Golden Dome concept. Photo: Via Satellite archive

For the Golden Dome missile defense system, getting data about ballistic or hypersonic missile launches from sensors to the fusion engine which provides 3D tracking and finally to the interceptors that will target and destroy it is an extraordinarily complex problem. Industry experts in a March 23 SATShow Week panel on missile defense said it wasn’t one that could be solved with technology alone. 

“I don’t think it’s as much a technical challenge as it is a political or maybe bureaucratic challenge,” said Devin Elder, senior director for Communications and Networking Strategy and Business Development for Northrop Grumman Strategic Space Systems.

“There’s agencies that have sensors which can provide data that would be very useful for the missile defense mission, but they’re designed for a completely different purpose,” he said, adding that it is not a standardization or interoperability issue.

“There’s sensor data out there from sensors that were built by agencies [other than the] Space Force, and oftentimes it’s very hard to get that data into the fusion engine. There are the usual bureaucratic stovepipes,” he said, describing a series of organizational stumbling blocks including classification levels and data assurance issues, and the different legal authorities under which military and intelligence agencies operate.

“It is not a technology problem that we’re facing right now,” agreed Paul Wloszek, vice president and general manager of Spectrum Solutions at L3Harris Technologies. “Integration is probably the largest challenge that we are seeing because of the multiple phenomenologies that we’re bringing to the sensing domain,” including optical telescopes, radar signatures and the infrared spectrum — both in space and on the ground. 

The challenge for the data fusion engine, he said, is turning those multiple two-dimensional images into a single three-dimensional track of a missile. “To take all that information and output an answer in … seconds, because of the speed at which these decisions have to be made, we all have to be speaking the same language. Standards [are] a critical part of that.”

Even within a single domain like infrared, Wloszek added, “We’ve seen some differences in interpretation of standards that we’ve had to work through over the last couple of years.”

Another issue impacting data fusion and integration is product quality concerns from the agencies that owned the data, said Elder, explaining that organizations oftentimes didn’t want to share raw data, but only “final [analytical] products that they [can] fully stand behind.” Whereas a missile defense system couldn’t wait for the data to be crunched, he said, “You need the data as fast as you can get it.”

In part that is because of the evolution of the threat, added Wloszek. “In the 1960s … we could estimate where an [inter-continental ballistic missile, or] ICBM would go based on ballistic physics,” he said. Today, “the threat environment has changed dramatically. … The threat that we’re living with right now is a highly maneuverable hypersonic missile, which at the low end, is traveling [at] 16,000 miles per hour.”

That necessitates a different approach to the sensors needed, explained Robin Dickey, director of Policy and Government Affairs for Slingshot Aerospace. What could once be accomplished by a single infrared sensor in orbit, now required a hybrid, multi-domain, multi-orbit, multi-phenomenology architecture, capable of not just detecting a threat, but following it. 

“To actually maintain a track once you’ve identified an object … there’s no ‘one sensor type to rule them all,’” she said. “Looking up [from the ground], you’re going to see very different aspects of an object than you would looking down [from space]. The background is different. The object itself could look different. And so having both of those directions is very important when you’re trying to look at increasingly complex missile threats.”

She also noted that space-based capabilities needed to be guarded against enemy attack. “All of these different phenomenologies are really important … and so I would say, when you’re thinking about a combined, integrated missile defense, every aspect of the environment — in space, on Earth, weather on Earth, space weather threats — they all have to be considered if you’re actually going to be able to conduct the mission in real time, especially if the adversary knows you have this capability and wants to get involved and mess with it.”

There were unexpected synergies between missile defense and weather detection, added Wloszek. “Weather is a real-time mission, just like missile defense is a real-time mission, and both use the infrared part of the spectrum to provide decision making,” he explained. In fact, he went on, the on-orbit demonstrator L3Harris had built to show its missile defense capabilities was a multi-mission satellite that had been able to track Hurricane Helene. “We used that to open a discussion about the 99% of the time that this missile defense capability is not providing missile defense services. How else can it help and kind of defray the taxpayer’s investment.”

Moderator Clayton Swope of the Center for Strategic and International Studies added that, given the huge amount of data required, bandwidth, latency and the speed of human decision-making will all be constraints. “That’s why we’re pushing data processing towards the tactical edge. The timelines that missile defense works on, you have to eventually get to a point where it is human out of the loop. We’re not quite there,” he said.