Iron Stallion®: Next-gen Space Domain Awareness

Protecting space means protecting life as we know it. That’s not hyperbole. So how do we do that? One solution in KBR’s space portfolio is Iron Stallion®, part of a renowned software suite that helps governments around the world find, watch, track and report on the movement of objects in space. Listen as Missy Thomas and Liz Pearce of KBR Mission Technology Solutions discuss this game-changing technology and its critical role in the new race for space.

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IN ORBIT: A KBR PODCAST

Season 5, Episode 4

Iron Stallion®: Next-gen Space Domain Awareness

INTRODUCTION

John Arnold

Hello, I'm John and this is In-Orbit. Welcome to the podcast, beautiful people. Whether you're tuning in for the first time or are a long-time orbiter, we are grateful to you for checking in and staying in our orbit. We have listeners all around the world, which when you think about it, is kind of amazing, but also something we might take for granted.

When many of us were growing up, we dreamed of galaxies far, far away, and were told that space was the final frontier. And while we still have much to learn about space, especially as we set sights on moon colonization and trips to Mars and beyond, it's quietly become part of our day-to-day lives in ways large and small. I hardly ever drive across town without using GPS. We bank from our phones, we can have weird things delivered to our houses in mere hours, we can talk to people thousands of miles away with ease. But while that's happening, space is also playing an increasingly critical role in national security and defense, which is why understanding the space environment is crucial. Simply put, protecting space means protecting life as we know it.

The term applied to our understanding of the space environment is space domain awareness. That includes gathering information on objects in space and their purpose, the surfaces those objects provide, or the threats they pose, and how the natural cycle of space impacts the equilibrium of all those factors. At KBR, we say, "We do things that matter," and that's not just hyperbole, especially in this regard. KBR has built a reputation as a space leader with a portfolio of capabilities from human spaceflight to space domain awareness, and everything in between. Part of that portfolio is Iron Stallion®, part of a renowned software suite that helps governments around the world find, watch, track, and report on the movement of objects in space, capabilities that are paramount in this new race for space.

With us here today to talk about these amazing technologies and how they're being used are Missy Thomas and Liz Pearce. Missy is director of space software with KBR's National Security Solutions Business Unit, and Liz is Australian program manager space with KBR Australia Defense Security Solutions. Welcome to the podcast, Missy and Liz.

INTERVIEW

Missy Thomas

Thank you.

Liz Pearce

Thank you.

John Arnold

Very excited to have you on. It's not often that we get to talk to two people in the same conversation, so this is a treat for our audience and a treat for me. So thank you both again for being with us today.

Before we get into all things Iron Stallion, which I cannot say without immediately thinking of an '80s hairband, I know that our audience would love to hear about you both, your careers, and how you landed up at KBR. And why don't we start with you, Missy?

Missy Thomas

Thanks, John. I went to the University of Michigan for college and got my degree in aerospace engineering, and right after that I started my first job as a satellite system engineer. I was working mission planning for on-orbit satellites, which was the coolest coming straight out of college after studying aerospace. Then after that I worked as a system engineer on various programs that were either satellites or the ground systems that controlled the satellites, command and control. And while I was doing that, I got my graduate degree in system engineering and engineering management, and then I joined KBR in 2016 supporting a small ground project that was just getting started. I stayed with that program basically from cradle to grave, and grew that and grew my career while working on that project and started out as just a system engineer supporting the government and grew that into a team lead role, then program manager, and then a senior program manager, and now director where I am today.

John Arnold

That's fantastic. "Just a systems engineer," she said. That's amazing.

Missy Thomas

Well, I wasn't managing anything at that time yet.

John Arnold

How about you, Liz?

Liz Pearce

Right. So my career has been a little bit more zigzaggy than Missy's, so it took me a little while to actually realize physics was what I wanted to do at university. Tried IT first, did not enjoy it, quit and didn't want to go back to uni, but then just really wanted to actually have a career. So made the very big leap into doing physics at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales in Australia with everybody saying, "Why bother? There's nothing in Australia for physics," which is not untrue at the time, but I loved it and I didn't get into space until I got close to my honors year when there was a space weather research group at my university, so I ended up doing my honors in space weather, which is just the most amazing topic in the world.

And that led me through to working in space weather for a year, and that contract ended and so I got a job within Australian Defence working in position navigation and timing, like GPS kind of stuff, and then a little bit of autonomy towards the end, and that was getting further and further away from space and I realized, "I really love space, I want to get back to that." And the Australian Space Agency had just opened, and so I jumped over to the Australian Space Agency and worked there for five years in a whole bunch of areas, position navigation and timing, again, a bit of autonomy, a bit of space situational awareness or space domain awareness as it turned into halfway through, and I was there for five years.

