THE WATCH STAFF
When the German Ministry of Defense lost transportation to the United States for its SARah-1 satellite, it had to scramble to find an alternative for getting the spacecraft to California for its June 18, 2022, launch.
So, as the popular phrase asks: “Who you gonna call?”
The answer: the National Guard.
The SARah-1, pictured in illustration, was to be shipped by a Ukrainian commercial cargo plane to Vandenberg Space Force Base, but the ongoing war in Ukraine made those aircraft unavailable, according to a June 22 news release from the National Guard Bureau (NGB). Instead, the cloud-penetrating satellite was sent from Germany to the U.S. by ship, where it arrived at the Port of Baltimore in Maryland. Then the challenge became: How to get it across the U.S. to Vandenberg? An oversized and overweight trailer would be needed to carry such a large and heavy load — as well as transportation permits in every state the 4-ton satellite crossed, according to the news release.
“In discussions with our German Space Command partners on the alternatives to get SARah to the launch sites, we realized they would need assistance getting all the state-by-state permits approved to make this possible in just a matter of days,” Garrett Haslem, the U.S. Space Force’s associate director of global partnerships, said in the news release.
Working with the National Guard Coordination Center, Guard operations directorates from nine states helped secure the permits, said Army Col. Kurt A. Rorvik, chief of the operations directorate at the NGB. Once the satellite was on its way, the Guard’s Soldiers and Airmen helped solve travel obstacles that ranged from closed sections of interstate to wildfires, according to the National Guard Bureau.
“As a result of these collective efforts across the National Guard, the German SARah satellite was ready for its planned launch date, allowing a U.S. ally to deploy its satellite into space,” Rorvik said, according to the news release. The National Guard Coordination Center ensures that state elements of the Guard have what they need to carry out a mission.
The SARah-1 is the first of three such satellites commissioned by the Bundeswehr — Germany’s Armed Forces — to replace their SAR-Lupe constellation currently in orbit, according to a June 18 story on NASASpaceFlight.com. Unlike optical reconnaissance satellites such as the
SAR-Lupe, radar-imaging satellites like SARah-1 can image Earth in any weather, using a technique called synthetic aperture radar (SAR), according to NASASpaceFlight.com.
When a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket finally launched the satellite into orbit June 18, it was the end of an odyssey that had begun more than three weeks earlier in Germany.
“All in all, this was one of the most impactful and unifying team efforts that we’ve been a part of in the NGB operations directorate — working with the states for such an important outcome,” Rorvik said in the news release, “and it really demonstrates the ingenuity and teamwork involved by our dedicated Soldiers and Airmen to accomplish the mission.”
IMAGE CREDIT: AIRBUS