The space community spends enormous energy protecting satellites in orbit — and comparatively little protecting the factories, launch sites, and supply chains that make space power possible. In a special in-person episode of The ISR Debrief recorded in Los Angeles, host Wesley Rose brings together the team behind The Integrity Flash to ask a question few are focused on: are we defending space power in the wrong place?
Chad Hartman leads the discussion with three of the Flash’s space and counterspace analysts — Greg Gillinger, Senior Vice President for Strategy and Development at Integrity ISR; Alison Sayer, an Air Force veteran focused on space security and counterspace threats; and Ron Lerch, a retired Space Force intelligence chief master sergeant. The catalyst is a recent Ukrainian strike on Russia’s Progress Rocket Space Center in Samara — a critical hub for producing the Soyuz rocket family — using the new Flamingo (FP-5) cruise missile.
The panel’s assessment of the strike is nuanced. Russia likely has reserve launch capability in the near term, the analysts note, so the immediate operational impact may be limited. The more significant effect is psychological, and strategic: the attack underscores how far Russia’s space program has declined, how difficult resilience becomes in the middle of a draining war, and — as the discussion repeatedly returns to — that the true vulnerability is often not the building but the ecosystem around it. Specialized tooling, supply chains, and above all the skilled workforce are far harder to replace than concrete and steel. “Buildings can be rebuilt,” one analyst observes, “but some of that technological knowledge is very hard to replace.”
A central insight reframes what “space resiliency” means. For years, the term has implied disaggregating capabilities across proliferated constellations in orbit. But resiliency, the panel argues, extends all the way down to the ground — to launch facilities, logistics, and the long, specialized process of putting a rocket in the air. A nation can harden its satellites and still be crippled by a strike on a single production facility, a jammer near a launch pad, or a cyber intrusion that never produces an explosion at all.
The conversation widens to the Middle East — where Israeli strikes on Iranian space infrastructure and Iranian strikes on U.S. bases marked a “summer of space targeting” — and to China, whose decade-long investment in military-civil fusion and dispersed, redundant launch infrastructure stands in sharp contrast to Russia’s single-point fragility. The United States, the panel cautions, has its own exposed ground segment, from launch-site bottlenecks to GPS dependencies to cyber vulnerabilities.
Asked for the one terrestrial vulnerability they would fix first, the analysts pointed to expanding what “counterspace” means, building more launch capacity, and analyzing space operations as a system rather than a collection of widgets. Hartman’s closing line distilled the hour: space power doesn’t begin in orbit. It begins on the ground.
The ISR Debrief is produced by Integrity ISR, with education powered by ISR University. The analysis in this episode draws on the work of The Integrity Flash, available at https://integrityflash.com.
Learn more at https://integrityisr.com e https://isruniversity.com.
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