Competing in Space

What does American space intelligence believe its adversaries can do - and is willing to say in public? Competing in Space, Second Edition, published in December 2023 by the National Space Intelligence Center with the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, is the intelligence community's official unclassified answer: the illustrated threat assessment that briefs Congress, allies, and citizens on the counterspace arsenals of China, Russia, and beyond. This volume reproduces it in full facsimile.

The second edition updates the influential 2018 original across five years in which the threat matured from forecast to inventory: Chinese direct-ascent interceptors and on-orbit grapplers, Russian co-orbital systems and the ground-based lasers of Kalina and Peresvet, proliferating jamming and spoofing of navigation and communications, cyber operations against ground segments, and the November 2021 destructive test that seeded low orbit with trackable debris. The document's signature is accessibility: graphics that explain orbital regimes, threat categories sorted reversible to irreversible, and prose written for the policymaker rather than the specialist - intelligence tradecraft translated into civic literacy.

Its very publication is strategy. Declassifying threat detail deters by exposure, arms allies with shareable evidence, and builds the public mandate for space defense budgets; this is the document that does that work, and its second edition's sharpened language about China as the pacing challenge measures how far official candor traveled in five years.

The official source document is reproduced in full facsimile, with separate editorial apparatus of the public document, produced under 17 U.S.C. §105. For staffers, journalists, educators, allied analysts, and readers of the doctrine volumes in this series who want the threat picture those doctrines answer, Competing in Space is the intelligence community's own primer - vivid, official, and finally durable in print.

As an artifact, Competing in Space also documents the intelligence community's evolving theory of disclosure. The 2018 first edition tested whether declassified threat assessment could shape the public debate; the second edition, published amid active congressional fights over space funding and on the heels of headline-grabbing Russian and Chinese tests, deployed candor as policy with full deliberation. Comparing the editions measures both the threat's growth and the government's willingness to discuss it -- a double trajectory this printed edition fixes at its 2023 waypoint. It remains the single best document to hand anyone who asks why a Space Force exists: twenty-eight illustrated pages from the analysts whose job is to know.

About this series: Nimble Ultra's American Spacepower Documents collection puts the primary sources of the space age's second great competition into durable, uniform print -- doctrine, strategy, intelligence, oversight, and exploration architecture, each volume an exact and complete facsimile of the official public release, with full bibliographic identification for citation. Government URLs break, documents are revised without notice, and libraries deserve stable copies; these editions fix the record as issued. Collect the doctrine shelf alongside the analytical flagship of the series, the RKHS-extended edition of Space Force Vector 2025.

This 38-page Nimble Ultra paperback identifies National Space Intelligence Center as the originating body and preserves Competing in Space: Second Edition as a durable print reference. The edition is intended for policy research, technical study, teaching, professional consultation, and library collections.