The government could spend those funds on a host of areas under the new Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense, or SHIELD, contracting vehicle, according to presentation slides reviewed by Breaking Defense.
The goal of the collaborative effort was to show that commercial data can help close the time lag between when a satellite is released into orbit from a rocket to when the Space Force can reliably track it and put the trajectory coordinates into the military's catalog of space objects, said Kayhan CEO Siamak Hesar..
Balancing security and access to data are critical to providing users with trustworthy, reliable data for real-time decisions.
Anduril's Lattice software "will replace legacy communications systems with a resilient mesh network" to link sensors, rapidly share data with users, and ease integration of new software systems and users, the company said.
Hiding in the sun, launching mini satellites and radar absorbent materials are just some of the tricks nations are using to hide their military satellites in orbit.
"[P]roduct development has been slower than anticipated, and the projected date to decommission SPADOC continues to extend further to late FY24, a delay of more than two years from the original timeline," according to the 2023 Annual Report of the Pentagon's Director of Operational Test & Evaluation.
SpaceX alone was responsible for 98 of the 109 launch attempts made by the US in 2023, and 1,937 of the 2,234 US satellites successfully orbited.
Partnerships with outside industry are a cornerstone of the kingdom’s ambitious growth strategy.
The company said that on Thanksgiving, for instance, a Russian satellite's sub-satellite — in a Matryoshka-style — released yet another satellite, in what a LeoLabs analysis said could've been timed for fewer American eyes on the sky.
While the new Russian satellite didn't get super close to any others, its behavior "could be considered unfriendly," said Slingshot's Audrey Schaffer, who until recently served as the director of space policy at the National Security Council.
"Commercial data, commercial processing is not classified. It does not matter that the DoD wishes it were," said Barbara Golf, special advisor to Space Systems Command.
The COMSPOC study included a look at risks from unannounced rendezvous and proximity operations — such as those being routinely performed by the Russian "inspector" satellite Luch/Olymp that have raised hackles at the Defense Department — and the risks to US military satellites cause by mis-plotting the trajectories of adversary birds.
As threats evolve, the winning model ties digital engineering to manufacturing capacity and a reindustrialized supply chain.
There is growing concern about what happens when different countries' predictions of an on-orbit collision do not match, said Matt Hejduk, of The Aerospace Corporation. "A man with two watches never knows what time it is," he quipped.
That pilot project will use SPACECOM's Unified Data Library (UDL) as a data base, DalBello said, because Commerce is still in the early stages of creating its own cloud-based data storage capability, called the Open Architecture Data Repository (OADR).
Speaking with Breaking Defense and Defense One on Tuesday, SPACECOM head Gen. Jim Dickinson noted the importance of space "governance," including "norms of responsible behavior," and the "need to better preserve" the space environment.
The Commerce Department doesn't simply want to replicate what DoD does now in providing space situational awareness data to industry, but go beyond to provide "a technologically superior product," said Richard DalBello, head of DoC's Commercial Space Office.