WASHINGTON — The Area Pressure introduced today that its software-centric program for managing, processing and disseminating area monitoring information, the Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis System (ATLAS), has been accepted as “operational.”
The transfer paves the best way for the service to lastly rid itself of its dysfunctional Nineteen Eighties-era laptop system known as the Area Protection Operations Heart (SPADOC), which as been used to keep tabs on satellites, spacecraft and dangerous space junk even after almost twenty years of failed alternative efforts.
Operational acceptance of ATLAS delivers the “the important thing capabilities [needed] to not be reliant on the SPADOC system,” Shannon Pallone, program government officer of Battle Administration, Command, Management, Communications, and Area Intelligence (BMC3I) on the service’s major acquisition unit, Area Programs Command, advised Breaking Protection on Sept. 16.
ATLAS’s official greenlight comes after a virtually year-long trial period for the software program at Area Operations Command’s Mission Delta 2, headquartered at Vandenberg SFB, Calif.
Pallone, talking in an unique interview throughout the Superior Maui Optical and Area Surveillance convention in Hawaii, defined that because the trial started delta operators efficiently have been utilizing the system to create precise monitoring information for area objects.
“[O]n the ops ground, it’s producing a catalog — it’s publishing information to Space-track.org They’re utilizing that as a major system,” she mentioned.
SPADOC initially got here on-line within the Nineteen Eighties and was by 2017 an “old clunker” that wasn’t match for area warfighting capabilities, in line with then-head of Air Pressure Area Command Gen. Jay Raymond, who went on to steer the Area Pressure.
The ATLAS undertaking, initiated in 2018 and contracted to L3Harris, was designed as half of a bigger Area Pressure effort to switch and enhance upon the infamously flawed Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) Mission System (JMS). The JMS program started in 2009 to switch SPADOC, however after a decade of effort and never fairly $1 billion in spending it was killed in 2018.
The Area Pressure initially deliberate for ATLAS to turn into operational in 2022, however this system has been bedeviled by technical points and schedule delays — to the purpose the place then-Air Pressure Area Acquisition Government Frank Calvelli in 2023 dubbed it one of many Area Pressure’s three most troubled packages.
The decommissioning of SPADOC, Pallone mentioned, might be a game-changing achievement.
“Perhaps that’s after I’m similar to: ‘I retire’,” she joked. “It’ll be a serious coup.”
A Area Operations Command spokesperson advised Breaking Protection at present that for the time being there isn’t a set timeframe for SPADOC to be shut down.
Pallone confused that ATLAS’s operational acceptance is a primary step to bettering the Area Pressure’s capability to detect, observe, and characterize objects in area in a exact sufficient approach to enable persistent “eyes” on adversary satellites.
“That’s actually simply the beginning of getting after the place we have to go in space domain awareness as a mission,” she mentioned. “I’m in a brand new baseline, and now I can begin to do some actually thrilling issues with that, and I can begin to really get after gaps as an alternative of getting after modernizing. … I wish to get out of modernization into closing gaps, and that is going to allow us to try this.”
