El Segundo, Calif. (AFNS) — From processing space-based data faster to enlisting commercial partners in new ways, this year’s annual Fight Tonight competition sponsored by Space Systems Command elicited an impressive array of novel ideas designed to deliver space capability at the speed of need. Seven teams made the final round and presented their concepts to U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command leaders Oct. 7.
Winners will be announced Nov. 15, at the Space Force Ball in Los Angeles.
Space Systems Command’s annual Fight Tonight competition debuted three years ago seeking to empower solutions in alignment with the critical Space Force mission of ensuring a secure space domain for all. The competition is open to all SSC government employees and all ideas must have an operational sponsor from Space Operations Command to validate that the proposal is operationally relevant. Up to $12 million is available to fund the idea or ideas that win.
This year, SSC asked participants to focus on the following areas: reducing operator workload; enhancing space situational awareness systems; enhancing the space common operating picture for ops centers; assisting operations in denied areas; and Tracking, Telemetry and Command resiliency.
The teams presented their entries to a panel of judges that included Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, SSC commander; Joy M. White, SSC executive director; Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Air Force, space acquisition and integration; Brig. Gen. Chandler Atwood, Space Operations Command vice commander; and Col. Michelle Idle, SSC deputy commander.
Capt. McKenna Medina, Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking cell director from SSC’s Space Sensing Program Office, kicked off the final presentation session with a review of her team’s proposal for a pre-mission planning tool called PRIMER, which stands for Precursor Refinement and Investigation Mapping for Exploration Recommendations. According to Medina, PRIMER is designed to quickly analyze satellite data faster to identify “hot spots” for further investigation, getting tactical data to the warfighter 33% faster and cheaper.
The idea, she explained, evolved from a TacSRT pilot launched 10 months ago to partner with commercial vendors to deliver tactical insights to warfighters within 72 hours. The pilot delivered 268 operational planning products to seven combatant commands and 57 partner nations.
By incorporating existing data at the outset of a query response, PRIMER would “allow TacSRT operators to leverage and analyze free imagery data and adapt commercial algorithms to provide historical context and establish baseline conditions to reduce the scope and timelines for all future SRT queries,” Medina said.
For example, one pilot query involved an area of 6,000 square kilometers. The commercial partner was able to access years of NASA nighttime data, which allowed the TacSRT team to narrow the field to just six areas that deserved more investigation, including one region that wasn’t included in the original request. This reduced the scope of the ask to 1,100 square kilometers, resulting in faster results and an 82% cost savings. In other cases, the cost savings has been as high as 99%.
In addition, “PRIMER will be able to identify adversarial construction and suspicious movement activities,” Medina said. “It will also be able to monitor treaty violation, detect weapons testing and launch activities, and respond to natural disasters.”
Maj. Donovan Hutchins, Assured Access to Space Operations lead, presented his team’s idea: Launch Logistics, Execution, And Programmatic System, an integrated launch scheduling capability that centrally manages the complexity of launch data management, which involves tracking a broad, diverse and dynamic data set that includes supply chain management, changing launch schedules, instrumentation turn times, launch protection, day of launch operations and more.
In total, Hutchins’ team identified 732 data sources from across the AATS enterprise that contribute to successful launch operations and found that a lot of that data is siloed. LEAPS would transform all of that siloed and dispersed data into insight.
“That is the ultimate goal,” Hutchins said. “To provide insight to our leaders who are making decisions at the tactical level, the operational level and the strategic level and then to provide situational awareness for everything that’s going on.”
In a joint presentation with Lt. Col. Brian Kester, Antenna Services materiel leader, 2nd Lt. Devrin Chullanandana, Acquisition Policies and Processes Division, Space Sensing PMA action officer, outlined Joint Antenna Marketplace. As the name implies, JAM would create a centralized marketplace to connect government-owned and commercially owned antennas to Space Force missions.
USSF operators are very concerned about the Satellite Control Network being able to handle the sheer number of satellites it wants to launch and the pace of information that demands in an era of Great Power Competition, Chullanandana said.
“Our current ground infrastructure that’s heavily relied on by operators cannot handle the sheer number of missions we anticipate,” Chullanandana said. “It got so bad in 2021 that there were about 16,000 scheduling conflicts and operators (at the Guardian Field Forum 2023) complained about getting ‘pushed off the lunch line’ and getting deprioritized.”
JAM would be an augmentation to the SCN, explained Kester. It would modify the existing scheduling software to aggregate all the different schedules available from various vendors and provide a way to take requests from the different satellite operations centers.
Representing the Air Force Research Laboratory, Apoorva Bhopale presented Space COP on SIPR for Joint and Allied partner use, a SIPRNet and allied version of the successful JWICS SDCCS Space Analytical-COP tool.
Space Defense Characterization and Control System is a mature Java application on JWICS that was built to provide near real-time awareness of space domain/space COP, Bhopale said. A key use of it was to show which objects in orbit are co-orbital with others. SDCCS was Ops Accepted at the National Space Defense Center and is being sustained by SSC. It currently receives space catalog data from SSC’s Warp Core data hosting environment, Bhopale said.
