Boulder, CO-based Ball Aerospace announced on March 7 that it has been selected to continue work on the Space Evaluation and Analysis Capability (SEAC) testbed for the second phase of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Hallmark program. The Hallmark program is advancing technologies that deliver real-time space-domain awareness informing the command and control and protection of space assets.
As part of the Hallmark program’s second
phase, Ball will collaborate with a set of independent software development
teams and conduct three additional evaluation events in which the company will
run mock space operations exercises to evaluate software tool performance.
During the first phase of the Hallmark program, Ball completed five successful
evaluations of the testbed.
“Our revolutionary open architecture
approach brings commercial capabilities and best practices like rapid
integration of new services and secure DevOps to the Department of
Defense,” said Steve Smith, vice president and general
manager, Systems Engineering Solutions, Ball Aerospace. “We look forward
to continuing the successful demonstration of our enterprise software
architecture’s capabilities during the second phase of the Hallmark
program.”
With 30 years of experience developing unique and accurate exploitation algorithms for satellite systems, Ball understands the challenges of integrating new features into operational systems. Under the Hallmark program, Ball is working to streamline this process, bringing essential mission capabilities into operations faster than ever before. Ball’s approach to the SEAC testbed design eliminates the single-contractor integration bottleneck in traditional acquisition models. This modern software development practice succeeds by enabling external tool developers to rapidly design and test capabilities in an operations-like environment without risking system security or stability.
Source: Ball Aerospace
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