Press Release
Department of Commerce teams up with the Air Force’s National Space Defense Center for an International Space Traffic Management Exercise
Published on 02/12/2020
COLORADO SPRINGS, Co., January 13, 2020 — On December 16, 2019, over 50 Space industry companies converged at Catalyst Campus in Colorado Springs, SAFRAN/Zodiac Data Systems in Colombelles, France and the Australian National Concurrent Design Facility (ANCDF) at University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia to participate in SACT 19-3. The U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Space Commerce sponsored the commercial Sprint Advanced Concept Training (SACT) for Space Situational Awareness (SSA) along with its Air Force partners from the National Space Defense Center (NSDC) and Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
The four-day event involved establishing, integrating and operating three commercial Space operations centers in the United States, Europe, and the Pacific. The SACT successfully demonstrated around-the-clock daytime-only operations by alternating primary operational responsibility between teams on three continents. Commercial sensor and Command and Control (C2) systems provided the essential data and analytical products to conduct live Space Traffic Management (STM) activities in support of the Department of Commerce, while simultaneously augmenting the military functions of the NSDC.
During the event, government and industry Space professionals performed continuous Space surveillance operations on thousands of objects. Participants identified and analyzed live on-orbit activities, including a rapid revisit of high-interest objects, maneuver detection, conjunction assessment, proximity operations, and small/faint object tracking. The commercial operations centers also performed real-time software evaluation, development, and in-depth analysis to assess on-orbit events, that were performed live by DoD and commercial satellite owner-operators in cooperation with SACT. The exercise demonstrated emerging commercial abilities to adapt to a situation-dependent, real-time environment in which threats, whether hostile or arbitrary, evolve quickly.
At the core of this experiment was the Air Force's cloud-based Unified Data Library (UDL), an enterprise data-sharing platform used by all commercial providers to exchange information through machine-to-machine interfaces. New data sources and processing systems integrated rapidly with the UDL to join an extensive list of systems that were already connected, these include AGI, AI Solutions, EOS (AUS), ExoAnalytics, L3/ADS/Harris, LeoLabs, Lockheed Martin, NASA, Node Centric, NorthStar (CAN), RINCON, RT Logic, Saber Astro (AUS), Seradata (GBR), SpaceX, Spire, Stottler/Henke, TDKC, ThothX (CAN), and Safran/Zodiac (FR).
The commercial SACT served as an opportunity to prove the interoperability between U.S. government space organizations, allies, and commercial data providers as the Air Force plans to hand off the Space Traffic Management Mission to the Department of Commerce. In fact, SACT 19-3 provided the innovation sharing and follow-through outlined in a Declaration of Intent agreement recently signed between the US and France by Secretary Wilbur Ross and Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) President Jean-Yves Le Gall.
SACT events occur every three months with the first held in March 2019 – mark your calendars, the next event will occur about April 2020!