By Jeff Hunter ’96

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Since it wasn’t around when he was in college, joining the U.S. Space Force wasn’t a dream of Major Jake Singleton’s while he was attending Utah State University. But thanks in a large part to a dream, the Kaysville native is now doing exactly what he wants to be doing.

Now a member of the country’s newest branch of the military, Singleton was part of the Get Away Special Team’s Cube Satellite Ultraviolet-Curable Boom and Control System experiment as a junior at USU in 2012. The group of students was involved with an undergraduate research project that involved designing and building a small cube satellite, or CubeSat.

As part of that task, the team tried to come up with an inexpensive means of deploying a boom off the satellite to help orient the CubeSat’s camera in the proper direction to take photographs of the Earth.

“I actually had a dream at night, and in the dream, I had the idea of inflating something like a balloon to push it out,” Singleton recalls. “And I came back and told the rest of the GAS team, ‘Hey, what if we inflated a balloon to push out a meter-long dish or panel off of the satellite?’ And everyone was like, ‘That’s crazy. That’s a dumb idea.’

“And I was like, ‘Yeah. You’re right.’ Because I didn’t know anything. I was just a dumb undergraduate who was just learning.”

But the “crazy idea” from his dream lingered, leading Singleton to eventually discover some non-classified research at the National Reconnaissance Office in Washington, D.C., that revealed some previous exploration into the use of inflatable structures to deploy large radar dishes in space.

“That’s when I realized, I’m not crazy. I’m not silly,” Singleton says. “Actually, some of our smartest researchers were thinking about it. But there were some reasons why it didn’t work, mostly that it was too experimental to use on a large, expensive satellite. But a lot of those reasons were irrelevant because we could do it as a low-cost experiment on a CubeSat.”

The GAS team ended up successfully using Singleton’s inflatable boom idea on that 2012 experiment, leading Utah State’s AFROTC detachment to nominate him for the U.S. Air Force’s Cadet Research Award. Singleton received that honor, given annually to just one cadet in the entire country, in November 2013.

“That was the only time that ever happened to any of the cadets in the three years I was commander there, so it was definitely a pinnacle achievement,” says former Utah State AFROTC Commander Al Dubovik, who retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2016 after 30 years in the Air Force.

“I think Jake kind of serves as an example of what you can achieve out of the Air Force ROTC and commissioning program. … It’s really the individual that makes the difference, and I think Jake’s performance back then, and today, are a real testament to the Air Force ROTC, and the Utah State University ROTC program.”

Singleton, who served in the USAF for seven years before transferring over to the Space Force in February 2021, points out the Cadet Research Award came with an additional perk.

“I was also given a ribbon for my uniform,” Singleton says with a smile. “A lot of the ribbons we wear in ROTC are just for ROTC, and once you’re commissioned and go on active duty, they all go away. But even though I was a cadet, that one was an active-duty award, so I already had an Air Force-level recognition, which was pretty unusual and really cool.”

From Mr. USU to Guardian

While he now wears a U.S. Space Force uniform adorned with a gold oak leaf, Singleton’s first major award came in September 2013 when he was crowned Mr. USU during Homecoming activities early in his senior year.

Singleton, who represented the College of Engineering, told The Utah Statesman prior to the contest: “The show is superhero-themed, and the motto of the engineering department is creating tomorrow today. That’s going to be my main superpower.”

It turned out Singleton’s “superpower” ended up being a knowledge of physics, as well as the capacity to lay on a bed of nails while a friend used a sledgehammer to bust up a cinderblock placed on a board sitting on his torso.

“If you lie on one nail, it’s going to impale you,” Singleton notes. “But if you lie on 1,000 nails, it’s not comfortable, but the pressure of your weight is distributed across the surface area of all those nails. So, it doesn’t impale you. … We had been thinking about what I could do, like sing a song or dance, like most of the other contestants. But I’m not that good of a singer, and I was representing the engineering department. So, I decided to use a bit of an engineering trick.

“I built the bed myself; put all the nails in a piece of wood,” Singleton adds. “It would have been better if they were all perfectly even, but I got the cheapest nails I could at Home Depot. So, they were kind of uneven, which made it a little bit more uncomfortable laying on it. But it was a lot of fun.”

Unlike the other contestants in the Mr. USU contest that year, Singleton was not single. And he and his wife, Mandy, had already welcomed the first of their four children eight months earlier.

“It was a little bit out of my comfort zone,” Singleton admits. “Most of the other people in the competition were in fraternities and more socially involved, while I was spending all of my time at home, or in classrooms and the library. So, when they did the formal wear competition and everyone was in tuxes, I dressed up like a nerd. Because I was Mr. Engineering and representing the engineering department.”

That, in itself, was highly unlikely at one point. Coming out Davis High School, Singleton says he had no family ties to Utah State and no close relatives who had served in the military or had a background in engineering. In fact, Singleton says, when talking to USU recruiters at a career fair, they suggested engineering might be a good fit for him because he had always done well in math and science.

“And I said, ‘Well, I really don’t have any interest in driving trains,” Singleton says with a chuckle.

