This is Part 2 of our interview with Col. Raj Agrawal, the former commander of the Space Force's Space Mission Delta 2.

If it seems like there's a satellite launch almost every day, the numbers will back you up.

The US Space Force's Mission Delta 2 is a unit that reports to Space Operations Command, with the job of sorting out the nearly 50,000 trackable objects humans have launched into orbit.

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Russia is a waning space power, but President Vladimir Putin has made sure he still has a saber to rattle in orbit.

This has become more evident in recent weeks, when we saw a pair of rocket launches carrying top-secret military payloads, the release of a mysterious object from a Russian mothership in orbit, and a sequence of complex formation-flying maneuvers with a trio of satellites nearly 400 miles up.

In isolation, each of these things would catch the attention of Western analysts. Taken together, the frenzy of maneuvers represents one of the most significant surges in Russian military space activity since the end of the Cold War. What's more, all of this is happening as Russia lags further behind the United States and China in everything from rockets to satellite manufacturing. Russian efforts to develop a reusable rocket, field a new human-rated spacecraft to replace the venerable Soyuz, and launch a megaconstellation akin to SpaceX's Starlink are going nowhere fast.

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The US Space Force announced Friday it selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin for $13.7 billion in contracts to deliver the Pentagon's most critical military to orbit into the early 2030s.

These missions will launch the government's heaviest national security satellites, like the National Reconnaissance Office's large bus-sized spy platforms, and deploy them into bespoke orbits. These types of launches often demand heavy-lift rockets with long-duration upper stages that can cruise through space for six or more hours.

The contracts awarded Friday are part of the next phase of the military's space launch program once dominated by United Launch Alliance, the 50-50 joint venture between legacy defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

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