Slingshot Aerospace has landed a $25.2 million contract from the US Space Force (USSF) to expand its Digital Space Twins to represent satellite orbits, space weather and radio interference. The investment will help the company develop a government version of its technology for war games and mission planning. Additionally, it will also fund Slingshot Laboratory to improve space training.

Government and commercial operators plan to launch more than 115,000 satellites by 2030, increasing the risk of collisions. The increasing number of satellites also increases the chances that some satellites could launch attacks on others, either by the operators themselves or by hackers who manage to compromise the control systems.

Satellite operators consider dozens of approaches when launching a new satellite into orbit, including space weather, orbit, space debris, and the dynamics of their spacecraft. A digital twin can help them model and evaluate the safest, fastest and most efficient way to achieve their goals and deploy satellites.

The company’s Digital Space Twin combines real-time mapping of orbiting objects and space weather data with physics-based simulations to show users how planned missions will perform in the real space environment. The new digital twin is based on the Slingshot Beacon service which provides a kind of air traffic control system for satellite operators. The service launched last August and benefited from Slingshot’s acquisition of Stellatus Solutions earlier in the year.

Slingshot Beacon helps operations teams share updates on their satellite fleets with each other and provides an actively curated directory of operator contacts and reports on environmental anomalies such as solar flares. It also automates workflows to detect possible collisions and adjust orbits to compensate. The service is used by companies such as OneWeb, Spire Global, Orbit Fab and others which currently make up more than half of the satellite constellations in low Earth orbit.

The company has developed the Digital Space Twin tool over the past two years. The latest contract will help align the software with USSF requirements to analyze and respond to current and future threats. Slingshot also plans to launch a commercial product before the final government rollout.

Exponential growth

Like many aspects of technology, the number of satellites slated for launch is growing exponentially. This is great when it comes to improving climate change mapping, communication and planning. It gets bad when it comes to mitigating the impact of space debris, security risks, and radio interference.

“I realized how quickly the space domain was becoming more and more complex with an increasing number of satellites, large amounts of orbital debris and more and more nations competing for superiority,” said Melanie Stricklan, co-founder from Slingshot, to VentureBeat.

She and Thomas Ashman co-founded Slingshot to accelerate space sustainability and create a safer, more connected world. They then teamed up with entrepreneur David Godwin in 2017 to solve this problem for space operators.

The number of satellites has tripled since the company launched in 2017 to more than 7,000 today and is expected to reach 115,000 by 2030.

“As space becomes more crowded, the risk of accidents increases dramatically, which means collision avoidance decisions and maneuvers will need to be made across all government, commercial and civilian space entities,” Stricklan said. .

Constellation planning is gaining importance as teams identify the most cost-effective ways to launch larger fleets and then safely decommission them at end-of-life. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has already launched more than 2,000 low-cost satellites. The FCC has authorized the company to deploy 12,000 more and has filed with the International Telecommunications Union to approve spectrum for 30,000 more satellites.

Similarly, Amazon’s Kuiper project envisions a constellation of 3,236 satellites. Meanwhile, several other organizations are also planning large satellite constellations, including China’s Guo Wang (12,992), Britain’s OneWeb (6,372) and South Korea’s Samsung (4,700).

A complete digital twin of space could help improve the complex planning of these large constellations. It could also help other, smaller efforts avoid the rapidly growing fleet of living satellites and dead satellites that fail to burn up properly at the end of their useful life.

In addition to the growing number of satellites, operators must plan for four categories of threats that could compromise in-orbit sustainability, including:

• The increase in debris could make Earth orbit more difficult to access.
• A conflict could increase debris and complicate operations.
• Space weather events could directly damage hardware and increase debris for others.
• Radio frequency congestion and degradation.

Matching space

The digital twin captures new data about objects in space from a variety of sources reflecting electromagnetic interference, space weather, debris patterns and observations.

“It is necessary for the Digital Space Twin to ingest as much reliable data as possible from all of these sources in order to provide useful interactive information,” Stricklan said. This helps users predict future behaviors of objects in the space environment, understand trends by examining current and past data, and enables more reliable mapping, modeling, and scenario planning.

Then it models their movement and simulates future scenarios. For example, it could allow teams to simulate nefarious acts such as explosions, rammings, or electromagnetic attacks on satellites to help teams plan various responses and evaluate results. Satellite operators could also plan the best course of action when unknown objects approach a satellite.

The initial focus is on pairing space closest to Earth, ranging from low Earth orbit (LEO) to geosynchronous orbit (GEO). But even when considering these closer orbits, it is essential to consider the whole space domain, because each source of information can have an impact on the satellites and spacecraft located in these orbits.

Competitors focused on space sustainability include companies like Leo Labs and Kayhan. Leo Labs offers a space mapping service calibrated by ground-based phased array radars. Kayhan has developed a suite of integrated spaceflight operations tools. Slingshot is focused on virtualizing the entire space operating environment, including space weather and radio interference.

The three companies provide complementary services to help evolve space operations in a safe and sustainable way. “It will take a collective effort across the industry to ensure that space remains a tenet of our global economy for generations to come,” Stricklan said.

Big data for older twins

Most digital twins focus on individual items like a consumer product, vehicle, or building. The Digital Space Twin models the larger space environment and is designed to scale with petabytes of data.

Other large companies are similarly pairing entire environments for climate change research, sustainability planning, smart cities and supply chains. Nvidia recently announced plans to map over 500,000 kilometers of roads by 2024 that could be continually updated with new data from passenger vehicles.

Stricklan said: “While these large-scale digitized environments are rare today, they are rapidly becoming more common for all types of industries. Engineers and designers are now learning that a digital twin of a material item, whether it’s a car, plane, or rocket, can only provide so much information. useful. Instead, they need a twin of the environment in which the hardware operates to generate useful data that speeds up their development cycle, increases safety, and improves quality.

In some ways, this represents a full circle for the initial ideas behind digital twins. Michael Grieves points to the original work simulating Apollo 13 lunar missions in the 1960s by sowing the seeds of modern digital twins.

NASA simulators ingested data from multiple sources, including telemetry and simulated results in response. This allowed the engineering teams to run various simulations between astronauts and engineers before departure and came in handy when things broke down on a mission in 1970. The engineering team on the ground helped the astronauts troubleshoot issues, which was critical to getting the astronauts to safety. residence.

Massive advances in sensing and data management have allowed Slingshot to adapt these fundamental ideas to space itself. “While organizations have used digital twin-specific hardware for years, Slingshot Aerospace is the first company to create a digital twin of the entire space operating environment, both physical and non-physical,” said said Stricklan.