And so by the end of that I'd come to about 14 years of public service in Australia and I felt like it was really important for me to go and work in private industry. And KBR was a great choice because of the technical focus of the company and the amazing space heritage that KBR has, and so here we are.

John Arnold

That's awesome. Well, you just kind of hit on a common theme for the podcast, and that is when we ask people about their careers, it's sort of a mixed bag. Some people are from jump, they know exactly what they want to do, and then a lot of other people like myself and others, it's not so linear. So, Liz, you mentioned you kind of found your way back to space. Was space something that you were interested in at all at the beginning or was it something, as you say, that you just kind of meandered that way once you got more involved in the technical side of it?

Liz Pearce

Space has always been cool, but I was very much physics focused. I just wanted to learn how things worked. I didn't really have an area that really drove me as a teenager or even going into university. I just wanted to know things and how they worked. But once I got into physics, I really decided that physics was my path. And then when I learned about space physics, it's physics in space, how much cooler could you get really? And so it was all over once I got to the end of university, it was space was my passion.

John Arnold

And, Missy, starting out in aerospace, was space in the periphery of something that you were really, really interested in or was it more general aerospace at that time? And how did it lead towards space for your career?

Missy Thomas

Yeah, I started my space nerd era very young and it has never ended. Started in elementary school. I was trying to think back the other day, I joined a workshop at my elementary school to build my own telescope, and from then on I loved anything space-related. And then when I was a senior in high school trying to decide, "What am I going to do in college?" It just felt natural to go into engineering. I'd always enjoyed science and math and been good at it. And they said, "What kind of engineering do you want to do?" And I was like, "Well, I like space." So I went into aerospace engineering for my studies and it was just amazing, and I knew my career would be in a space-related field.

John Arnold

Excellent. Well, space is definitely the topic of the day today, and it is ubiquitous in our news feeds from lunar landings to Mars rovers, to whatever the James Webb Space Telescope is looking at, to Starlink. And then there are a lot of less savory topics mixed in there as well as it pertains to near-peer threats.

And, Liz, I want to ask you about this. We'll talk about the near-peer threat thing later, but first would you give us some examples of how important space is in our day-to-day lives? Because there's an awful lot of our daily shared human experience that's happening above our heads, and that might seem like our remote concept to a lot of people.

Liz Pearce

Yeah, it's incredibly important to everyone in the entire world. So we've got technology in space that is looking back to earth and doing things back for us. We also have technology on earth looking out into space to learn more about the origins of our planet, of our lives, and each one is as important as the other for impacting everybody. Things like there's thousands of satellites in space, we all know that, there's the crucial satellites that we all depend on. Things like communication satellites to get our TV signals, to get our internet signals even. We've got the GPS satellites and all the other ones, the other constellations that do the same thing. There's about five or so. They give us ... Google Maps get you your navigation to where you want to go.

What a lot of people don't know though is built into that signal is also a timing signal, and that timing signal is in almost every critical system in the world. So our financial transactions, getting your money out of an ATM, synchronization of energy grids to make sure that their power is given and transmitted accurately and safely, it's incredibly important. Then you've got the earth observation satellites and systems that monitor the weather, monitor water quality, monitor emissions, and things in the atmosphere. I mean, this is really topical right now. There's a tropical cyclone bearing down on Queensland and Australia today.

John Arnold

Oh, wow.

Liz Pearce

It's only category two, “only,” I say in quotation marks, but it's already knocking down trees and we're anticipating extreme flooding across a very big part of the East Coast. And without the satellites in space to monitor that and do the predictions, the accurate predictions, we've been able to evacuate people, get them out of the dangerous zones, and it will also help with the cleanup and the response to that. So emergency management is another key part that people don't really think space has anything to do with.

And then there's the even more remote parts. We've got the International Space Station buzzing around Earth, does a couple laps a day, astronauts up there. And that sounds very frivolous, astronauts, what's really their purpose, but the research being conducted in space is incredibly important for back in earth. A lot of technology spinoffs for space activities come back to earth technology. The camera in your phone is a technology that came from work in space and the astronauts on the ISS are doing research into cancer treatments, into osteoporosis research, that will benefit humans all over the world. So space is everywhere and it is incredibly important.

John Arnold

Yeah, it puts things in perspective. Missy, those are examples of how space affects many things we take for granted in normal day-to-day life. Would you please explain why space is such a huge focus from a national security and defense perspective?

