Ball Aerospace has received a contract to work on the second phase of the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Hallmark programme.
The objective of the Hallmark programme is to provide improved capabilities to plan, assess, and execute US Military operations in space.
Under the contract, Ball will continue to work on the Space Evaluation and Analysis Capability (SEAC) testbed and conduct three additional evaluation events.
These events will see the company conduct mock space operations exercises to evaluate software tool performance.
The company will partner with independent software development teams for the evaluation events.
DARPA’s Hallmark programme is advancing the development of technologies that provide real-time space-domain awareness, informing the command and control and protection of assets in space.
Ball was previously selected to perform five evaluations of the testbed during the first phase of the programme.
Ball Aerospace Systems Engineering Solutions vice-president and general manager Steve Smith said: “Our revolutionary open architecture approach brings commercial capabilities and best practices like rapid integration of new services and secure DevOps to the Department of Defense.
“We look forward to continuing the successful demonstration of our enterprise software architecture’s capabilities during the second phase of the Hallmark programme.”
The company noted that its approach to the SEAC testbed design removes bottlenecks associated with single-contractor integration in traditional acquisition models.
The software development practice allows external tool developers to design and test capabilities in an operations environment without compromising system security or stability, Ball added.
Last year, the Hallmark programme awarded Phase 1 contracts to 11 organisations to strengthen existing commercial technologies and add capabilities.