“It’s in daily, real-world use at the Pacific U.S. Fleet Forces Command and Navy, and the software is also on the carriers USS Carl Vinson and USS Lincoln,” Bhopale said. “They used it during their last operational deployment.”
“For a Fight Tonight situation in terms of impact, this funding simply expands a capability that’s already in daily, real world use today,” Bhopale said. “I know where to get the data sources, the main source code is done, and the development pipeline and contracts are in place in terms of innovation. It shortens the kill chain by promulgating SDA at all echelons from NSDC to Co-Comm and to tactical levels like a carrier or an Army division.”
Addressing the category of enhanced space situational awareness, Capt. Trenton Harper, program manager with SSC’s Space Domain Awareness program, presented his team’s proposal for Tactical and Persistent Monitoring of GEO Targets through a Super-Synchronous Small Satellite Surveillance System (S6) utilizing two existing, free-flying satellites with optical payloads to set up additional GEO monitoring.
There may come a time in 2026 when the USSF’s SDA systems are overloaded, legacy systems are overloaded, and there are communications outages, yet an operator needs data urgently to support wartime decisions, said Harper. With S6, operators could task sensors and use commercial cloud-based ground systems to rapidly provide critical information.
“S6 real-time tasking has automated data processing and, with a fast downlink, can bypass legacy systems and provide the operator with a clear picture of the warfighting domain and engage with defense systems to win the fight,” Harper said.
The satellites have already been completed, Harper said. If selected, Fight Tonight funding would provide integrated and coordinated rehearsals with Space Operations Command to execute S6’s timing queue capabilities with automated processing; provide additional software development; enable test rehearsals, and drive down the latency for data availability.
“By leveraging commercial solutions like ground-based cloud processing and commercial antenna networks, we can add resiliency to our (Telemetry, Tracking and Network Control) commit systems,” Harper said. “This ensures that even when our traditional assets are overwhelmed or attacked, we maintain control and visibility in space.”
“In addition, we’re reducing operator workloads by using autonomous data processing and near real-time machine-assisted tasking to deliver actionable intelligence to the warfighter faster than ever,” Harper said.
Capt. Trenton Harper, program manager with SSC’s Space Domain Awareness program office, presented his team’s proposal for a Space Data Network Overlay Framework, which would enable capacity to provide rapid connectivity from the continental United States across multi-orbital SATCOM networks to the tactical edge.
In the event of conflict involving INDOPACOM “our Navy will be fighting to get to the AOR over thousands of miles of open water,” Johnson said. Once there, Johnson says they’re going to require networks that connect well with each other from East to West.
While the future Space Data Network is designed to help alleviate edge-to-edge issue, Johnson stressed that warfighters need capabilities today and certainly before 2026. The proposed overlay network would reduce communication planning time to second.
“Users would access the overlay network with a small device which is compatible with their existing hardware and that provides access to essentially managed network,” Johnson said.
Representing SSC’s Space Domain Awareness TAP Lab, Maj. Sean Allen presented Dungeons and Dragons: Countering Space-Domain Camouflage, Concealment, and Deception, a capability to rapidly process data looking for “tripwire” anomalies that could be indicators of camouflaged space objects.
“Space is not different from other domains in many regards,” Allen said. “If we want to protect and defend our systems, we need to counter camouflage, concealment and deception.”
“However, it’s not just about protecting and defending our on-orbit assets,” Allen said. “Winning a joint and even multi-domain fight requires that we identify adversary space force enhancement systems, which may include signature-managed or clandestine payloads that could serve as critical comm nodes which we ought to be considering in our planning. You can’t plan to mitigate or negate a node if you don’t know that it exists.”
Even as far back as 1963, the U.S. was concerned about the potential for adversaries to use satellite signature reduction. Today, similar measures are used by some commercial vendors, including SpaceX, which has implemented some optical signature reduction technologies in the past few years because astronomers complained that original satellite buses were “too bright,” Allen said.
“There’s plenty of existing data and sensors that can be brought to bear in a software pipeline to find specific ‘tripwire’ anomalies,” Allen said. Dungeons and Dragons will “go get any and all data and have a systemic and rigorous way to test for evidence of camouflage, concealment, deception, and then aggregate the data and do sensor command and control tip and queue to maintain track custody of those objects and feed into other existing systems.”
This is in practice today at the unclassified level, but Dungeons and Dragons would take it to higher classified levels and automate the process, Allen said.
“It’s semi-manual even in this current rudimentary form, but Dungeons and Dragons has already found week over week somewhere in the north of 600 objects that are real,” Allen said. “They’re not in the public catalog and we feel they are not of U.S. origin, and they exhibit some degree of camouflage, concealment, deception.”
Rachel Souder-Arguedas, director of Atlas X, which organized the competition, thanked the finalists at the end of the presentations, and noted that part of the purpose of the competition “was to make sure that all employees here feel like they have a voice, a way to participate and share their ideas.”
“So, whether or not you receive funding, there is definitely value in sharing these ideas,” Souder-Arguedas said. “And I know by the fact that we were able to get a couple hours of time from these senior leaders here that they really value your thoughts and insights and perspectives as well.”
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