As the number of objects in orbit continues to skyrocket, space domain awareness (SDA) has become an enormous task — and equally enormous business opportunity. In a panel at ASCEND in Washington, D.C., Aerospace's Kevin Bell, SVP of the Engineering and Technology Group, led a discussion of this crucial and fast-evolving capability.

The participants on the panel were:

• Todd Bacastow, VP, Marketing Development and Partnerships - LeoLabs
• Mark "MJ" Jeffries, Senior Manager, Commercial Space Programs - Anduril
• Dr. Adrian Thompson, Chief AI and Innovation Officer - Slingshot Aerospace
• Justin Mikolay, Vice President, Government Affairs - Turion Space

Each brought their own form of expertise to the discussion, and though their perspectives differed, the still converged when it came to the best way to meet the moment.

Among the challenges, they noted, are the fragmented and in some ways competitive silos of data that need to be shared, reconciled, and applied in near-realtime if they are to be useful to forces on the ground.

"We want to build the need before the need exists. This coalition up here, we're able to work together and understand where those pain points are, and what threads we can pull in order to get ourselves there. Collaborating allows us to build that need, see that need, put our own company dollars behind it so that the warfighter has it when they need it at that time," said Jeffries.

Dr. Thompson emphasized that the process of putting together a coherent picture of relevant orbital assets is itself changing, and all the companies on stage were pushing that technological frontier.

"We're thinking of it as sense, fuse, decide, act," he explained. "Gradually building up the stack towards full autonomy and taking advantage of not just our data, but more and more data to be able to fuse it."

But, he pointed out, interoperability and cooperation between companies with ostensibly competing databases is necessary for the greater mission:

"You can put sensors out there, but it's a very large number of satellites to get the types of coverage we need. You're going to need collaboration across all the modalities... but we can't build that mode if we don't have at least the ability for it to connect together now, if we don't begin to build the proof."

Curious about the full discussion? You can watch the full panel here: