In an era where space has develop into a contested domain, members of the U.S. Space Force, save for a select few astronauts, find themselves firmly grounded on Earth.
Unlike their counterparts within the Air Force, who engage in training missions up within the sky, or Navy sailors who practice combat drills at sea, Space Force guardians don’t get to directly experience outer space. Their training, as an alternative, is confined to the boundaries of classrooms and traditional simulators designed for repeated practice of a selected skill.
While these established methods sufficed when military operators focused solely on satellite operations, the Space Force now shoulders a broader mandate. This includes safeguarding satellites from hostile actions, necessitating the adoption of more sophisticated training tools.
“The brand new space domain is way different from the one I grew up with,” said Gen. Likelihood Saltzman, chief of U.S. space operations. “It has taken on the characteristics of a more dangerous and dynamic security environment,” he said last month on the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual conference.
Satellites should be protected against traditional threats like electronic jammers and in addition from cyberattacks and more destabilizing ground-launched missiles, on-orbit grapplers and directed energy weapons.
The very existence of the Space Force underscores the fiercely contested nature of space, he said. Nevertheless, the formation of the Space Force is just step one. The following objective, said Saltzman, is to construct a dedicated Space Force that excels within the intensified U.S. competition with China and Russia — also known as great power competition.
The following phase of space training
To cultivate the requisite skills for competition with spacefaring global powers, the Space Force is exploring the usage of technologies capable of creating virtual and distant training way more realistic and immersive than previously possible.
“We spend quite a lot of time interested by how we attack the advanced training, the specialty training that we want to instill the talents in our guardians to be prepared for competition and conflict,” said Maj. Gen. Shawn Bratton, who until recently led the Space Training and Readiness Command, often called STARCOM.
Bratton was nominated in July to be deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements. .
“The primary challenge is find out how to explain the domain when you’ll be able to’t put the person into it,” Bratton said at a National Defense Industrial Association conference. “We are able to’t carve out real estate on orbit and construct a training location.”
STARCOM has hosted industry events and put out calls for information on technologies that would help guardians not only understand the mechanics of the space environment but additionally learn tactics to outmaneuver adversaries.
After the Space Force established STARCOM in August 2021, the command turned its attention to the preparation of incoming officers from the military academies and Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs on college campuses, said Lt. Col. Adam Wasinger, deputy commander of STARCOM’s Space Delta 13 Detachment 1.
Wasinger’s unit oversees space education schemes on the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where since 2020 about 100 graduates annually get commissioned into the U.S. Space Force.
Incoming officers “should be prepared to fulfill the Space Force mission, which is fight and win in contested, degraded space environments,” Wasinger told SpaceNews.
The Air Force Academy for years has had an area program, but it surely was short and limited in scope, Wasinger said. Last 12 months, STARCOM introduced a three-week training course for space professionals offered to U.S. Air Force Academy and U.S. Military Academy cadets, U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen, in addition to ROTC students considering a commission within the U.S. Space Force.
A central goal of this system, called Azimuth, is to “help prepare our future guardians to prevail in competition and conflict through modern education,” said Wasinger.
The course introduces cadets to space and orbital dynamics through academics, zero-gravity experiments on parabolic aircraft flights, constructing rockets and satellites, and training in immersive mixed-reality environments.
Technologies like augmented and virtual reality are increasingly being applied in space training programs, he said, because they assist operators understand the congested and contested space environment.
Immersive training tools typically are categorized as virtual, augmented or mixed reality.
Virtual reality generally means a computer-generated world experienced through a headset and haptic controllers. Augmented reality systems overlay digital information on real-world elements. In mixed reality, the user interacts with and manipulates physical and virtual items and environments.
About 150 students went through the Azimuth program this summer. They learned concerning the space domain via an augmented and mixed reality tool called Kwyn Solar, which ingests data from the military’s catalog of space objects and displays the space environment on the inside the trainee’s goggles.
Wasinger shared that Space Delta 13 evaluated several products before it chosen Kwyn Solar. Some students get so-called VR motion sickness and like augmented reality, said Wasinger. Using AR headsets, they will see all of the satellites which are on orbit today, find out about their orbital paths, regimes, country of origin and even where their ground stations are positioned.
Reflecting on his own undergraduate training, Wasinger said much of it was confined to the pages of textbooks. While books and two-dimensional models are invaluable, they fall short on the subject of understanding the complexities of space, he said. Orbital mechanics, as an example, are tough to understand through a two-dimensional representation.
DARPA-funded technology
The Kywn Solar tool leverages visualization technologies which have rapidly matured lately, said Robert Hyland, principal scientist at Charles River Analytics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based defense contractor that developed Kwyn Solar.
Charles River Analytics makes a speciality of digital modeling and AI-powered software. The corporate in 2018 was hired by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to assist U.S. military commanders higher understand potential threats in space.
