Under development by L3Harris, ATLAS is the Pentagon’s latest attempt to modernize antiquated systems used by the Space Force to track satellites, spacecraft and other objects on orbit. The software-based platform is the foundation for a broader effort to replace the 1980s-era Space Defense Operations Center (SPADOC) computer system.

“ATLAS is going very well, we expect to go into operational acceptance testing this year,” Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, head of Space Systems Command (SSC), told reporters last week during a media roundtable at the annual Space Symposium.

ATLAS is designed to integrate and disseminate a range of data types — including space domain awareness, command and control, and intelligence — with the help of automation capabilities to give operators a complete picture of the space domain. The system is one piece of the service’s Space Command and Control initiative, started after the previous SPADOC replacement known as the Joint Space Operations Center Mission System (JMS) was terminated in 2018 due to poor performance.

Although it’s now on track, ATLAS was considered one of the service’s most beleaguered programs by former space acquisition lead Frank Calvelli. The Space Force initially wanted the system operational by 2022, but software integration challenges and lack of trained operators have plagued ATLAS during its development, forcing the service to delay decommissioning of SPADOC.

Furthermore, the program has notched multiple Category 1 deficiencies — designated for problems that could cause serious harm or damage — as well as less severe Category 2 deficiencies.

To tackle some of ATLAS’s key challenges, Calvelli last year directed that the program be moved from SSC — the service’s acquisition arm — to Mission Delta 2-Space Domain Awareness. The organization is one of the newest integrated mission deltas under Space Operations Command (SpOC) and brings the mission area’s personnel, training elements and acquisition professionals for maintenance and sustainment under one commander.

Garrant commended the decision, as it allowed guardians to better understand the complexities of the system and put urgency on developers to deliver capabilities on time.

“The connective tissue with the operators and getting them early time on the system, and even closer connections at low echelons of command between the developer and the operator — that’s probably the biggest success we’ve seen in all of our mission deltas and all of our sustainment squadrons,” he said. “It’s been incredibly successful, I think you’re going to see more of that.”

The new approach was also key for L3Harris in its work to get ATLAS across the finish line, because the company is now working closely with operators to test and integrate capabilities through an agile development cycle, Charles Clarkson, vice president and general manager for the company’s space superiority and imaging division, told DefenseScoop.

To prepare for IOC this year, SpOC is conducting quarterly capability integration tests (SCITs) where test squadrons, space operators and L3Harris work together to analyze ATLAS and deliver additional capability. The service recently completed its tenth SCIT in March.

“We test it in a development environment, and then we also test it in an operational environment, with the operators then being able to provide that real-time feedback to the software development team,” Clarkson said in an interview on the sidelines of Space Symposium. “It’s all about creating closeness to the mission, and then being able to incorporate those requirements to keep pace with the threat.”

L3Harris received a $53 million indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract to develop ATLAS in 2018. Since then, the company has received multiple extension awards from the Space Force for the program — including a $90 million follow-on contract in January to “meet ATLAS initial operational capability and achieve software stability,” according to the Defense Department.

The contract extension will also give L3Harris the opportunity to improve ATLAS with additional tools and technologies, Clarkson added.

“It’s also looking at then, how do we build on [and] augment capability on top of that foundational layer that was primarily giving operators and warfighters a modern toolset, and just scaling so that we could keep pace with the exponential launches in space,” he said.

Clarkson emphasized that even with the delays, L3Harris did not have to pare back any of the capabilities for ATLAS. The company is also resolving the remaining deficiencies identified during SCITs, he said. An SSC spokesperson confirmed to DefenseScoop that all of the program’s Category 1 deficiencies will be resolved “prior to trial period entry.”

“I don’t look at it and say, ‘Hey, we had a dozen, two dozen, three dozen [Category 1 deficiencies] coming out of a SCIT,’ as a negative thing. What that really means is we’ve actually seen an increase in recent SCITS, and that’s really driven by the fact that it’s becoming very, very real,” Clarkson said. “That’s exactly what we want to see in agile software development, is you identify those deficiencies and you burn them down over the next sprint.”

The post Space Force on track to deliver modernized space monitoring software in 2025 appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Service leaders have warned about the risks to the ground segments of U.S. military space architectures from cyber threats or other adversary methods, seeing them as a potential “backdoor” way of attacking American satellite communications.

Additionally, delays in delivering ground systems from industry can set back space programs.

