Members of the 18th Space Defense Squadron work together with Maxar members on the 18 SDS operations floor at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., April 16, 2024. This mission was supported by S4S’s Commercial Integration Cell program. U.S. Space Force photo by Maj. Julian Labit

The U.S. Space Force said on Wednesday that it has added five companies to the U.S. Space Command Combined Space Operations Center’s (CSpOC) Commercial Integration Cell (CIC) at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., and is in the process of adding another two early next year, but the service declined to identify the companies.

“We’re working with those companies on their timeline to announce that they’ve become a part of that, and that should be coming out shortly,” Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess, the commander of U.S. Space Forces-Space (S4S), the service component of U.S. Space Command, told a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies’ virtual forum.

“I don’t see an upper [CIC] limit from the ability to interact with companies,” he said. “What it really comes down to is our ability to manage all of those connections — do we have the number of personnel, how many people does it take to do that? I don’t see an upper limit on the ability to bring on companies. It’s just how do we manage that connection. We are going to continue — 17 is not the end number, and we’re going to continue to bring on companies as we can.”

The 10 CIC member companies are SpaceX, Maxar Technologies, Eutelsat America Corp., Hughes Network Systems, Viasat and Viasat-owned Inmarsat, Intelsat, Iridium Communications, SES Space & Defense, and XTAR LLC.

Under Space Force cooperative agreements with the above companies, designated personnel at the latter receive top secret/sensitive compartmented information clearances to view Space Force operations at Vandenberg and to exchange information with Space Force personnel on threats, including company detections of electromagnetic interference.

“We have the connections so that we can provide them with threat information back and forth at the Top Secret/SCI level “here’s what’s going on,” and they can also provide us information, and so we have folks on the CSpOC floor — not 24/7 right now, but they have the ability to call into the CSpOC floor and they can say, ‘Here’s what I’m experiencing,’” Schiess said.

“They’ve all decided to work together so they’ve all signed non-disclosure agreements that they’re not going to use any information that we give them about one of the other CIC members for their ability to make a profit,” he said. “At the beginning of the Ukraine invasion, Russia did a cyber attack on a commercial company that was a member of the CIC so then they were providing that information to us at the CSpOC so we could then make sure the other companies knew that something was going on so if there was things that that company had found out they could also harden their ability to do that. We can provide information to them [CIC companies] on, maybe, different satellites that are close to them that might be listening satellites so we can provide that information to them on a fast basis.”

Russia has launched cyber attacks on Starlink terminals in Ukraine and, an hour before the country’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, on Viasat modems and routers.

Space Force said on Wednesday that the newly cleared mission areas for the five companies to receive information on in the CIC are Space Domain Awareness and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.

“Through the implementation of the CIC, S4S has seen improved space object screening; increased space situational awareness through highly accurate and timely data exchange; improved detection, characterization, and resolution of electromagnetic interference; timely indications and warning regarding real-world events (e.g., dazzling/lasing, direct ascent launches, etc.); and improved coordination of critical asset lists,” Space Force said on Wednesday.

This story was first published by Defense Daily