Missy Thomas

Yeah, sure. I mean, it's a lot of the same things that Liz already mentioned actually. Space provides a level of situational awareness that without it we would not be able to have. We rely on it for so many important things for our military, communications, navigation, intelligence, surveillance, and really just the usage of space assets to observe global events as well as space events. It helps us prepare ourselves to respond to threats and really just maintains situational awareness of what's happening in space and on land. So, really, space is vital from a national defense and security perspective because it just gives us so much information that we never had before we had those assets.

John Arnold

Liz, how about from a perspective in the Asia-Pacific region, that part of the world is becoming increasingly important strategically and a lot more volatile. How is space becoming a growing national security focus and defense priority, particularly in Australia? And, also, is space domain awareness viewed differently in Australia than other nations? Because it sounds like the space program there is relatively new in comparison to some other international space programs.

Liz Pearce

Sure. So the Australian perspective is definitely different to the US, even in the UK, each of the countries around the world have a different perspective, different focus. So Australia is in the Asia-Pacific and we we're surrounded by a bunch of countries, a bunch of island nations, Pacific island nations, and we feel responsible for our neighbors and keeping them safe. So given that we're at such a big island nation, we need to be able to have the view of all our borders, and our borders are the entire perimeter of our country, which is all water, so you can't put a lot of stuff on the ground or on the water to do surveillance for protection of the country or protection of the nations around us. So space becomes crucial to be able to monitor those areas and also have communications, lines of communications.

As I mentioned earlier, there's a cyclone bearing down, and those cyclones, when they come to Australia, they typically go through a bunch of island nations first, and so the disaster recovery and our defense are very heavily involved in disaster recovery in those Pacific nations as well, so we really need the space capabilities to support those efforts. And space domain awareness for Australia is an up-and-coming area. It's obviously very important in an area we've been aware of for a long time, but it's becoming increasingly important for Australia to have its own capabilities and its own sovereign capabilities, particularly with the transition of the SDA capabilities in the U.S. to the Office of Space Commerce and the impacts that might have in the future, and nothing's really guaranteed yet, but it's important for Australia to know what they need, what information they need, how fast they need it, and why they need it.

So we're going through an exploratory phase as a nation as to what do we need? How does that work? What is civilian versus what is defense requirements? It's a small thing to be cognizant of. And the flip side of that is in Australia, the industry that is serving defense is the same industry that is serving the civilian entities. We don't have an industry big enough to separate and only have defense industry, so it's the same industry that do both. So it's all very nuanced in Australia. There's a lot of commonality, particularly with the U.S., which is why working with Missy is so important to make sure that we can leverage each other's capabilities.

John Arnold

That's fantastic, sort of a microcosm of what's happening on an international level right here at KBR. That's really, really interesting to think about being part of the development of these capabilities at such an early stage. It sounds like it's really, really vital, a vital time in the history of Australia and in the Asia Pacific region. Now we've sort of set the table. Let's talk technology. Missy, would you tell us about Iron Stallion and its associated technologies and what makes it stand out from the crowd? Why is this a game-changer?

Missy Thomas

Thanks, John. Yeah, sure. Iron Stallion is a space domain awareness tool that allows operators and users to know what things are going on in space. It stands out for a few reasons. It can take in many different data sources and data types, and fuse them together. We're talking about massive amounts of data that are just from observations from telescopes and other satellites, and just anything you can think of that is looking at space. And it can ingest all that data, fuse that data, and then it has an automated functionality that can filter through that and create a so what view for the operator, which them spend more time just looking at that information that has been given to them and making decisions rather than having to manually go through this data and try to figure out what's an event, characterizing it, and even identifying it.

And, also, it allows the operator to customize their parameters of things that are important to them. So we like to say it enables a three-click SDA and really brings down the manual functions that someone using Iron Stallion has to do. And then the last thing is the architecture is cloud-enabled and really can be used on any platform.

John Arnold

So it really becomes like it's a rapid single source of truth for these operators?

Missy Thomas

Yeah.

John Arnold

Am I allowed to ask what sorts of things these operators and users might be needing to look at?

Liz Pearce

So in Iron Stallion in particular, it can track all sorts of things. It can track satellites in orbit, things in geostationary, medium Earth orbit, low Earth orbit, can track all of those. It can track rocket debris, any other debris. There is a lot of debris in space, like a lot. And particularly in Australia, it happens to be falling on Australia. There's been a handful of re-entries over the last 12 months, which is dangerous for people and populated environments. And Iron Stallion can track a lot of that stuff and provide predictions on where it's going, what's likely to happen next if a satellite has moved when it's not supposed to move. That's something that it will pick up and tell you automatically and say, "Look out, that satellite moved. Is that a problem? Has it gone closer to another object? Is it going to run into something? Are they going to crash creating more debris? Is that satellite spinning? Is it dead? Is it just a piece of junk now?" It can do all sorts of things.

