For years, digital twins have been touted as the next big thing in the space industry. While the technology is still evolving, companies in the industry are seeing an increasing demand for digital engineering tools to design complex satellite networks.

“We’ve finally reached the transition point from being a buzzword and too much cynicism to people who see a real need,” said Robbie Robertson, co-founder and CEO of Sedaro, a digital engineering startup. software focused on space systems.

The Arlington, Virginia-based company was founded in 2016. It has raised nearly $3 million in small business research grants from the Department of Defense and NASA and has attracted venture capital. Robertson said the scale and complexity of satellite constellations make digital twins a necessity. The problem, especially for military programs, is that outdated digital design tools that have been rebranded as digital twins have been sold, he said.

“When you combine the virtual and the physical, you can manage complexity to a degree that humans can’t,” he said when planning and designing large satellite arrays.

Robertson said digital twins are gaining momentum in military satellite programs as the Department of Defense plans next-generation space systems. The Sedaro software is used by the Pentagon’s requirements organization, which oversees the purchase of large systems, he said. For example, the digital twin of a missile tracking satellite network helps decision makers fine-tune their satellite acquisition requirements.

The space force is using a digital doppelganger to plan an experiment called Tetra 5 to refuel orbiting satellites. “This is an example of an application that requires a digital response along with the physical system,” said Robertson.

AI platform for digital engineering

The military’s space programs are also targeted customers for a digital engineering firm called Istari, backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and led by former Pentagon purchasing officer Will Roper. Roper, founder and CEO of Istari, said that if the platforms could be designed, tested and even certified using simulation and simulation, the development of military aircraft, satellites and other systems could be made faster and cheaper.

He said that is not possible today because military procurement programs are based on a mix of models and simulations of different contractors that do not work together in an integrated digital environment. The Istari AI platform will serve as a common operating system for models and simulations. The idea is to allow any model to connect and run, no matter who owns it.

Space forces could really benefit from the technology, Roper said. For example, a satellite operator will train on the same model an engineer designed. There will be a true digital stream, allowing engineers to constantly update and improve their designs with real-time user data.

A “real” digital stunt

Robertson said customers are often overwhelmed by marketing buzzwords and different definitions of the digital twin. He describes it as “a high-precision virtual representation of a physical system that exists throughout its lifecycle until the behavior of the orbiting system and its counterpart are perfectly synchronized.”

In April, Sedaro released an updated version of its cloud-based digital engineering tool that it hopes will convince skeptics that the tech isn’t just another hyper-trend.

“A lot of people are disappointed at the point where we’re at in digital engineering for space systems,” he said. This is understandable because “we did not use software to significantly improve the complexity and quality of the hardware technology.”

The Department of Defense’s satellite programs relied on a messy mix of proprietary and decades-old commercial software products to develop their own digital counterparts. These legacy technologies cannot scale to the large arrays of satellites the military plans to build in the future, such as the Space Agency’s low-Earth orbit architecture, Robertson said.

Digital engineering for constellation planning

In its latest competition for communications satellites, the Space Agency is asking contractors to provide digital representations of their satellites so the agency can build models. “They didn’t specifically call digital twins,” but they’re moving in that direction, Robertson said. “There are many buttons that can enable what digital twins could mean for a particular organization.”

For the Department of Defense, having digital copies of operational satellites “really is the most exciting future application of this technology,” he said. Traditionally, people think of engineering simulation as a design tool “before you have the hardware, before you have the physical system”.

“But digital twins will be used primarily for operations, simulating a system with really high accuracy so you can optimize its use, find military vulnerabilities, and do predictive maintenance; that’s how digital twins are used a lot in other industries.”

To be valid in the defense market, digital engineering platforms must be interoperable, Internet-like environments, so the Department of Defense is not dependent on a single vendor, he said. Organizations like SDA that buy satellites from different manufacturers don’t want to pay millions of dollars for incompatible models and software.

Robertson said the Space Force is making an effort to introduce digital technology into every aspect of its operations, and that will include digital engineering.

It’s still unclear what this actually means at the user level, he said. “Management says we will be a digital service, but they rely on legacy providers of bespoke software tools.”

Under the new program, called the National Space Test and Training Facility, the Space Force will seek industry proposals for a range of technologies, including digital engineering.

“There are all these digital engineering ecosystems and toolkits, including the digital counterparts,” Robertson said. “But there is no clear winner.”

They have tough decisions ahead of them in this area, he said: “They have all these repetitive, unnecessary efforts. So which one will be the working cloud ecosystem?”

Space Systems Command announced plans in April to launch a digital engineering “ecosystem platform” to help the U.S. Space Force and mission partners stay ahead of threats. The digital platform, expected to be completed in 2025, “will help integrate existing digital engineering efforts into the USSF ecosystem.” Source