“I’ve always been an advocate that probably our biggest threats are ground. And I would love to see a future — and I’m thinking way out there — that more satellites are autonomous. I really see a future where there are autonomous satellites with onboard processing. I mean, you think about what’s in your iPhone today, I mean, there’s no reason why we can’t be doing much more stuff onboard processing, and just downlink and tasking to whoever we need it to,” Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said Friday at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“So, I envision a day down the road, maybe 20 years, where there’s a lot less ground stations and a lot less operators. Right? And then if you think about where all these commercial companies are going with direct-to-phone kind of service from space, you can almost envision you don’t need ground terminals anymore, you can go directly to a commercial provider or commercial providers, right in terms of these … systems. So, I see a future that’s very autonomous and very much more onboard processing — and I think that makes us much more resilient and survivable than a ground station with lots of people and lots of network connections inside that could be vulnerable to cyber. But that’s just my personal view of the future,” he said.

The Department of Defense is also concerned about adversaries’ anti-satellite weapons that could disrupt the services that space systems provide to military and civilian users. The Pentagon relies on satellites for critical missions such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), and communications.

To mitigate these threats, the Space Development Agency is pursuing what it calls a Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), which includes tranches of data transport and missile-tracking satellites that will operate in low-Earth orbit.

A White House official recently told reporters that Russia is developing a new “anti-satellite capability” that hasn’t been deployed yet. The system could be a space-based weapon with a nuclear component, according to reports. The Kremlin has denied these allegations.

At the CSIS event Friday, Calvelli was asked whether the U.S. is at risk of relying too much on LEO constellations to mitigate risks to American platforms.

He said the Pentagon needs to diversify.

“I think that proliferation in LEO is one approach to resiliency. Other approaches include also that we need to be doing more of is diversification of orbits. And so if you look at the history of the [Defense] Department, most of our stuff was in [geosynchronous orbit], right? Except for GPS, most of our stuff is in GEO — all of our missile warning, all of our MILSATCOM kind of capabilities. And so I’m an advocate of proliferation everywhere. I think we should be proliferating more in [medium-Earth orbit], we should be preferring more in GEO, as well. And so I think we’re taking the first steps through SDA with proliferation in LEO, but I also see us proliferating more at other orbits and trying strange orbits too, as well,” Calvelli said.

The post Acquisition chief sees autonomous satellites as wave of the future for Space Force appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The department sees a number of advantages in tapping into commercial offerings as the DOD moves to augment its capabilities and capacity.

“I think if you really want to go fast, that’s what you do — you take advantage of commercial. We need to continue to take advantage of commercial space communications … space domain awareness services, commercial launch, other commercial services. Leveraging commercial services at speed diversifies the architecture and adds resiliency. It’s really key,” Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said during remarks at NSSA’s Defense and Intelligence Space Conference. “I think if we can get it commercially as a commercial service, we probably should.”

Calvelli previously served as principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, and he wants the Pentagon to take a page out of that agency’s playbook.

“Something that the NRO did that we’re going to try [at DOD] is what the NRO did for imagery was they took all the requirements and put them together and said, ‘How much can I satisfy with commercial?’ And then they pulled those off the side and allocated them to commercial … I think we can take the same approach,” he said.

Defense officials are “actually looking at that where we take all the comm requirements and stack ‘em and then figure out can we allocate a chunk of these to commercial. And I think that’s a really good approach,” he added.

Additionally, leveraging commercial spacecraft would support the Pentagon’s strategy of moving to a more distributed architecture featuring smaller satellites and multiple orbits including low-Earth, medium-Earth and geostationary.

“I would love our adversaries to think that every COMSAT in LEO, GEO and MEO that’s commercial — we’re on. Because that makes their targeting a lot more difficult,” Calvelli noted.

Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command, also called for doing more to take advantage of the innovation and research-and-development work that’s happening in the commercial sector.

Spacecom is the U.S. military’s combatant command that is responsible for areas that are more than 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.

The Defense Department needs to avoid potential “failure modes,” according to Shaw.

“A failure mode is not leveraging commercial to the greatest extent we possibly could,” he said. “In some ways, commercial can go a whole lot faster than the government can go … I think another challenge that we will realize to a greater degree in the days moving forward is how do we get enough capacity to do what we want for our various space missions? And commercial will provide that augmented capacity. And so we absolutely need to partner there.”

However, relying more on the commercial world will require closer partnerships when it comes to addressing potential risks, he cautioned.

In the past, commercial space companies haven’t built their systems with potential cyber, electromagnetic, or physical threats in mind. And that is a concern for U.S. military officials.

“There will have to be better collaboration between the commercial sector and the national security sector to understand potential threats in space,” Shaw said.

As an example, he noted the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war in which SpaceX has been providing Starlink satellite communications capabilities to Ukraine. Adversaries could try to interfere with those types of systems.

