Insight for Evaluating Risks and Impacts to Space Systems and Services

Satellite based services such as satellite communications (SATCOM), positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), and surveillance, serve as a critical backbone to economic, educational, social, civil, humanitarian, and military operations.  For some systems (e.g., remotely piloted aircraft), it is a fundamental requirement and without reliable satellite services, these systems cannot operate.  This creates a vulnerability that has been recognized by our adversaries and documented in bulletin recently released by the FBI, National Counterintelligence and Security Center and U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Unfortunately, the ability to monitor and assess the risk to satellites and their services has lagged given the complications in 1) establishing comprehensive and persistent monitoring of all space objects, 2) understanding what constitutes a risk is which is actively evolving, and 3) having clear policies that define what actions or responses can be taken in response to a risk given the unmanned nature of satellites.  Given these three challenges require long term and systematic changes, there is a need for rapid yet sophisticated software solutions to provide stop-gap capabilities to users now.  In this document, 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” (IERIS3) to identify and quantify risks that have the potential to degrade, deny, or intercept, satellite services for real-world space operations and wargaming purposes. IERIS3 will enable users to develop robust plans in the face of demanding requirements, resource constraints, and assess risk in the presence of uncertainty.  This toolkit will ingest and sanitize heterogeneous data, support complex queries, reduce analysis effort, enable “what-if’ analysis, and support tactical timelines. IERIS3 will enable the U.S. to represent and assess the space domain battlespace, to practice in simulated contested environments (e.g., wargame) and if necessary, “fight” at the speed of battle. IERIS3 seeks to quantifiably answer the question of “is today riskier than yesterday?”