OPIR) program. In addition, the U.S. Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific will deploy the Relay Ground Station-Asia (RGS-A) in 2025. The station will help the U.S. and its Allies and Partners safeguard the Indo-Pacific by linking legacy and next-generation satellites to enhance regional security.

The upgrades are a joint effort among the U.S. Space Force, the Space Development Agency (SDA) and the Missile Defense Agency. The U.S. Space Force announced in November 2023 that four companies will develop designs of the FORGE C2 system to control orbiting satellites, with prototypes expected by 2025. As part of the Next Gen OPIR program, the SDA in January 2024 chose three companies to develop 54 low Earth orbit satellites, set to launch by 2027. Six middle Earth orbit satellites have completed critical design review and are scheduled to launch in 2026.

This “proliferated constellation” will make SBIRS and its support architecture more robust, Saltzman said. “That’s a much more resilient architecture. An adversary has a lot harder time disrupting thousands of satellites than it would one or two.”