Insight for Evaluating Risks and Impacts to Space Systems and Services

Space-based services including satellite communications (SATCOM), positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), and surveillance systems form an essential infrastructure underpinning military, economic, civil, and humanitarian operations worldwide. These services are not merely advantageous but fundamentally critical - exemplified by remotely piloted aircraft which cannot function without reliable SATCOM support. This creates a vulnerability that has been recognized by our adversaries and documented in bulletins recently released by the FBI, National Counterintelligence and Security Center, and U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations.  This problem only becomes more challenging with the rapid increase in the number satellites in space and the impressive pace of advancements in launch and delivery systems, payload capabilities, and platform maneuverability.  Adversaries are using such capabilities to establish more complex operations and tactics to strengthen their anti-satellite capabilities which can be used to threaten US assets.  The need for space battle management is not new but only becomes more critical to enable the US to maintain its freedom of operations in space.  Space battle management solutions must prioritize flexibility to stay relevant in a rapidly evolving domain and scale to defend against multiple, simultaneous threats to US satellites and space-based services, in a resource constrained environment.Alesia Engineering, LLC proposes the development of a comprehensive software analysis toolkit under project “Insight for Evaluating Risks and Impacts to Space Systems and Services” (IERIS) to identify and quantify risks that have the potential to degrade, deny, or intercept, satellite services for real-world space operations and wargaming purposes.  IERIS presents an innovative framework that transcends traditional one-versus-one monitoring techniques by implementing advanced pattern recognition within data streams that enable users to make the semantic lift to extract high-level contextual information from low-level processes.  A key to our approach is the assertion that the goal of the system should not be to replace a commander’s intuition, experience, or operational vision. Rather, it should be to permit rapid and accurate experimentation of alternate outcomes, using “what-if” scenarios, to quantitatively compare results.  This gives a commander the ability to apply their knowledge, to counter the risks associated with uncertainty, and make informed trade-offs on how to resolve the current operational dilemma in presence of incomplete knowledge.  IERIS will transform space battle management from a limited, static approach to a dynamic, proactive system that provides rapid, contextual understanding of space domain threats and potential mission impacts.