Space Force to prototype new software to fuse commercial, military space tracking data

MAUI ― The Space Force is planning to develop new prototype software designed to automate the integration of commercial and military space tracking data to provide more timely and more accurate information.

Col. Barry Croker, who heads up the service’s Mission Delta 2, said Thursday that the plan is to launch the prototype “software environment” later this fall and to build a “minimum viable product” that can be up and running quickly.

Mission Delta 2 is responsible for organizing, training and equipping Guardians to undertake space domain awareness operations. It includes the 18th and 19th Space Defense Squadrons that operate the Space Surveillance Network of telescopes and radars around the globe and the software systems required to analyze the data they gather about space objects, in particular those operated by potential adversaries.

“Our number one priority right now is: How do we improve support to space control operations?” Croker told Breaking Defense in an interview on the margins of the annual AMOS (Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance) here.

To do that, Croker said, he said, having “a bias towards timeliness” rather than seeking the highest accuracy levels as current software and processes for analyzing data from military software does. For instance, the prototype could include lower fidelity, but faster observations and analysis now provided by commercial firms monitoring the heavens.

“I now have the opportunity to get a more timely state of something, even if it’s not perfect,” he said, for example, a new debris cloud or a “whole bunch of satellites” newly launched.

“Now I can start to have a more timely indication of what’s going on. So that’s the big, that’s the number one focus,” Crocker said.

At the moment, the Space Force acquires commercial space tracking information via the Joint Commercial Operations cell, and houses that information in the cloud-based Unified Data Library. But that data is not fused directly into operational space domain awareness computer systems, instead running on a “parallel” system, according to Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of SPACECOM.

He told reports here on Wednesday that current space domain awareness capabilities are not yet up to snuff to ensure precise targeting of adversary satellites and that being able to automatically integrate commercial space tracking data would go a long way to filling those gaps.

“We could take the largest step forward if we could just better integrate the [commercial] data and consistently fund the the acquisition of that data, and then be able to drive it into our programs of record for space domain awareness. That would be the biggest initial step we could take, and we could take that in the short term,” Whiting said.

While data fusion is the goal, Croker explained the reason for setting up a separate software environment is to ensure that tracking based on military sensors doesn’t get watered down by integrating commercial data that may not have the same high accuracy.

So the idea is to start “with having the right environments that I can do that type of work and not perturbate the high accuracy collision avoidance type missions,” he said.