Second in a series of notes from our residency at SDA TAP Lab:
We are working to solve a core problem in business: Everyone is drowning in data and starved for insight.
No-one feels this pain more deeply than people in the booming domain of space operations.
Rockets blast off from U.S. spaceports that still operate on antiquated, stovepiped 20th-century hardware and software not designed for the digital age – 232 launches are scheduled this year (given no mission delays).
Satellites orbit the earth with data packets crossing space in myriad formats, languages, and even purposes among their users, operators and stakeholders.
So rather than flowing, data drips sluggishly through channels gated by piecemeal infrastructure and security and intellectual-property protocols – or choked by the need to translate it from one use case to the next on a case-by-case basis.
Here in Colorado Springs, we are collaborating with other companies to answer a uniquely complicated data-flow question: Is that space debris or a satellite threat?
The challenge here is that intelligence data flows in many forms from many sources towards the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command, which is responsible for safety and national security. There, human operators must filter the real threats out of more than 44,000 other satellites and rocket bodies, and hundreds of thousands of particles of debris orbiting Earth.
So our SDA TAP Lab teams are collaborating on methods of sorting through all that data to help SSC operators decide whether to flag an object: Threat? Non-Threat? Or simply Unknown?
At PSAI, we are seeking to understand how the operators make those decisions today so they can use data from new “events” more effectively.
We believe that by making these data sources interoperable – and understanding the meaning that those decisions give to the data, we can help them take action in the future with with greater clarity, confidence, and speed.
Watch this space.
#spacedata, #sdataplab, #decisionsupport, #ai, #artificialintelligence, #ussf, #satellites, #satellitedefense
