COLORADO SPRINGS — One of the national security space sector’s longest acronyms just got a lot shorter.
Gen. John Hyten, leader of U.S. Strategic Command, announced Tuesday that the Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center, or JICSpOC, will now be called the National Space Defense Center (NSDC).
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington, Hyten said that the mission of the center will not change, but that the new name is a better reflection of the organization’s goals.
“In coordination with our partners and to eliminate confusion, we have decided to rename the JICSpOC to better describe its actual purpose,” he said in written testimony.
The change became official April 1.
The newly minted NSDC, located at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado, is focused on bringing together the Defense Department, intelligence community and commercial sector to address threats in space, and unify plans and efforts in orbit.
NSDC should not to be confused with the Joint Space Operations Center, or JSpOC, the Defense Department’s space operations command and control center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The fact that the names of the two organizations were so similar — JSpOC and JICSpOC — was often a source of confusion.
