3 Accelerators for Space Domain Awareness

Realize strategic as well as tactical benefits

These AI-powered capabilities will go beyond modernizing space traffic management to delivering advantages across missions. A few examples:

  • National security analysts will have the capabilities for rapid battlespace characterization—for example, knowing whether an object approaching a satellite is a rival’s space asset with hostile intent or merely space junk. Critical for military command and control, they’ll be able to deliver intelligence to warfighters so they can act faster than the adversary.
  • Space exploration specialists will be able to create more accurate launch projections, in addition to leveraging rapid analysis to optimize paths for space traffic going to and from the moon—a new category of orbit.
  • Environmental analysts will be able to analyze space weather patterns and effects so they can model and forecast changes in everything from precipitation and runoff to potentially catastrophic events, giving earlier warnings to space operators and protecting national assets.

Speed transformation with true open architectures

Today Booz Allen is putting the technologies to accelerate all these advances into practice, transforming space missions that range from national security to space exploration. We apply decades of mission knowledge to innovation featuring open architectures, flexible data frameworks, integrated data “fabrics,” and rigorous DevSecOps. Here are some highlights:

  • Using commercial software that integrates seamlessly across platforms, we connect open, cloud-native data platforms. This allows plug-and-play integration from any vendor. For example, for one client we were able to source and sample best-in-breed, commercially available propagation algorithms resulting in rapid modernization at less cost.
  • Helping the Air Force design and develop Platform One, the federal government’s first DevSecOps enterprise-level service, allows us to leverage ready-made capabilities—delivering the power of big data with the flexibility of microservices and small components for rapid, secure upgrades.
  • Our partnerships with leaders like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google allow us to bring clients seamless access to the newest technologies. And working with both commercial and government data gives us experience rapidly integrating data across disparate platforms—for example, calibrating sensors displaying different signature characteristics.  
  • Our data-centric communications infrastructure enables data sharing with “bring your own network” flexibility, secured with a zero-trust framework providing granular protection at the data level.
  • Intelligence clients are using our solution that moves commercial and other unclassified data into classified environments, as well as our cross-domain solutions framework allowing classified data to move to unclassified.

The open architectures that enable these flexible advances will not only further space domain awareness but also empower initiatives from developing tomorrow’s intelligence space systems to equipping satellites for AI processing at the edge. It’s all possible by using the power of data—across modular, interoperable frameworks that put the mission in control.

As a trusted space partner to the U.S. government, Booz Allen helps clients modernize capabilities for today’s greatest space challenges: 

  • Weaponization of space: The U.S. must stay ahead of adversaries threatening space systems critical to our nation’s security, commerce, and way of life.
  • Addressing climate change: Space-based earth observation is essential to research.
  • Congestion: Tracking and protecting space assets is critical as satellite constellations grow exponentially.

References

1.     Garcia, M. (2021, May 27). Space Debris and Human Spacecraft. NASA.gov. Retrieved November 30, 2022, from https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.html

2.     Borowitz, Mariel, Brian C Gunter, Megan Birch, and Richard J Macke. “An Investigation into Potential Collision Maneuver Guidelines for Future Space Traffic Management,” 2021. https://amostech.com/TechnicalPapers/2021/Conjunction-RPO/Borowitz.pdf.

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