In an exclusive to OnOrbitWatch, General Campbell, Executive Vice President of Iridium's Government Program was kind enough to do a question and answer where he discusses the role space situational awareness plays for Iridium, and its impact on the NEXT program.
OOW: How do you look at Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and how has Iridium used SSA in the past?
Gen. Campbell, Iridium: All students of military strategy are familiar with Col. John Boyd’s famous concept of the OODA Loop. OODA stands for “Observe, Orient, Decide and Act,” and while it was designed to understand the dynamics of air combat, it’s been widely applied in a variety of business and industrial environments. A key concept of the OODA construct is “situational awareness” (SA), which, in air combat, is an overall understanding of the battlespace and the factors which affect the pilot’s course of action. Situational awareness in the air starts with observation and incorporates a variety of sensors including “eyeballs,” radar, AWACS information and other on and off-board sensors. Like the OODA loop itself, situational awareness is such a useful concept it has become widely applied in other environments.
Space situational awareness (SSA) has come to describe our knowledge of the objects in space, and our ability to characterize and catalog them. As in the air combat arena, SSA starts with observation—in this case the observations produced by the components of the U.S. Air Force Space Surveillance Network: optical, radar and others. SSA is a product of the Observe-Orient components of the space OODA loop, and enables the Decide-Act components.
The first space priority of the U.S. Air Force has always been to ensure the safety of manned operations in space, followed by that of our military and civil space systems. Prior to early 2009 the best SSA information available to commercial operators was the conjunction analysis information derived from the General Perturbation catalog maintained by the U.S. Air Force Space Command. Unfortunately, in the dynamic low Earth orbit (LEO) environment, the accuracy of this data was insufficient for collision avoidance. On February 10, 2009, a satellite operated by Iridium (designated Iridium 33) was struck and destroyed by an inactive Russian military satellite, COSMOS 2251. Although Iridium 33 was fully operational and maneuverable, there was no information available to the commercial sector of sufficient accuracy to allow collision avoidance actions to be taken.
As a result of this incident, U.S. Air Force Space Command and U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) began to provide high-accuracy conjunction analysis and assistance in planning collision avoidance maneuvers to Iridium and other commercial operators. Today Iridium, like other commercial space operators, receives regular conjunction updates from the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) and, when necessary, maneuvers satellites to avoid potential collisions. We believe this is a substantial first step in better information sharing between the government and industry, and support even more robust interaction which can provide better and more efficient operation of our satellite constellations.
OOW: Will Iridium be using SSA with Iridium NEXT?
Gen. Campbell, Iridium: Absolutely. Like all responsible space operators, we want to have the most accurate and timely information possible and will continue to make collision avoidance a priority as we transition to our new constellation, Iridium NEXT. We see three key requirements for effective SSA for commercial operations. First, someone must detect and observe objects in space, build and maintain a database to track them and analyze object-to-object interactions to predict where collisions may occur, and that’s the U.S. Air Force Space Command and the JSpOC. Second, understanding that some data sources and analytic methods may be sensitive, we all must have the policy and security framework to allow the needed information to be shared with industry, including foreign operators. Finally, we must have the infrastructure and CONOPS to rapidly disseminate and act on SSA information in an iterative process between the commercial operations centers and the JSpOC so that collision avoidance maneuvers can be developed, vetted and executed in a cycle time appropriate to the environment.
Having observed the evolution of the JSpOC-industry relationship over the past few years, I would say that we’ve made enormous progress on the second and third parts of this problem. We now receive conjunction data based on the Special Perturbation Catalog, previously reserved for government users, and we’ve cooperatively developed a process for dissemination, analysis, course of action development, feedback and execution which allows us to efficiently maneuver satellites to maintain safe clearances. I give great credit to U.S. Air Force Space Command and the JSpOC for building, on a very aggressive schedule, the analytic capability to develop conjunction information on a much wider range of objects and for working through the policy and security wickets to be able to provide a more robust data set to industry. While in some respects this relies on brute force and “sneaker nets,” it works, and we can improve it incrementally through more computing power, more analytic capability and by working through any remaining security issues which limit information sharing.
OOW: Can hosted payloads be used to improve SSA in any way? How so?
Gen. Campbell, Iridium: While we’ve made significant progress on the policy, process and analytic parts of the SSA problem, the future direction of the sensor network is unclear. In 2002, based on concerns over the future vulnerability of U.S. space assets, we established the requirement for a constellation of Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) satellites to provide robust optical detection and tracking of objects in space. The acquisition plan called for a Block 10 pathfinder mission, followed by a constellation of four Block 20 satellites. The Block 10 mission was launched in late 2010, but because the per-satellite cost had grown to nearly $1 billion, the U.S. Air Force elected not to proceed with even a single follow-on satellite and instead announced its intention to study alternatives for the space component of the U.S. Air Force Space Surveillance Network.
