Simulation Based Development and Evaluation of Space Superiority System Concepts

Abstract

Space Superiority, which envelopes Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and Defensive/Offense Counterspace (DCS/OCS), is a national security imperative. Selecting system concepts that optimize coverage areas while ensuring high quality, actionable data products can be a daunting task in the best fiscal environments. With the present budgetary constraints, it is even more important to optimize system concepts that provide critical operational capabilities against their respective life-cycle costs. This requires significant innovation, not only to perform SSA, DCS and OCS missions from a technical standpoint, but also from an economic standpoint. It is well established that the majority of a system’s life cycle cost is set prior to the first project milestone. Much of this occurs during the Concept Definition and Analysis of Alternative (AoA) sub-phases, as well as the Concept Selection milestone. Simulation based analysis offers great potential for advantage in Concept Definition and evaluation of concepts for AoA and Concept Selection. Sufficiently developed simulation capabilities could be used to assess the operational utility of a new concept, identify critical performance metrics for a given mission, compare competing concepts against performance metrics, quantify technical risks of the system even beyond the development phase, and identify significant contributors to life cycle cost by potentially simulating the entire life cycle of the system concept. Substantial system simulation technology exists but is only focused on pieces of the overall problem of simulating the entire life cycle. By bringing these pieces together into a consolidated life-cycle simulation based assessment, system concepts could be designed not only for performance, but also to minimize life-cycle cost. Furthermore, they can be evaluated with respect to system peculiarities that contribute to cost throughout the life of the system.