Editor-in-Chief:: Dr. Ronald H. Freeman; ronaldhoracefreeman@gmail.com

Associate Editor:: Dave Welch; dave.welch@lasp.colorado.edu

Editor for European Operations:: Dr. Joachim Kehr (acting); joachimkehr@aol.com

Editor for Asian Operations:: Vacant - Applicants see Editor-in-Chief

Editor for SpaceOps News:: Dr. Joachim Kehr; joachimkehr@aol.com

Founding Editor:: J. Paul Douglas

 

About Us The absence of a dedicated peer-reviewed journal was keenly felt throughout the space operations industry for much of its history. There were efforts to fill in this gap, including a short-lived print journal in the 1960s and an effort made by the founders of the SpaceOps Organization in 1994, at a time when the Internet was experiencing explosive growth, to capture papers from their regular, biannual conferences into their Electronic Publishing System (EPS). Yet there remained the lack of a journal in which authors could publish regularly, and though papers could and were published in other journals, they most often carried a fee, and this was yet another concern expressed by readers and authors alike. It wasn’t until 2003 that practitioners gained a permanent home for their papers, which is uniquely suited to their discipline. The Space Operations and Support Technical Committee (SOSTC) garnered support and seed funding from its parent organization, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), to create an Internet-based journal, at the time called the Space Operations Communicator. Soon after, the journal received a much-needed boost from its first founding sponsor, the ASRC Aerospace Corporation, who provided funding to begin building. What was desired, however, was a journal that was global in both its reader and authorship. Later in that same year critical mass was reached when members of the SpaceOps Committee visited the annual SOSTC space operations workshop. It was at this spring meeting that the SOSTC announced its plans to host a journal, which quickly drew the attention of the SpaceOps Committee contingent in attendance who confided a similar ambition. It was shortly thereafter that the two groups resolved to jointly publish what was to become not only the world’s premier peer-reviewed technical journal for space operations but one that escaped the bonds of traditional print periodicals and came to readers online. Now readers could access timely and relevant papers whenever and where ever they happened to be and at no cost! The Communicator’s early history was marked by the inevitable growing pains of such an ambitious project, and having quickly expanded beyond the limits of the host space of its birth, it moved to its own domain and underwent a design and name change. Now titled Journal of Space Operations & Communicator, the publication boasts a feature-rich environment that combines the traditional journal with magazine-styled departments such as the Pioneers that highlights prominent figures of the past and present. And more importantly it offers a custom-built publication engine, which enforces our single-blind review process and tracks new manuscripts from submittal to final publication online.