Architecturing the future national security space domain awareness acquisition enterprise

Space-based capabilities are increasingly critical to prosperity in the United States (US) and around the globe. They are deeply embedded within society's vital functions and even more tightly intertwined with US national security capabilities across all warfighting domains. The disruption to these capabilities severely diminishes US warfighting capability. Space Domain Awareness (SDA) systems provides space environment and activity information to decisionmakers to enable action. These systems are prerequisite for the defense of US space capabilities. Adversaries see US dependence on space as an attractive target and are rapidly developing capabilities to deny US access to these systems at the time the nation would need them most. These threatening capabilities are eroding the longstanding US technological advantage in space. The US must react with capability development efforts that outpace the threat, but acquisitions have been stymied by a fragmented enterprise, risk adversity, burdensome acquisition processes, and oversight requirements that delay capability delivery, including SDA capabilities. Concurrently, staggering growth in commercial space activity is making the space environment more congested and increasing difficulty of the SDA mission. Fortunately, commercial capabilities that can support the NSS SDA acquisition enterprise have also evolved.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Kelly, Aaron Joseph (Researcher in engineering and management).

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Donna H. Rhodes.

• Engineering Systems Division.
• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/145231

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/145231