Space Systems Command has unveiled a new collaborative facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that will focus on the development of space domain awareness technologies.
The Tools Applications and Processing Lab will facilitate the U.S. Space Force’s engagement with its innovation partners to address critical SDA challenges through a technology accelerator initiative, dubbed Project Apollo, scheduled on Oct. 26, SSC said Monday.
SSC Commander Lt. Gen. Mike Guetlein said the new TAP Lab will provide government and industry partners with access to a digital sandbox to experiment on “data at all classification levels.”
The sandbox includes a software development environment and algorithm benchmarking tools and enables participants to host their own microservices and applications.
“Promising developmental capabilities will then be fast-tracked into operations, giving our warfighters a competitive advantage,” Guetlein said.
The lab will host three-month innovation cycles with partners up to four times a year as part of Project Apollo.
The first cohort of participants will focus on one or more of three challenge areas: maintain custody of launches within minutes and predict intermediate and final orbits; classify, identify and evaluate space objects within seconds; and provide semi-automated, real-time, data-centric decision aids for an operation command and control center.