But he always had an interest in space, and he soon made the connection between engineering and space, as well as viewing the military as a career option. That led to Singleton getting involved in the ROTC his senior year of high school, as well as at Utah State after serving a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in western Australia.

Singleton graduated from USU with a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering in 2014, then spent seven years in the Air Force. He completed a master’s degree in astronautical engineering through the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology in 2016 while serving as an acquisition officer, and in early 2019 was assigned to MacDill Air Force Base in Florida as a member of the U.S. Special Operations Command’s Ghost program. During that time, he was involved with the development of the AC-130J Ghostrider gunship.

“In the Ghost program, they take acquisitions, embed them, and then send them downrange to solve technical problems,” Singleton explains. “So, I went to Africa first, but then was deployed with the SOCOM group in Afghanistan, where they were solving real problems in a wartime environment. And that kind of just reignited that fire, and the desire to keep pushing those kinds of things.”

“… I had a chance to work with our most elite warriors doing their job out there,” Singleton adds. “It was a totally different environment for an engineering acquisition guy. But it was really rewarding because those people were doing really important things.”

Later in 2019, Singleton relocated to the United Kingdom where he spent two years as an exchange officer conducting research at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl). That assignment placed Singleton and his family overseas during the pandemic, which led to his fourth child being born in England and the young captain being trained to administer the COVID-19 vaccine.

It also meant that when Singleton decided it was time to move from the U.S. Air Force to the Space Force in February 2021, the commissioning ceremony was conducted by the defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy in London. Upon his return from the U.K. that summer, Singleton was assigned to the Deep-Space Advanced Radar Capability program at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“That program is an international security cooperation that is fielding deep space radar sites around the world to track satellites out in the geostationary orbit (GEO) regime,” says Singleton, who is one of the first Aggies to serve as a guardian in the U.S. Space Force, which was founded in December 2019.

“It’s pretty exciting; a very important project for the U.S., our allies and the Space Force as a whole,” Singleton continues. “Effectively, we can’t do anything out in GEO without good space-domain awareness there. And so, we’re building radar sites that we’ll be able to track and have that full-space domain awareness picture out in GEO. Right now, we don’t have anything that can provide that radar capability out there.”

A Thought Leader

In 2013, Dubovik was assigned as the commander of the AFROTC detachment at Utah State University. By that time, Singleton was firmly established as a cadet in the ROTC, and Dubovik says it wasn’t hard to picture him as a commissioned officer.

“I remember when I first met Jake that he was mature and super professional,” Dubovik recalls. “If he hadn’t been in a cadet uniform, I probably would have mistaken him for second lieutenant — or even a first lieutenant — on the staff. He had a confidence about him because he was very well-spoken. But at the same time, he carried that humble professionalism that we try and teach new officers to embrace.

“He was definitely an impressive cadet and individual. And it was very apparent that the other cadets held him in high regard and respected him.”

Dubovik, who now works at the Space Dynamics Laboratory and serves as the Ogden-Wasatch Front Site Lead at Hill Air Force Base facility, has had a chance to interact with Singleton a few times in recent years through his role at the SDL. He says he’s not surprised at all that Singleton, who was promoted to major in April 2023, has found success as a Guardian.

“Jake’s on a trajectory to do great things,” Dubovik declares. “I think he’s pretty well known, at least across the Space Force, as a thought leader. And it’s really satisfying to see that.”

Three years ago, Singleton had the opportunity to return to Utah State and visit with the GAS team that helped bring his inflatable boom idea — now known as the AeroBoom — to fruition as part of the Get Away Special Passive Attitude Control Satellite (GASPACS) project. The completed CubeSat was sent up to the International Space Station in December 2021, which let Singleton reconnect with 10 members of the GAS team for the launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He then hosted the group of undergraduate students for a tour of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

“It was a long time in the making, but it was really cool,” Singleton says of the launch of the GASPACS, which spent 117 days in space before successfully completing its mission on May 23, 2022.

While at USU, Singleton also took on a senior engineering design project that was sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory. The project called for the creation of a mobile heavy-lift system that could move something as weighty as a fire truck and be used by Air Force pararescue teams to rescue and treat downed personnel.

As one of the team leads, Singleton traveled to Arnold Air Force Base in Tennessee and successfully deployed the lift kit on a bulldozer placed in a ditch.

“Climbing out of that hole, I had these two Air Force pararescue guys shake my hand,” Singleton remembers. “One of them thanked me for my leadership, and one of them called me his brother. I was blown away there as they talked about the challenges and the frustrations they had with the technology, and the kits they had that weren’t good enough and didn’t work. And we had developed and built something right.

“That was the most rewarding experience I’ve ever had as an engineer, and I was a student in senior design at Utah State, weeks away from commissioning at that point. I thought, ‘This is what I’m going to be doing for the Air Force. Wow.’ I was so excited.”

Singleton’s story later came full circle when, as a first lieutenant, he was assigned to the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque and was able to see the system he’d helped design undergo further development. He then had a similar experience while deployed in Afghanistan, where he saw some of the other projects he helped develop solving urgent problems in combat conditions.  

“And it all started as a senior student at Utah State,” Singleton acknowledges.