The Space Force is taking applications from companies and universities for the first round of space domain awareness projects at its Colorado Springs, Colorado-based technology hub, Project Apollo. The technology accelerator, focused on improving the service’s ability to identify and track objects in space, will kick off its first three-month innovation cycle Oct. 26.
Project Apollo aims to fill capability gaps by providing a sandbox for industry, academia, and government to quickly formulate, test, and prove solutions. The initial projects will focus on capability gaps in space launch custody, object identification, and decision aids.
The space launch custody area is interested in capabilities that use unclassified and commercially available data to quickly detect a space launch, predict its orbit and trajectory and pass that information to a sensor that can then track that object. Object identification involves using things like behavior, frequency and radar emissions and orbital data to detect space objects.
Maintaining insight about what’s happening in orbit is a top priority for the Space Force. The service maintains a network of ground and in-space radars and sensors aimed at supporting the mission, but they lack cohesion.
Project Apollo is one of the Space Force’s two Tools, Applications and Processing (TAP) Labs, which aims to drive collaboration among various agencies and institutions to quickly field new capabilities. To date, the Project Apollo hub is partnered with Mitre Corp., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Aerospace Corp., and the Space Force’s Supra Coder initiative.
