The Lockheed Martin built Space Fence location in the Marshall Islands. (Lockheed Martin)
SPACE SYMPOSIUM: While Space Force is making some progress at updating the US military’s faltering computer systems for monitoring the heavens, at least two key sensor systems — the Space Fence radar and the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) satellites — are still reliant on the old tech.
The fact that two of the most modern and sophisticated sensors in Space Command’s space domain awareness (SDA) tool kit must rely on the creaky CAVENet computer system, developed in the 2000s, for data analysis and sharing is a testament to just how painfully slow and difficult that long-standing effort has been.
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The Department of Defense for two decades has been struggling to replace, and improve upon, that increasingly dysfunctional hardware and software needed to provide SDA capability — an effort that has seen stopgap after workaround over the years (think duct tape and glue) but as yet no final solution. So even as new and improved technologies come online, operators are forced to depend on that old data processing IT.
One of those newer technologies, the Space Fence ground-based radar came online in 2020, and can see very small objects down to the size of a cherry in Low Earth Orbit (although the lone radar facility currently in use cannot continuously track objects that small). Built by Lockheed Martin to the tune of $1.5 billion, it is routinely tracking some 26,000 satellites and pieces of space debris.
That capability to keep tabs on a large number of objects, however, has meant that it has been tricky for Space Command to integrate the vast amount of data it provides into its ancient processing systems.
Space Fence can’t directly link with the 1980’s-era Space Defense Operations Center (SPADOC) computer system and software that is used to both task SSN sensors and populate the publicly available Space-Track.org catalog of space objects.
Instead, its data is being fed into CAVENet, an offline computer system for classified analysis that dates to the early 2000s. On CAVENet, analysts can run software, called the Astrodynamics Support Workstation (ASW), that allows higher accuracy collision analysis and threat assessments for national security users.
“CAVENet was originally intended as an analyst platform for people to analyze/manipulate data in ways that the official system (SPADOC) could not. It’s just a local network for UNIX computers running a bunch of mostly custom-built software,” said Secure World Foundation’s Brian Weeden, who has followed the SDA issue in depth for a decade.
“But over time CAVENet started taking on operational missions because SPADOC couldn’t do it,” including running ASW and tasking of the SSN sensors, he added. “It was easier to add new capabilities to CAVENet than it was to upgrade or replace SPADOC.”
With new hardware and software developed under the Space C2 program becoming available — mainly, Palantir’s Warp Core software and L3Harris’s ATLAS hardware and software to replace SPADOC — Space Command will be able to integrate Space Fence data to create a common space environment picture for satellite operators.
But they still need CAVENet to do it — which already in the mid-2000s was suffering from a problem of finding space parts because of their obsolescence [PDF] — at least for the foreseeable future.
“The 18th Space Control Squadron (SPCS) has the capability to integrate data from Space Fence through the Non-Traditional Data Pre-Processor (NDPP). ATLAS and Warp Core can both consume Space Fence data. The NDPP deposits Space Fence data into CAVENet, and Warp Core can pull it from CAVENet and send to ATLAS,” one SSC official explained.
It is a similar story for GSSAP. The Space Force in 2022 lofted two more GSSAP satellites, built by Northrop Grumman, bringing the constellation of “neighborhood watch” satellites to six. GSSAP capabilities are classified, but they are able to maneuver to get up close and personal with other satellites of interest to monitor activities — and have done so vis-a-vis Chinese and Russian birds on several occasion.
GSSAP data is delivered to the 18th Space Control Squadron through the Red LAN “tactical data distribution node for space-based SDA sensors with direct connections into operations centers at multiple classification levels,” the SSC official said. Red LAN puts the data into CAVENet and Warp Core can pull it out, but in future “direct feeds” from Red LAN to Warp Core “are planned.”
Indeed, at the moment it is unclear whether Space Force actually will ever be able to ditch CAVENet entirely.
“It’s complicated and it depends on who you ask, apparently. After decommissioning of SPADOC, the goal is to continue to migrate capability to ATLAS. So theoretically CAVENet could go away,” one industry source said. “The operators say that they intend for CAVENet to remain as an analyst platform,” the source added, but the Space C2 program office is likely to “say officially that CAVENet goes away.”
Space Systems Command didn’t answer a question from Breaking Defense about what system or systems would be replacing CAVENet, and when.