“If you’re operating a satellite communications capability that might be somehow supporting the Ukrainian effort, you can bet the Russians don’t like it. If you’re operating a commercial ISR capability that is somehow contributing to the Ukrainian war effort, we know Russia doesn’t like it. And so we need to be again working collaboratively as we go forward” to take potential threats to commercial space systems into account, Shaw said.

Another potential “failure mode” could occur if companies fear their systems will come under attack and become wary of helping the U.S. military during a conflict.

“We need to partner with commercial to share the threat environment and making sure that we all see that homogeneously together to optimize everyone’s performance and capabilities and operations,” Shaw said.

“If we need those capabilities from our national security interests, you know, how do we … partner with commercial so that we don’t have another failure mode, which would be … we have reliance on commercial systems, but as soon as the war begins and they start to come under threat commercial just says, ‘OK, we’re done.’ That’s bad for a lot of reasons. It’s bad for operational reasons. It’s bad for deterrence. And so that would be a failure mode we want to avoid. So we have to have a continuing dialogue about realizing these things happen and what are the solutions to those. I’m not going to propose those solutions. I just laid out the challenge that I think we’ll have, and we need to talk about it collectively,” he said.

Determining the right mix of military and commercial systems that support the Pentagon’s space missions will be an “iterative process” that the DOD will have to figure out in the years ahead, Shaw added.

The Pentagon is “fully committed” to partnering closely with the commercial space sector, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ron Moultrie said.

The department and the intelligence community plan to allocate billions of dollars for commercial space capabilities over the next decade, Moultrie noted, and an innovation fund has been established to further these types of efforts.

Finding the best way to securely integrate commercial capabilities into the national security architecture and ensure they’re resilient will be a challenge, he said.

“We have committed to declassifying information about these threats when possible and have established mechanisms to share information with commercial providers to enable them and help them protect their systems,” Moultrie said.

Pentagon officials are evaluating the department’s classification guidelines with the aim of maximizing information-sharing “where appropriate.” They’re also looking at current policies to determine if revisions or new policies are needed to maximize the DOD’s collaboration with the commercial sector, he noted.

“We embrace the expansion of commercial space capabilities,” Moultrie added. “They’re really game-changers … and they’re major shifts in where we were before. However, we must keep privacy considerations paramount as we determine how to best integrate and securely deliver commercially derived products and services to users in a timely manner.”

The post Spacecom leader warns of potential ‘failure modes’ as DOD pursues commercial space capabilities appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition Frank Calvelli detailed those initial aims on Friday during his first public speaking engagement in this brand-new position, in which he will help set the long-term direction for Space Force procurement.

“We seem to have a disconnect with space and ground systems where we will want something but the ground system is just not ready yet, or the user terminal is just not ready yet,” Calvelli said during a Mitchell Institute event. One of his top goals will be “to ensure that the space and ground systems come together as an integrated system so that when we launch the systems, we can take full advantage of them.”

Calvelli said reading a lot of federal watchdog reports helped him come to that conclusion.

Integrating America’s space architecture into other warfighting domains to give the military more of an advantage across the spectrum of operations will also be critical, he said.

Improving on those integration issues are two of his top five priorities that align with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s recently shared operational imperatives to help the Pentagon more rapidly deploy technologies to deter adversaries as warfare capabilities evolve. Calvelli first mentioned his priorities at his confirmation hearing last month, but expanded on them during the forum on Friday.

Another aim is delivering capabilities that are already in the works.

“One of my top priorities is executing — I need to deliver on the things that got started over the last couple of years, and I think it’s going to make our Space Force and our Department of the Air Force a much stronger organization in terms of capabilities for the warfighter,” he said.

Getting capabilities into the hands of troops faster, and improving program management and execution are other key focus areas.

“There really truly is a sense of urgency out there. I mean, we have threats against our systems, we have threats from near-peer adversaries. We need speed. We need execution,” he added.

“I think there’s no better way to actually get some speed than to actually deliver on your commitments and actually execute your programs on cost and schedule. So my … priority is to really drive project management discipline across the service,” Calvelli said.

Another top aim is to make the nation’s space architecture more resilient.

“That’s going to be key because our nation does depend on space, both in peace as well as times of crisis and conflict. So, it’s really important that space is always available to the nation no matter what the environment is,” he said. 

Congress mandated the creation of Calvelli’s new position in the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. He comes into the job as the military works to modernize its satellites and other key space assets, and buy sophisticated technologies to compete with competitors like China. Calvelli said he spent months preparing to take on the leadership position by reviewing and studying academic papers, government reports, news articles, speeches, hearings and more.

He also brings to the job more than 30 years of experience in the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) — which uses space assets for the U.S. intelligence community — and the CIA.

The post New acquisition exec for US military space programs to tackle ‘disconnect’ between satellites, ground systems appeared first on DefenseScoop.