There are only about 10,000 Guardians in the United States Space Force. That’s the entire service. You could fit them all inside a mid-sized college campus. And yet the domain they operate in underpins every GPS navigation route, every satellite weather forecast, every financial transaction, every phone call made today. The Space Force is simultaneously one of the most consequential organizations in the world and one of the least visible.
Jennifer Saltzman has spent more than 30 years on the inside of that story, long before it was a Space Force story at all. As the spouse of Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations, she has traveled to bases and installations across the country, sat with families in places where a small pocket of Guardians is embedded in a much larger military community, and watched a new service build itself from the ground up in real time. She joined SFA Founder Bill Woolf, an old friend, on the Spacepower Podcast to talk about what that journey has actually looked like, and why the community holding the Space Force together matters just as much as the capabilities it produces.
Building Something New
Jennifer Saltzman has been watching the Space Force find itself since day one, and she hasn’t hidden her enthusiasm about it. “I feel more privileged to be a Space Force family,” she said, “because it just seemed, it’s just such an honor to be in a startup. Every day is filled with firsts.”
That startup feeling has been literal in ways most people don’t appreciate. She recalled moments early in the service’s history when Guardian uniforms were still being tested in small batches, when seeing two or three people in the new gear at the same event was worth stopping to photograph. “If there were two or three in a room,” she said, “I’m like, get together. Let me take a picture. Look, there’s, you know, to make it look like there’s more of them.” She laughed telling it. The memory is funny now because the context has changed so much.
It continued to change, visibly, recently. She described attending a Basic Military Training graduation where the class was dressed in full Guardian service dress for the first time. “This last time, just within the last month, they’re in service dress, a guardian service dress,” she said. “Soon there won’t be those kids and graduates and they won’t know that that was a hurdle.” That’s the point. The firsts keep becoming the baseline.
Small, Mighty, and Easy to Miss
The visibility challenge for the Space Force is structural in a way that other military services don’t face. You can see a jet. You can see a ship. You can see a tank rolling through a base. You cannot see a satellite. And with only 10,000 Guardians spread across the country and the world, most Americans have never encountered one.
Jennifer doesn’t treat that as a problem to be managed, she treats it as a call to action. “Talk about space,” she said simply. “Figure out how it does. If you don’t know that it affects you every day, learn that it does, and then teach other people too.” She pointed to SFA chapters and volunteers as essential to that effort, people who are filling the gap that the service’s small size creates. Because if Guardians can’t be everywhere, the story about what they do has to travel further than they can.
That story, she argues, is more urgent than ever. The domain isn’t shrinking. The number of launches, the commercial growth, the strategic competition in space all point in one direction. “It’s not a sector that’s gonna get smaller,” she said. “The amount of growth, the exponential growth, is like no other. And there’s no sign of it slowing down at all.”
The Community Guardians Are Building for Each Other
One of the more honest stretches of this conversation was Jennifer’s discussion of what life actually looks like for Guardian families, particularly the challenge of being “deployed in place.” Unlike service members who deploy and return, many Guardians conduct complex, high-stakes missions from installations close to home. The operational intensity doesn’t diminish because you drive home afterward.
“It’s very hard to switch,” she said. “You know, I’ve just been doing this very complex thing, and now I just have to go mow the grass and act like everything’s great, or I’ve gotta help with homework and kind of refocus.” The tension is real, and Jennifer was candid that the Space Force is still working through how to support families navigating it. Naming it matters.
What has emerged, in part as a response to that challenge, is a pattern of Space Force spouses identifying problems and building solutions before anyone tells them to. Jennifer highlighted two examples from the Front Range that she clearly admires. At Buckley Space Force Base, the Buckley Spouses Alliance recognized food insecurity among families and built a food pantry from nothing, logging over 5,500 volunteer hours and distributing more than 38,000 pounds of food in a 24-month period, serving nearly 2,500 visitors and supporting close to 8,500 family members. At Peterson Space Force Base, a separate group saw what Buckley had done and built their own version, the Peak Food Pantry, which opened in September 2025 and distributed nearly 23,000 pounds of food in its first months of operation.
“When they see a problem, they just fix it,” Jennifer said. “I think that’s very similar, that’s just like Guardians do.”
Why This Conversation Matters
The Spacepower Podcast typically focuses on the doctrine, the systems, and the operators. This episode is something different. It’s a conversation about the infrastructure of people that makes all of it possible, the spouses building food pantries, the families navigating deployments that don’t look like deployments, the community that forms when 10,000 people spread across the globe decide to hold each other together.
Jennifer Saltzman has had a front-row seat to the Space Force’s entire existence. She’s seen the uniforms evolve, the questions shift from “is that still a thing?” to something more like recognition, the graduating classes that will grow up never having served in another branch. She’s still the one handing out space-themed chocolate at every event, because “who doesn’t want some chocolate in the day,” and because sometimes the simplest gesture is the one that lands. A young Guardian told her recently that he still had the piece of chocolate she gave him two years ago. She gave him another one.
Hear the full conversation on the Spacepower Podcast. It’s worth the listen.
Jennifer Saltzman is the spouse of Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations, United States Space Force. She is an active advocate for Guardian families, military spouse programs, and public awareness of the Space Force mission.
Learn more about the U.S. Space Force: https://www.spaceforce.mil/ Join SFA: https://linktr.ee/ussfa Subscribe for more conversations on spacepower, national security, and the future of the space domain.
