Free Republic

The U.S. Air Force has hired Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems to study the possibility of integrating additional Missile Defense Agency (MDA) sensors into the U.S. Space Surveillance Network that tracks orbiting satellites, a Raytheon official said Oct. 28. The Tewksbury, Mass.-based company was awarded a $3 million contract from Air Force Space Command for a program called the Enterprise Sensing Prototype Architecture for Space Situational Awareness (ESP-SSA), Joe Chapa, Raytheon’s technical director for national theater security programs, said in an interview. The Air Force’s Space Surveillance Network employs a host of optical telescopes and radars around the world. The telescopes...