Fusion engine for missile warning lacks a government dataset

WASHINGTON – National missile warning and tracking could be improved if all government agencies shared the raw data they gather.

“There are agencies that have sensors that can provide data that would be very supplemental to the missile-defense mission, but they designed it for a completely different purpose,” Devin Elder, Northrop Grumman Strategic Space Systems senior business development director, said March 23 at the Satellite 2026 conference. Due to “data-control structures and maybe classification reasons, organizations don’t necessarily want to share raw data.”

National missile defense is fundamentally a big-data problem. Companies work with government agencies to fuse datasets from a variety of ground- and space-based sensors to tackle the increasingly complex challenge of identifying and tracking missiles.

“There’s no one sensor to rule them all,” said Robin Dickey, Slingshot Aerospace director of policy and government affairs. “Looking up, you’re going to see very different aspects of an object than you would looking down. The background is different. The object itself could look different.”

Stove Pipes

Military constellations like the Space-Based Infrared System, Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared program and the Space Development Agency’s missile warning and missile tracking satellites are designed to supply raw data for missile defense. That is not necessarily the case for sensors operated by other government agencies.

Obstacles to sharing range from “bureaucratic stove pipes” to Title 10 and Title 50 challenges, data-assurance concerns and classification, Elder said. (Title 10 is the portion of the U.S. Code that lays out U.S. military roles and missions. Title 50 outlines intelligence agency responsibilities.)

Elder did not mention intelligence agencies, but said some organizations “want to share final products that are fully vetted, that they can stand behind.”

For missile defense, seconds and milliseconds matter. “You need data as fast as you can get it because that final targeting information really does have a finite lifetime,” Elder said.

Speaking the Same Language

Among the datasets that are shared freely, integration “is probably the largest challenge because of the multiple phenomenologies that we’re bringing to the sensing domain,” said Paul Wloszek, L3Harris Technologies Spectral Solutions vice president and general manager.

In addition to optical telescopes, missile defense systems ingest radar and infrared data.

“For a 3D fusion engine to take all that information and output an answer in seconds, because of the speed at which these decisions have to move, we all have to speak the same language,” Wloszek said.

Missiles are moving at least seven kilometers per second. As a result, sensing an object, sending data to a command-and-control node for fusion and then sending the result to a missile interceptor “has to happen extremely quickly for us to bring successful missile defeat,” Wloszek said.

Onboard data processing is helping L3Harris satellites built for the Space Development Agency Tracking Layer “pick out the literal hypersonic needle in the haystack of infrared signatures,” Wloszek said. “If you go to our legacy systems, you’re going to watch literally humans in the loop taking information on thermal signatures and saying, ‘We think this is a threat or this isn’t a threat.’”

“It’s hard to think of that working today in a way that is sensitive to this timing piece,” said Clayton Swope, Center for Strategic and International Studies Aerospace Security Project deputy director.