Cislunar Space Economy Gets Boost As US Air Force Looks To Companies For New Technologies
The Air Force wants to expand domain awareness beyond geosynchronous orbit as it becomes more crowded and competitive. They seek to develop additional capabilities for space-based assets that cut down on size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C). This continues the military’s overall trend away from “big, juicy targets”.
The Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center, or JICSpOC, at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado went live in October 2015 as collaboration among the U.S. Strategic Command, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Air Force Space Command, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the intelligence community and commercial data providers. Credit: U.S. Air Force.
In pursuit of this objective, the Air Force recently released a commercial request for Phase I SBIR/STTR contract proposal that includes Cislunar Space Operations under Space Technologies, one of their 19 official Focus Areas. This addition is intended to include any technologies applicable to the cislunar environment. This document describes a wide array of capabilities, including:
Payloads for providing space domain awareness from the lunar surface.
Low SWaP-C, wide field of view sensors for space-based space domain awareness.
Study to provide methodologies for orbit determination and catalog maintenance in cislunar space. Objectives of the study would be to define the contents and requirements for a catalog of cislunar custody data, investigate ML/AI tools to associate observations, both astrometric and photometric, with orbit information, methodology to improve orbital information with multiple observations, and a methodology to predict degradation of orbital information during observational gaps.
Concepts for providing position, navigation, and timing solutions for cislunar space operations.
Study on providing low SWaP-C optical communication (total power, beam size, pointing, data rates, etc.) links from Earth to cislunar space and vice versa.
High delta-V propulsion concepts especially supporting green fuels
Concepts for providing visualization of cislunar orbits/trajectories.
Terrestrial-based concepts for providing space domain awareness of cislunar space.
The upshot to space resources is in continual development of cislunar economy. Any lunar surface operations can benefit from locally-sourced materials, and technologies like high delta-V water plasma propulsion have the advantage of fuel that is both “green” and source-agnostic.
