This fiscal year, the U.S. Space Force is to award a contract to modernize the service’s Unified Data Library (UDL), which began as a $150,000 research and development effort in 2018 between the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Space and Missile Systems Center–now Space Force’s Space Systems Command at Los Angeles AFB, Calif.
The “enhanced UDL” has 176 new requirements, Lisa Costa, the Space Force’s chief technology and innovation officer, told a Michell Institute for Aerospace Studies’ Schriever Space Power virtual forum on Nov. 8. “We want to use AI to cleanse data. We want to have Guardians be able to put data directly into the Unified Data Library without having to go through a contractor, as an example. We want to reduce the backlog that gets created in systems that require a lot of human intervention.”
UDL “was a pilot developed by AFRL,” she said. “The design of it [UDL] is quite old. However, it met the need at the time based on the amount of data that was being produced by the Space Force. That was not a lot of data. We didn’t have a lot of commercial assets. In fact, I don’t think we had any commercial assets in space at the time that pilot was developed.”
“This is a new time and place where we have massive amounts of commercial data being produced,” Costa said. “Don’t think of it as just commercial data being produced in space and from space. There’s also commercial data about space being produced that needs to be processed as well. That calls for a very different architecture and very modern systems that allow us to address different temporal aspects of data. Those requirements for an enhanced UDL are very important. That contract is supposed to be let in FY 24.”
The aim of UDL has been to serve as a centralized, cloud-based data repository for space domain awareness/space defense and is to contain data from DoD, academic, commercial, and foreign sources.
In April, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report said that Space Force faces challenges in making UDL an integral part of space domain awareness (Defense Daily, Apr. 24).
“The Space Force has deployed an initial operational version of the UDL and plans to further develop it; however, staff who monitor objects in space are not using it in daily SSA [space situational awareness] operations because it is not integrated into their operational systems.,” the GAO said in its April report. “A plan on how to use the UDL with SSA operational systems would facilitate the Space Force’s ability to benefit from the amount of data in the UDL.”
In 2021, Colorado-based Bluestaq LLC received a $280 million Space Force contract to develop the UDL (Defense Daily, May 4, 2021).
While space object tracking has been the province of DoD, a number of commercial companies are able to perform such tracking, and DoD should boost its use of such commercial tracking, GAO said in its April report.