Many in industry, including Iridium, believe hosted payloads could provide an extremely cost-effective way to deliver additional SSA capability. Iridium NEXT, a 66-satellite LEO system, is set to launch over a two-year period starting in 2015, and we’ve designed in room for a 50kg hosted payload on each satellite, along with a communications infrastructure to provide real-time access to data. Since 2008, we’ve proposed a number of concepts for hosting SSA sensors aboard Iridium NEXT, ranging from simple fixed sensors, to steerable gimbaled sensors, to hybrid concepts that would include sensors in geostationary orbit. We’ve worked with industry partners who have long experience in the sensor business to develop payloads optimized for the LEO environment and to devise architectures ranging from six to as many as 36 sensors. We’ve explored a number of acquisition models including government-furnished equipment payloads, firm fixed-price turnkey systems, and data-buy models with no up-front investment. While we’ve gotten encouraging feedback and responded to numerous data calls, and while every analysis we’ve seen has indicated a multi-sensor LEO-based system could provide unprecedented coverage and revisit— not to mention the resiliency of a distributed architecture—it appears that no decision will be made in a time frame which would enable Iridium NEXT to play a part.
While there are numerous reasons for this situation (including “too much data”), two stick out. First, a hosted payload on a commercial satellite isn’t SBSS. In discussions of late, SBSS has become the standard against which an SSA hosted payload is measured, despite the fact that it’s almost certain the U.S. government won’t be able to afford another SBSS satellite. And mission cost doesn’t seem to factor into the discussion. As senior Defense Department officials frequently note, given our budget realities, we are going to have to go for the 80% solution rather than reaching for the most exquisite solution that technology has to offer. In the case of SSA, multi-payload hosted solutions that we’ve evaluated are typically 1/4 to 1/3 of the cost of a single SBSS satellite, with twice the mission life, so hosted payload life cycle costs would be in the range of 15-20% of the cost of SBSS (ironically, this is almost exactly what a 2008 Futron study of unclassified Earth observation missions predicts.). If we want a satellite with all the capability of SBSS, it will probably cost about what SBSS costs. If a hosted payload architecture can provide 80%, or even 50%, of all the capability of SBSS for 20% of the cost, that seems like a pretty good deal, and exactly what senior leaders say they are seeking. Unfortunately big programs—even dying big programs—have entrenched constituencies and good intentions have yet to be backed up with action.
The other big reason why hosted payloads haven’t gotten traction is that there’s no process to seriously evaluate them in the acquisition phase as real alternatives to traditional ways of developing space capabilities. The Commercially Hosted Infrared Payload (CHIRP) is by all accounts a great success, but it was a one-off which took advantage of an existing R&D payload and the heroic efforts of a few folks in government and industry. The CHIRP example should validate the economic advantages of hosted payloads, but it’s probably not a scalable model for the hosted payload process. Early last year, in a discussion of hosted payloads, a senior DoD space acquisition official remarked at the conclusion of the meeting, “You know, this [hosted payload concept] is a really good idea. It should be somebody’s job in the Department to make sure it’s considered as a part of our acquisition process. I don’t know who that is … I just know it’s not me.” And while the 2010 National Space Policy provides clear guidance for better use of commercial space capabilities, including hosted payloads, that person or office hasn’t been identified today. The Hosted Payload Office at the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) may be a good start if it can take a proactive role in evaluating and advocating for hosted payloads and doesn’t default to simply a dating service to match up missions and payloads of opportunity.
OOW: In 2008, the SMC Space Superiority Systems Wing (SYSW) awarded a contract to Iridium for SSA analysis. What came out of these studies?
Gen. Campbell, Iridium: While we’re not privy to the complete report, we do know that the study indicated that an Iridium NEXT-based SSA architecture would provide excellent coverage of the orbits of interest including geostationary, Molniya, geostationary transfer and LEO. We’ve had follow-up discussions with the government and periodically respond to questions regarding sensor performance, price and schedule, but have not to-date been informed of the status of the study. We assume that it will be included in the review of alternatives for LEO-based SSA that the U.S. Air Force committed to in its FY12 PB submission. Unfortunately that will eliminate Iridium NEXT from any potential LEO SSA architecture as we will be making a final decision on the Iridium NEXT hosted payload in early 2012. Don’t misconstrue my disappointment in the lack of a SSA payload to mean we aren’t still expecting to use a lot of our hosted payload space when we launch. It’s just that I’m disappointed for my particular customer that, despite national policy and good intentions, the environment isn’t conducive to saving taxpayer money and improving SSA in a way not otherwise possible. Those of us who have spent five years trying to work with DoD on hosted payloads have joked that it’s not too soon to start working on payloads for our third-generation constellation (to replace Iridium NEXT), which should launch in 2030 or so.
Space News’ May 2011 editorial, “To Catch A Moving Train,” addressed the situation most directly. It said, “The DoD’s fast fading opportunity to piggyback a military mission aboard Iridium (NEXT) underscores the need for a formal mechanism and procedures by which government agencies, the Pentagon in particular, can identify and capitalize on brewing hosted payloads opportunities….The fact that the Pentagon hasn’t jumped at the opportunity is not due to a lack of interest…the problem is the Pentagon’s massive procurement bureaucracy has yet to adapt to doing business this way…The Iridium experience, by virtue of its high profile, is a wake-up call for the DoD to finally get serious about leveraging what to date has been an underutilized commercial space resource.”