John Arnold

What does Iron Stallion and this suite of technologies mean for Australian Defence Space Command and how does integrating this U.S. capability into Australian defense work?

Liz Pearce

Great question. So expanding Iron Stallion out from the U.S. into Australia didn't come perfectly. Obviously, there's always teething problems with these kinds of things. So we've been working really closely, Missy and I, to make sure that this is a smooth expansion.

And what is important is that Iron Stallion brings a level of trust to the customer. There's a lot of tools out there that do similar things, I wouldn't say the same, they do similar things. They present what's up in space, where it's going, what it's doing. But what is really important for the operators, particularly in, well, in any defense, really is trust and knowing that the answer that the software is giving you is true, is correct as possible, as true as it could be

John Arnold

Excellent. Well, I just have a couple more questions for you and then I'll let you guys go because I know it's early in the morning on Australia and it's getting later in the evening here in the States. So I'd like to hear from both of you on this one. And, Liz, we'll stay with you for a moment. Would you just tell us about the near and long-term potential for Australian clients in this suite of technologies?

Liz Pearce

Of course. So, as I mentioned, we're in the early stages of expanding Iron Stallion into the Australian market, and there are nuances within the Australian market that need to be taken into account. And that's why Missy and I are working so close together to make sure that we can deal with that, and this is not something that's just for Australia. We're investigating this for other nations around the world to try and have an Iron Stallion for the U.K., for other countries, which is really exciting, really exciting.

As I mentioned, we tend to break the typical data format. And so sometimes most of the data that is used for Iron Stallion comes through a program called the Unified Data Library, UDL, and it has its typical data formats and everybody forms into those, and some of our Australian capabilities don't fit in there. So how do we deal with that? Do we make them fit or do we have some other path into Iron Stallion that might make it a little bit easier? So there's a lot to do and really unpack a lot more of those nuances of the Australian requirements, and then how we can satisfy those. So it's really exciting.

John Arnold

That's very exciting. Missy, same question for you. What's on the horizon for Iron Stallion and its related suite of technologies?

Missy Thomas

So I want to echo what Liz said. We are so excited to be working with her and helping her bring this solution to her Australian customers, and it's been awesome, and I can't wait for that to continue to grow. And we're really excited about not just doing that, but about growing the capabilities of Iron Stallion. We in the future plan to apply a lot of the stuff that we do on Iron Stallion to other domains beyond space, not just space situational awareness, but all the domains. And then als, we want to expand some of our automation so we can support long-range fires and also just make it easier for the operator to get even more use out of it. So that's what we're looking for down the line for Iron Stallion.

John Arnold

Really interesting to think about that combined battle space aspect and all the different use cases that this potentially has. Well, are there any final thoughts from either of you before I let you get out of here?

Liz Pearce

I just want to say that this has been a lot of fun. I've only been with KBR for about eight months now, and the work on Iron Stallion has been my primary focus, and working with Missy and the team that are under Missy in the U.S. has been an absolute joy, so clever, and I can only hope that the team we develop in Australia will be just as clever. I'm about to send someone over to be learning from Missy's team, I think tomorrow, I think she leaves. And it's going to be fantastic and exciting over the next hundred years, let's go further.

John Arnold

I love it. I love the optimism.

Missy Thomas

I agree with Liz, we're looking forward to the visit next week too.

John Arnold

Fantastic. Thank you both for being on the podcast and we'll look forward to more updates on Iron Stallion and its related technologies in the very near future.

Liz Pearce

Thank you.

Missy Thomas

Thank you.

CONCLUSION

John Arnold

Space — the final and awfully important frontier to life as we know it. A huge thank you to Missy Thomas and Liz Pearce for being on the podcast with us to talk about space domain awareness, and the game-changing Iron Stallion. We'll look forward to speaking with them more in the future as these technologies continue to evolve. Special thanks also to Nadine Chisholm and Kaye Noske for getting this episode off the ground.

If you're interested in learning more about Iron Stallion and how KBR is expanding that capability in the U.S. and Australia, you can do a quick search in your preferred search engine and find several press releases and articles. You can also learn more at KBR.com. If you're interested in learning about the many different kinds of opportunities there are to work with KBR in fields like space, sustainable energy, national security, and other crucial areas, you can check out our careers page at KBR.com or visit think.kbr.com/careers.

If you like what you heard today and have an idea for a future episode or you just want to say hello, drop us a line at inorbit@kbr.com. As always, our team over here wants to thank all of you out there. We know life is crazy and busy and that the minutes are precious. We appreciate you spending a few of those minutes with us and for keeping us in your orbit. Be kind to each other and take care.