Face of Defense: A Guardian With Serious Ground Game

When people think Space Force, they think, well ... space. Rocket launches. Satellites. Earth's exosphere.

For Space Force Capt. Daniel Reynolds, it's meant scaling mountains, navigating through forests and urban reconnaissance, too.

The elite course is considered one of the Army's toughest, often compared to Ranger School for its rigors and the prestige that comes with earning its tab.

It's also, according to Reynolds, a valuable grounding for any service member looking to build their character and military skills - even ones with their eyes fixed on the skies.

What made you want to enroll in the Army's Sapper Leader Course?

I'm a test director during one of the final phases of the military acquisitions process: operational test, which seeks to determine whether a system performs as intended under the conditions in which it will be implemented operationally.

Operational test requires a special relationship between those who develop the system and those who implement it. The end-user of the systems that we test are the warfighters: the men and women on the ground and in the operations rooms implementing the system to accomplish the mission.

I knew that connecting with this community of experts would afford me the opportunity to better integrate the Space Force and combat engineering communities; this was ultimately what drove me to the Sapper Leader Course.

Was there anyone that questioned whether the program would be useful for you as guardian? Did you question the usefulness of the program as a guardian?

Fundamentally, the Sapper Leader Course teaches leadership, grit and resilience. Its focus is on "engagement area development," or shaping the battlefield to dominate the enemy. These descriptions run right in line with what guardians do daily.

It teaches leadership in a powerful environment unlike any other; you learn so much about yourself as a leader and as a human being when you're pushed beyond what you thought were your physical and mental limits. Success at the Sapper Leader Course requires individuals to recognize their strengths and weaknesses and to dedicate these to the success of the team.

Talk about your path to becoming a guardian. When and why did you join the Space Force, and what was your military/professional/educational experience leading up to your Space Force enlistment?

I graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 2017 with a Bachelor of Science in astronautical engineering. At graduation, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Air Force.

For my first assignment, I was extremely fortunate to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I pursued my Master of Science degree in aeronautics and astronautics. While earning my master's, I served as a research fellow at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, where I worked on testing candidate flight control strategies for NASA's next-generation lunar space station, the Gateway.

Working with brilliant engineers who had worked on the Apollo lunar lander, the Space Shuttle and the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle was deeply inspiring. We started with ideas on a whiteboard and, two years later, celebrated the conclusion of a full-spectrum developmental test. I graduated from MIT inspired by the possibilities that exist for advanced operations in the space domain.

When the Space Force was founded a few months after my graduation from MIT, my experiences there were at the forefront of my mind. Having the opportunity to be a part of an incredible team working together to solve some of our nation's most complex problems spoke to my passion to serve. This is what ultimately led me to transfer from the Air Force to the Space Force in the spring of 2021.

How do you explain Space Force to people who may not understand the newest branch or question its relevance?

The modern way of life is entirely dependent on space. Every day, on countless occasions, billions of people are either directly interacting with or benefiting from a space asset. GPS, weather forecasts, fuel pumps, contactless credit cards, ATMs, satellite phone services, broadband internet services and countless more daily parts of our lives rely on information transmitted through the space domain via satellite.

The success of our military operations also relies on the intricacies of space-based communication, navigation and timing. The necessity we, as a modern society, have for space-based assets makes it an imperative to protect and defend. This has been recognized by our competitors, who are also operating in the domain. The Space Force was created to protect this increasingly contested, congested and competitive domain by being prepared to defend our assets in space.

In 2021, you also became the first guardian to graduate from the Army's Air Assault School. How is what you learned there relevant to your work now?

The best engineers in the world can be drawn from those who understand how to use the system operationally. Attending Air Assault School was a rare opportunity for a tester to study the intricacies of how a warfighter implements a military system.

The second phase of Air Assault School (preparing various payloads for transport by helicopter) was one of the most intense exercises in attention to detail that I've ever taken part in. Having a three-minute window to completely inspect a Humvee, for example, requires an intricate understanding of the system.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

Music is a big part of my life. I'm very grateful to my parents for putting me in piano classes when I was young, despite me not appreciating the lessons as much at the time. As I have gotten older and dealt with life, I've realized how important music is for my own well-being, self-expression and mental health.

I love composing and producing electronic, ambient and classical music using the piano and a digital audio workstation. One of the first things I want to do after a meaningful experience is to sit down and express it via sound, melody and chord.

I even get to share my love of music as a DJ! I am a regular at the weddings of family and friends and reflect fondly on my time DJing university parties in Boston.

Most weekends, when I'm not in my apartment making music, I can most likely be found on the trails, mountains or ski slopes in lovely Colorado.