The U.S. Space Force is advancing the development of a government-owned open system to process and share data derived from existing and future missile warning satellites, SpaceNews reported Monday.
In January 2020, the Space and Missile Systems Center awarded a five-year, $197 million contract to Raytheon, which merged with United Technologies Corp. to form Raytheon Technologies in April of last year, to come up with an open-architecture system for Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution or Forge.
Col. Rhet Turnbull, director of the cross mission ground and communications enterprise at SMC, said Forge would be a “government-owned baseline, with the government owning the design and the data and the software.”
Lt. Col. Kellie Brownlee, materiel leader for future ground integration at SMC, said the service is working to transfer Lockheed Martin’s proprietary technology and data to a government-owned open architecture.
“As we migrate our legacy assets to the new system, data rights is one of our biggest concerns and risk areas,” Brownlee said. “We need to understand how the older systems are going to operate on our new system.”
The service is projected to spend $2 billion on the Forge platform and is working on another open system – Enterprise Ground Services – that will use common standards to operate future satellites by 2028.
