The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) wants a report from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on the fielding timeline for the U.S. Space Force’s Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis System (ATLAS) and any alternatives to ATLAS that Space Force could pursue.
“The committee recommends a provision that would require the Secretary of the Air Force to report to the congressional defense committees a date when [ATLAS] will be operational, and if it is not operational by that date, whether it should be cancelled and how it should be replaced,” according to the SASC report on the committee’s version of the fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill.
“Since its inception in fiscal year 2020, the Kobayashi Maru Space Command and Control (Space C2) program was described as an enterprise-level software acquisition effort focusing on space situational awareness to replace the 1980s-era Space Defense Operations Center (SPADOC) software, and at the same time acquiring a suite of software applications for Battle Management Command and Control (BMC2),” the report said. “The purpose of this effort was to pivot from purely space situational awareness and space object cataloguing through the Unified Data Library to performing BMC2 with a warfighting focus. The first objective was to first replace SPADOC through the development of ATLAS.”
“Subsequent reviews of the ATLAS program found numerous deficiencies resulting in a de-scoping of the SPADOC replacement effort and an estimated delay in replacing SPADOC from mid-2021 to the end of 2023,” SASC said.
The Unified Data Library is to serve as a data source for L3Harris Technologies’ [LHX] ATLAS, which is to replace SPADOC, a space situational awareness computer system established in 1979 at the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado (Defense Daily, Aug. 5, 2022).
Space Force has said that ATLAS’ machine-to-machine interfaces will lead to a dramatic increase in the speed of processing and integrating space domain awareness data from a variety of commercial, civil, and military space sensors.
Omitron and Parsons Corp. [PSN] are subcontractors to L3Harris on ATLAS.
Begun in 2009, the Joint Space Operations Center Mission System (JMS) was a previous Air Force effort to replace SPADOC, but the Air Force canceled JMS in 2019 after it faced technical and cost challenges. JMS was to process and integrate inputs from a variety of sensors, Omitron was a subcontractor on JMS’ Increment 2–the effort to make JMS operational.
In October 2018, the Department of the Air Force awarded an initial $53 million contract to L3Harris for ATLAS.
The Government Accountability Office said in April that meshing the Unified Data Library (UDL) and ATLAS to provide space situational awareness (SSA) is a challenge for the Space Force (Defense Daily, Apr. 24).
“The Secretary of the Air Force should ensure that the Space Force creates a plan for programs to determine how to use the UDL to access and manage all data for Space Force SSA systems,” GAO said in an April study, Space Situational Awareness: DoD Should Evaluate How It Can Use Commercial Data, GAO-23-105565.
UDL is to serve as a centralized, cloud-based data repository for space domain awareness/space defense and is to contain space situational awareness from DoD, academic, commercial, and foreign sources.
In 2021, Colorado-based Bluestaq LLC received a $280 million Space Force contract to develop the UDL (Defense Daily, May 4, 2021). One organization that has been involved in UDL testing and that will use UDL is U.S. Space Command’s Joint Task Force-Space Defense at Schriever Space Force Base, Colo.
While space object tracking has been the province of DoD, a number of commercial companies are able to perform such tracking, and DoD should boost its use of such commercial tracking, GAO said in its April report.
The GAO report referenced a March 2022 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) study that said that “the primary risk to spacecraft in orbit is from uncatalogued lethal nontrackable debris (LNT), which are objects between 5 millimeters and 10 centimeters in size.”
“An estimated 600,000 to 900,000 pieces of uncatalogued LNT are in LEO [low Earth orbit],” per the DIA study, Challenges to Security in Space: Space Reliance in an Era of Competition and Expansion. “Prior to 2007, most debris came from explosions of upper stages of SLVs [space launch vehicles]. Today, nearly one-half of all cataloged debris are fragments from three major events: China’s destruction of its own defunct weather satellite in 2007, the accidental collision between a U.S. communications satellite and a dead Russian satellite in 2009, and the 2021 Russian Nudol ASAT test.”
The report on SASC’s version of the fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill said that “the development and integration of other software acquisition programs for BMC2 in order to command and control space assets based on sensor data feeds and ATLAS is still unknown at this point.”
“If ATLAS is cancelled, then the provision requires the Secretary [of the Air Force] to report on the estimated funds spent to date, what will replace it, and the expected future time and costs for such replacement,” the report said. “In addition, the Secretary shall enter into a contract with a Federally Funded Research and Development Center to conduct periodic reviews of the software acquisition effort for the Space Command and Control system as a whole, including the integration of not only ATLAS or a subsequent replacement, but the integration of sensor data, information in the Unified Data Library, and the ability to command and control space assets in a warfighting environment.”