Rishi P. Patel, United States Air Force; Varlin V. Sheffey, United States Space Force; Joseph D. Gerber, KBR; Riley Burfield, Tech7 Consulting, LLC; Ryan Waterer, Tech7 Consulting, LLC; James Tippets, MITRE Corporation; David Stout, MITRE Corporation; Emily Bohner, United States Space Force
Keywords: Dragon Army, DevOps, Agile, Space Camp, JCO, Innovation, SACT, AFRL, SDA, Space Domain Awareness, STM, Space Traffic Management, International
Abstract:
DRAGON Army: An Innovation Pipeline for Space Operations
Rishi P. Patel
United States Air Force
Varlin V. Sheffey
United States Space Force
Joseph D. Gerber
KBR, United States
Riley Burfield
Tech7 Corporation, United States
Ryan Waterer
Tech7 Corporation, United States
Emily Bohner, Ph.D.
United States Space Force
Abstract
In September 2019, The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) established a program called the DRAGON (Defense Readiness Agile Gaming Ops Networks) Army Operations to revolutionize the way the DoD (Department of Defense) develops, validates, and integrates operational software for the space warfighter. Designed to support the space domain awareness community, Dragon Army creates applications through DevOps processes that demonstrate their efficacy by supporting the Joint Task Force Space Defense Commercial Operation (JCO) Cell in daily operations. In addition, Dragon Army also sponsors the international Sprint Advanced Concept Training (SACT) experiment series [Gerber et al. 2019]. The AFRL Dragon Army agile software development framework enables advanced space domain awareness (SDA) and space traffic management (STM) collaboration by creating an operationally-relevant space operations environment that fosters continuous learning. The Dragon Army accomplishes this by bringing in operational applications and capabilities from commercial and DoD software factories into an open-architecture environment where they are made interoperable and capabilities are validated through a cycle of experiments. The Dragon Army Operations environment is a Live-Virtual-Constructive (LVC) simulation environment where simulated data is layered over real-world live data through a data gateway that emulates the Unified Data Library (UDL). This approach provides a simple plug-and-play functionality for vendor partners to test and receive data-driven feedback on emerging capabilities and technologies. This software environment facilitates a two-week development-deploy-feedback cycle which is constantly iterating and allows capabilities to mature based on live operational feedback. In partnership with allied militaries/commercial industry and the U.S. Air National Guard, the JCO seeks to expand operations among multiple coordinated operations centers globally. In support of this vision, the Dragon Army Synchronization Service enables the real-time system-to-system synchronization of operator events and actions to populate mission management boards for U.S. and Allied space operator teams which is critical to supporting the goal of 24/7 commercial space operations. In addition to the Synch Service, the Dragon Army has created a suite of collaboration tools that provide a low-barrier-to-entry for vetting and integrating new capabilities including the White Cell LVC Architecture (Trogdor 2.0) and a management-layer tools for tasking, data visualization, product consolidation, and reporting (Mission Management Toolsuite). This methodology has led to some significant achievements for the Dragon Army to include the expansion and growth of the SACT, which represents an integration of over 70 organizations across commercial, DoD, allied partners and academic institutions, and achieved unprecedented performance metrics for quality and timeliness, specifically in response to taskings and requests from our DoD centers during exercises and regular operations. This expansion resulted in a successful test of global distributed operations across three sun-synchronized cells during the SACT, which represents a large step in achieving the goals of international partnerships and commercial and collaborative ownership of the STM mission. In addition to this, the Dragon Army partnered with the Department of Commerce (DoC) by demonstrating potential concepts during the SACT exercise series that would support the transfer of the STM mission to the Office of Space Commerce (OSC). This paper shows how this novel innovation pipeline contributes to the SDA & STM mission, while enabling startup, commercial, academia, and allied collaboration.
Date of Conference: September 27-20, 2022
Track: SSA/SDA