Big Ideas Lab podcast explores STARMOC: LLNL’s mission operations center

From off-roading in rural Nevada to commuting during rush hour on the 405 in Los Angeles, the space domain has undergone a rapid transformation over the past five years. What began as a vast landscape with a few high-profile, large-scale missions is now a heavily trafficked orbital freeway, rife with accident debris and security risks.

To navigate this new environment, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) built the Satellite, Telescope, Aerial drone, and Remote sensing Mission Operations Center (STARMOC). The latest episode of the Big Ideas Lab podcast takes listeners inside the facility, which support small satellite missions and space domain awareness research. STARMOC is now available on Apple and Spotify.

The number of objects in orbit is doubling approximately every two years, while traditional mission operations centers depend on human-intensive processes and legacy systems developed decades ago. As a result, the cost of mission support has become too expensive for the emerging class of SmallSat missions.

“We were thinking, ‘This is something we can do ourselves,’” said Phillip Rittmuller, principal investigator for STARMOC. “For our missions, which are small and experimental, we don’t want to have some big, fancy operations center. We can just have operations here at the Lab with the capabilities that we need, and it’ll be much less expensive.”

STARMOC provides in-house infrastructure for LLNL’s Space Program to monitor satellites and test experimental capabilities. By combining mission operations with high-performance computing and hardware-in-the-loop testing, researchers can evaluate how spacecraft and systems will respond in a simulated space environment.

“We like to push the boundary on technology and science and how things could be re-envisioned, and so the STARMOC is like our little hub of what the future of space operations could be,” said Luc Peterson, associate program leader for data science at LLNL’s Space Program.

The episode highlights one example of an experimental internship project in which three student interns connected an existing ground-based telescope automation network to the space layer. Their program reduced the time needed to automatically task a satellite to photograph the International Space Station from approximately 15 minutes to 10 seconds.

The system worked so quickly that it exposed an unexpected limit, sending more than 700 commands to a satellite in one day.

“STARMOC lets us really test out some of those technologies, break them in a safe space, and extend the laboratory ethos into outer space,” said Peterson.

Rittmuller said that he’s excited to see where STARMOC goes. It is designed to test ideas that have not yet been imagined.

“When DARPA developed the internet, they didn’t know that it was going to enable Google and smartphones and Amazon,” he said. “They developed this infrastructure and put it out there, letting super-smart people figure out what to do with it. That’s what STARMOC is.”

Listen to the latest episode of the Big Ideas Lab on Apple and Spotify to learn how STARMOC is helping the laboratory to tackle tomorrow’s challenges in space.