Slingshot Aerospace founders Thomas Ashman, Melanie Stricklan, David Godwin. Photo: Slingshot Aerospace

The Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) awarded Slingshot Aerospace a $6 million contract to rapidly prototype and deploy Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to augment a wide variety of Enterprise Space Battle Management mission needs. Slingshot’s toolset, known as Orbital Atlas, aims to help enable warfighters to pivot from traditional Space Situational Awareness (SSA) focusing on space catalog maintenance toward a more tactical, predictive, and evidence-driven solution.

SMC is employing a variety of contracting methods to leverage commercial automation capabilities to augment conventional space mission areas. SMC’s Space Superiority Systems Directorate exercised the 2019 contract option and expanded the value over a two-year period of performance.

Slingshot Aerospace is an analytics company that employs Artificial Intelligence (AI) to draw insights from a synthesis of satellite, aerial, drone, and other contextual data streams for defense, disaster response, and commercial applications. Slingshot’s user-centered geospatial and space domain software, in addition to their edge products, aim to help the gap between data analysis and critical decision making. Orbital Atlas is a predictive modeling engine that applies ML to massive amounts of space observation data and other contextual data streams to characterize patterns and predict events enabling warfighters, analysts, and senior decision makers to make better mission-critical decisions at the speed of relevance.