Space Force declares ATLAS space domain awareness software ‘operational’

WASHINGTON — The Space Force announced today that its software-centric program for managing, processing and disseminating space monitoring data, the Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis System (ATLAS), has been accepted as “operational.”

The move paves the way for the service to finally rid itself of its dysfunctional 1980s-era computer system called the Space Defense Operations Center (SPADOC), which as been used to keep tabs on satellites, spacecraft and dangerous space junk even after nearly two decades of failed replacement efforts.

Operational acceptance of ATLAS delivers the “the key capabilities [needed] to not be reliant on the SPADOC system,” Shannon Pallone, program executive officer of Battle Management, Command, Control, Communications, and Space Intelligence (BMC3I) at the service’s primary acquisition unit, Space Systems Command, told Breaking Defense on Sept. 16.

ATLAS’s official greenlight comes after a nearly year-long trial period for the software at Space Operations Command’s Mission Delta 2, headquartered at Vandenberg SFB, Calif.

Pallone, speaking in an exclusive interview during the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance conference in Hawaii, explained that since the trial began delta operators successfully have been using the system to create actual tracking data for space objects.

“[O]n the ops floor, it’s generating a catalog — it’s publishing data to Space-track.org They’re using that as a primary system,” she said.

SPADOC originally came online in the 1980s and was by 2017 an “old clunker” that wasn’t fit for space warfighting functions, according to then-head of Air Force Space Command Gen. Jay Raymond, who went on to lead the Space Force.

The ATLAS project, initiated in 2018 and contracted to L3Harris, was designed as part of a larger Space Force effort to replace and improve upon the infamously flawed Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) Mission System (JMS). The JMS program began in 2009 to replace SPADOC, but after a decade of effort and not quite $1 billion in spending it was killed in 2018.

The Space Force originally planned for ATLAS to become operational in 2022, but the program has been bedeviled by technical issues and schedule delays — to the point where then-Air Force Space Acquisition Executive Frank Calvelli in 2023 dubbed it one of the Space Force’s three most troubled programs.

The decommissioning of SPADOC, Pallone said, will be a game-changing achievement.

“Maybe that’s when I’m just like: ‘I retire’,” she joked. “It’ll be a major coup.”

A Space Operations Command spokesperson told Breaking Defense today that at the moment there isn’t a set timeframe for SPADOC to be shut down.

Pallone stressed that ATLAS’s operational acceptance is a first step to improving the Space Force’s ability to detect, track, and characterize objects in space in a precise enough way to allow persistent “eyes” on adversary satellites.

“That’s really just the start of getting after where we need to go in space domain awareness as a mission,” she said. “I’m in a new baseline, and now I can start to do some really exciting things with that, and I can start to actually get after gaps instead of getting after modernizing. … I want to get out of modernization into closing gaps, and this is going to let us do that.”