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After the DARPA program led to 2020, the corporate continued to further develop an augmented and mixed reality tool that it had designed for space situational awareness. The product transitioned to a business version named Kwyn Solar — short for Knows What You Need and Space Operation visualizations Leveraging Augmented Reality.
Hyland said Kwyn Solar empowers trainees to visualise and interact with satellite assets, helping their situational awareness and aiding their grasp of satellite roles in military operations. It also facilitates group training by difficult students to tackle hypothetical scenarios conceived by Charles River Analytics’ intelligence experts.
The tool also has been adopted at Officer Undergraduate Space Training and Enlisted Undergraduate Space Training programs at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
“What we heard from trainees and instructors is that they visualize things they never were in a position to before, comparable to a whole constellation,” Hyland said.
Tools more accessible
Augmented and virtual reality technologies have been around for many years, but have undergone significant evolution lately, Hyland noted. Lighter and more cost-effective headsets, coupled with the standardization of software and hardware accessories, have rendered immersive experiences more accessible.
The military is well-positioned to leverage these business products and exploit this technology for training without incurring substantial development costs, he said.
The Space Force stands to profit from these innovations even greater than other branches of the military as a result of the distant nature of its training, Hyland identified. This advantage is compounded by the undeniable fact that the incoming cadre of junior officers and enlisted guardians are from a generation of digital natives, and are in a position to adapt these tools with ease.
Throughout the Azimuth course this summer, “they put the headsets on and inside minutes the cadets were taking videos, passing them around, sharing and teaching one another,” Hyland said.
Considering the extensive array of subjects guardians must master, starting from orbital mechanics to satellite parameter adjustments and conjunction evaluation, the Space Force needs a more efficient pathway to amass knowledge, which immersive training can provide, Hyland said.
Beyond the Air Force Academy, STARCOM is evaluating the applying of immersive technologies to other training programs.
“We’re taking a look at ways to make this technology more widely available to the operational force,” said Wasinger.
The experience of using high-tech tools during undergraduate training “gives them a taste of what’s to come back,” he said. “What we’re attempting to implement is a ‘crawl, walk, run’ type of preparation.”
For instance, the Space Force’s 533rd Training Squadron that oversees officer and enlisted education schemes at Vandenberg is experimenting with augmented reality in an electronic warfare course, said Wasinger.
“We taught the scholars the essential fundamentals of electronic warfare after which using this digital capability we had them play in teams and check out to stop degradation of certain frequencies,” he said. The immersive technology is not any substitute for the Space Force’s extensive electronic warfare education program, Wasinger noted, but it surely helps students sharpen their critical considering, something that was hard to do once they only had textbooks.
Training for proliferated space
One other change happening within the Space Force — and more likely to impact training programs — is the adoption of commercial-like proliferated constellations.
The military traditionally has operated a comparatively small variety of bespoke satellites comparable to GPS, communications and missile-warning spacecraft. Over the subsequent several years, the Space Force’s Space Development Agency will acquire tons of of satellites that can form a network often called the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. This vast constellation in low Earth orbit will support military communications and missile threat detection.
Because the Space Force prepares to bring these proliferated networks of satellites into the fleet, additional training initiatives will come into play, said Jeffrey Schrader, vp of world situational awareness at Lockheed Martin Space.
Satellite operations units will need advanced tools to learn find out how to control large constellations and to automate tasks through artificial intelligence, he said. The Space Force desires to shift more resources to the protection and defense of space, so it must reap the benefits of AI and machine learning to administer satellite constellations with minimal staff, Schrader added.
Lockheed Martin is working on latest products that automate quite a few tasks typically requiring human intervention, he said. The corporate recently unveiled a cloud-based satellite operations center run by AI-driven software that may manage satellite data and predict and mitigate hardware malfunctions, said Schrader.
“Because the Space Force moves towards fighting in a special approach to deter adversaries,” he said, “it must utilize technologies which are on the market to operate in a more efficient way.” .
Culture of ‘continuous improvement’
The Space Force must be “purpose built” for the challenges of strategic competition, Saltzman said on the AFA conference. This implies investing in exercises, wargames, training and education “to be certain that our personnel are equipped with the newest knowledge, skills, tools and experiences,” he said.
Saltzman also cautioned that the adoption of latest technology requires changes in culture.
“It isn’t nearly acquiring latest weapons and equipment, but additionally about fostering a culture of continuous improvement,” he said. “We must continually evaluate how we train and educate our force in order that we will prepare them to handle uncertainty, ambiguity and ‘black swan’ events.”
Saltzman mentioned the conflict in Ukraine as testament to the centrality of space in modern warfare. He also reminded the audience that “technology isn’t a force enabler by itself. It’s concerning the readiness of the forces using that technology that can tip the scales toward success.”