The U.S. Air Force is moving forward with plans to develop new space vehicles that can launch quickly and frequently, but spaceflight is not expected to become as routine or as pervasive as military air power in the century to come.

Space launches will likely continue to be reserved for special purposes, said Col. Henry Baird, deputy director for requirements at Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs, Colo. Their flight rate may be more similar to the service’s use of B-2 stealth bombers than its use of fighter jets, he said.

The Air Force began a program this year called the Operationally Responsive Spacelift initiative. The goal of that program is to pave the way for reusable rockets that could be launched at a low cost on short notice. But while military space vehicles are unlikely to replace combat aircraft in the next century they could be the driver of substantial new technology.

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Brig. Gen. Simon (Pete) Worden, who leads the Operationally Responsive Spacelift initiative, noted that the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., led directly to unprecedented advancements in weapon systems.

“This development has continued to the present, yet we have not seen the large jump in system development that we saw back in the initial stages of flight development,” Worden said in a written response to questions earlier this year. “Space is our opportunity to mirror that transformational change.”

The Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have started a joint effort called the Force Application and Launch from CONUS (Continental United States) technology demonstration, referred to as Falcon, which is also intended to contribute to the Air Force’s effort to field quick-reaction reusable rockets.

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These efforts are intended to lead to improved methods of launching satellites and using vehicles that can travel in space to attack targets on the ground. A draft Falcon solicitation document issued June 17 said the ability to launch from the United States to strike targets within two hours “would free the U.S. military from reliance on forward basing to enable it to react promptly and decisively to … threatening actions by hostile countries and terrorist organizations.”

While the Pentagon has missiles today that can launch from the United States to strike targets around the world in less than an hour, the new systems are envisioned as vehicles that could verify their targets from space before striking, conduct other reconnaissance, and abort missions if necessary, according to experts.

The future of military spaceflight could also involve new missions such as placing military personnel in orbit, Baird said. Military officers have flown to space to take part in NASA missions, but the Air Force has yet to conduct its own manned spaceflight operations. The first program designed to place military personnel in space — the Manned Orbiting Laboratory — was canceled in the 1960s.

While satellite builders have made enormous advancements in spacecraft technology over the past several decades, and are likely to continue to do so, even the most sophisticated on-board sensors and computers cannot replicate some of the abilities of the human brain, Baird said. Baird said that he has had conversations with astronauts who have said they could make observations of the Earth that could not be gleaned from data collected by satellite computers.

The Air Force may want to keep officers in space for long periods in a space station to make continuous observations of the Earth and objects in space that could threaten U.S. assets, or launch manned spacecraft for quick observations in a crisis situation, Baird said.

As the U.S. Air Force pushes forward with new space programs in the years to come, its strategic planners will need to be mindful that other countries may make great strides as well, said Deborah Westphal, a partner in the Manchester, Mass.-based consulting firm Toeffler Associates.

“I think right now we are the one and only superpower and I don’t think that will continue,” Westphal said. “I think we will move toward having another superpower out there. Whoever that is will have to share in the control of space or control it.”

War in space is not likely to resemble fighting on the ground and in the air, but it is more likely to involve targeted attacks on U.S. satellites. An early indicator, Baird said, was the Iraqi military’s unsuccessful attempts to deny U.S. forces in the recent war there access to satellite navigation signals from the Pentagon’s Global Positioning System.

The Pentagon may be able to avoid attacks on its satellites if it stays away from the development of anti-satellite weapons, said Joseph Cirincione, director of non-proliferation projects at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here. Other countries are not likely to move forward aggressively with anti-satellite weapons unless they see the United States doing so, Cirincione said.

The Air Force recently began development of systems intended to temporarily disable enemy communications and reconnaissance satellites, and has not ruled out the development of systems to destroy spacecraft used by the enemy.

However, the missile defense interceptors under development at the Pentagon could be easily reconfigured to strike satellites, and may also encourage other countries to develop capabilities to strike satellites.

“The ground-based missile defense interceptors will be a lousy missile defense system, but a great anti-satellite system,” Cirincione said, pointing to the relative ease of targeting satellites in predictable orbits versus unanticipated ballistic missile launches.

However, some defense experts believe that countries like Russia and China are already developing anti-satellite weapons, and the United States must do the same in order to protect its own assets.

“It’s tremendously naïve to suggest that if the United States does not develop these capabilities, no one else will,” said Jack Spencer, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a think tank here. “It’s the lack of developing the ability to protect our space assets that gives rise to other countries developing anti-satellite capabilities.”