Harvey Reed, MITRE; Nick Tsamis, MITRE; Nathaniel Dailey, MITRE
Keywords: space domain awareness, space traffic management, supply chain
Abstract:
Space sustainability includes in-orbit salvage, reuse, and repair operations by disparate stakeholders, and requires greater stakeholder coordination than presently available. In May 2022 in the House Space and Science Subcommittee, Moriba Jah testified “The US White House recently delivered a strategy on In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing. The need for continuing supervision could not be more important than this developing space sector. In order to meet the needs of this community, there must be an unambiguous and distributed immutable ledger of who did what to whom when and where. As of this very testimony, I would challenge any government to demonstrate that it is currently capable of delivering such a capability. More complaints of harmful interference, damage, and threats will be raised whilst we are left ill prepared to assemble the evidence required to assess and quantify space events and activities.” Similarly, traffic management is soon to become more complex and require advanced stakeholder coordination with the introduction of regular cislunar traffic.
Combined, both space sustainability and traffic management require not just a level of coordination which informs stakeholders of activities, but rather a higher degree of trusted and dynamic space stakeholder coordination to enable self-synchronization, enabling dynamic and independent actions. This higher degree of stakeholder coordination may not be achievable with todays legacy approaches and capabilities.
Trusted information means that the information is attributed, available, has known pedigree and provenance, and is not controlled by any individual stakeholder or subset of stakeholders, and cannot be maliciously altered. Dynamic coordination means that stakeholders can independently make decisions, based on trusted and shared information. Independent decision making enables stakeholders to self-synchronize their activities, and dynamically respond to events. Examples of trusted space data includes the position of space objects (during launch, in-orbit, or de-orbit), the activity of object X (sustain orbit, maneuver, or decommission), and more. Other trusted space data could include pedigree and provenance of parts used in on-orbit repair operations establishing a supply chain for space repair depots.
Ecosystems of manufacturing supply chain stakeholders grouping to share critical information is discussed at length in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Internal Report NIST IR 8419 published in April 2022, Blockchain and Related Technologies to Support Manufacturing Supply Chain Traceability: Needs and Industry Perspectives. There is direct applicability from terrestrial manufacturing supply chain to space supply chain (on orbit repair and manufacturing). There is a strong analog from terrestrial manufacturing supply chain to space information supply chain, where pedigree and provenance of critical information is similar in importance as pedigree and provenance for supply chain parts.
Space Information Sharing Ecosystem (SISE) is a candidate ecosystem and ledger approach for trusted and symmetric space information sharing, building on the observations in NIST IR 8419. SISE is a socio-technical enabler that uses decentralized data technology (ledger) in combination with an ecosystem of space stakeholders who govern and agree to share a defined minimal set of information to accomplish ecosystem objectives. All ecosystem stakeholders share a common data picture of information shared in the ecosystem.
The thesis of this paper is that when individual stakeholders have access to trusted data in a symmetric manner, then one of the emergent effects is coordinated space activities and the increased safety, and the preservation of space. Decentralized socio-technical enablers are required because there is no single controlling authority over space as an international domain. The paper concludes with a call to action to pursue international prototypes of SISE to prove or disprove the thesis.
Date of Conference: September 19-22, 2023
Track: Space Domain Awareness