JSpOC collections officer
JSpOC collections officer. Credit: U.S. Air Force

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force has awarded Intelligent Software Solutions a contract worth $14.6 million to support the modernization of the U.S. Defense Department’s Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC), the Pentagon announced Feb. 27.

The JSpOC, headquartered at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, is the nerve center of U.S. military space operations, responsible for space surveillance, collision avoidance and launch support. The JSpOC Mission System (JMS) is a three-phased hardware and software upgrade project intended to improve the precision and timeliness of information managed by the center.

The modernization effort, initiated in 2009, is expected to cost more than $500 million through 2017. It will enable the JSpOC to integrate data from multiple sources to give U.S. military commanders a comprehensive picture of the orbital environment.

Intelligent Software Solutions specifically will work on a set of improvements known as Increment 2. Those improvements include moving away from the legacy Space Defense Operations Center and leaning more heavily on the new system and allowing software to classify satellite deorbits, re-entries, launches and other events.

Work is expected to be complete by Sept. 30, 2016, the release said.

Mike Gruss covers military space issues, including the U.S. Air Force and Missile Defense Agency, for SpaceNews. He is a graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.