By: Samantha Louque, VT-ARC
Ever since the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1, outer space has been a highly contested and rapidly changing domain. However, that change has grown exponentially over the past decade. The world launched 2,849 objects into space in 2024, compared to just 241 ten years prior. And things aren’t slowing down, with the space economy expected to grow by nearly $200 million over the next five years.
Thanks to technological innovation, outer space isn’t just busier. It’s pivotal for the function of society. If you’ve ever run Google Maps to find a new address, caught the last five minutes of a football game on your cell phone, or carefully monitored the weather ahead of an outdoor wedding, you’ve used space technology.
Of course, with great power comes great responsibility. The U.S. is constantly monitoring and mitigating threat actors in the space domain. Fortunately, the U.S. Space Force remains at the technological forefront. In his keynote address at the Spacepower Conference in December, Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman noted that “the Space Force stands ready with highly skilled Guardians and cutting-edge capabilities to fight and win our nation’s wars and to guarantee the American way of life.”
At the Innovation Hub (IHub) in Colorado Springs, Guardians, alongside civilian, industry and academic experts, work on those cutting-edge capabilities daily. From artificial intelligence (AI) tools to improve training exercises to tools that evaluate launch criteria, these prototypes lay the groundwork for success across the entire space domain.
Prototyping: Bringing New Ideas to the Space Domain
The Innovation Hub is a non-profit collaboration center founded through a partnership between the Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation (VT-ARC), Space Systems Command (SSC), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The IHub team provides support for Department of Defense (DoD) teams and their industry and academic partners in a variety of areas, including business intelligence, data science, and STEM education, to help advance their technology goals.
Over the course of 2025, the IHub team specifically focused on support for prototyping, or developing models built to evaluate or inform feasibility or usefulness of a concept. Of note, a prototype doesn’t necessarily mean a new piece of technology. Anything from a physical tool to a new theoretical concept could be considered a prototype.
With 27 government partners, the IHub supports countless different prototyping efforts. Below, you’ll find a few examples of those prototypes, and how the IHub team helps bring them to life.
Testing, Testing: The IHub Cyber Lab
In early 2025, the 1st Test and Evaluation Squadron (1TES) approached the IHub team with a unique goal: to create a physical environment where Space Force teams can conduct cybersecurity testing on their programs. Thanks to compute resources and expertise provided by SSC’s Battle Management Command, Control, Communications, and Space Intelligence Team, the IHub was able to get this Space Cyber Testing Range up and running in just a few weeks. Now, this environment has on premises infrastructure to empower Guardians to train on real-world cybersecurity scenarios, as well as conduct cyber penetration testing on Space Force mission systems.
This environment provides “unfettered access to a capability where you can inject your own hardware in the loop,” in the words of Maj. Victor Beitelman with the 1TES team. They’ve used this environment to run multiple test events to get more accurate data, build training modules, simulate adversaries, and get our systems ready for future conflict.
As we move into 2026, 1TES wants to expand the lab and make it more accessible for Guardians. “I would really like to see a lot more simulation in the day-to-day,” Maj. Beitelman noted in a recent episode of the T3 Talks podcast. He specifically highlighted a new platform to better visualize data that could be incorporated into the environment, driving tangible results that could drive real-world decision making.
AI, Data Science and Beyond
The IHub has a three-person data science team on staff, who’ve used their collective expertise to develop, support and mature a variety of prototypes. This includes an Amazon Web Services GovCloud Sandbox where government, industry and academic teams can build solutions in an environment that mimics the DoD’s. Various users have built over 25 projects in this environment, including proof of concept graphical representations for an SDA TAP Lab system and an open-source data aggregator and database. (See previous AG coverage of the Sandbox).
The data science team also helped USSPACECOM J0 create a prototype solution to streamline an exercise conducted during their Space Domain Innovation course. This class teaches participants from various DoD space organizations new approaches to problem solving and planning processes. In one exercise, teachers push attendees to examine multiple futures using a Semiotic Square heuristic tool, where participants use whiteboards to strategically move away from their organizational comfort zone. The prototype developed by J0 and the IHub utilizes AI to assist the group through that process and push them to even more creative outcomes. They’re planning to test the tool at their next course at the Innovation Hub in February.
Space Force’s Future Innovators
Students provide some of the most innovative thinking at the Innovation Hub. In 2025, more than 300 undergraduate, graduate, and PhD students from across more than 50 universities supported government teams on a variety of projects. Two of those student teams produced prototype solutions with the power to directly benefit the Space Force.
In 2024, the Innovation Hub education team began working with the Data Mine of the Rockies (DMR), a program that originated at Purdue University before launching across several schools in the Rocky Mountain area. It brings together students from a variety of backgrounds and degree programs to solve real-world data problems from across industry and government. During the 2024-2025 school year, one DMR group consisting of 12 students studying 9 majors from 5 universities took on a project to support the Space Domain Awareness (SDA) Tools Applications and Processing (TAP) Lab and Space Operations Center (SpOC). Their goal was to develop a tool for the operators at Buckley SFB that predicts the probability that weather-based launch commit criteria would be satisfied to enable a rocket launch anywhere on earth at any hour, in a three day window. They found incredible success and their program is now operational as part of the SDA TAP Lab’s kill chain.
During the summer of 2025, eleven students spent their summer working with the SDA TAP Lab through fellowship programs with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). For 10 weeks, students sought to create an automated benchmarking system and establish clear criteria to evaluate uncorrelated track (UCT) processors. UCTs represent observations of unidentified objects in space, which cause uncertainty and make it difficult to maintain space domain awareness. Companies create algorithms to make sense of these unidentified objects, but lack of standardization makes it difficult to determine what exactly that algorithm is doing, or how well it’s doing it.
At the end of their summer, both the DIU and AFRL students created successful UCT-processor evaluation criteria, as well as an automated system to generate data sets for testing. These tools empower companies to improve their UCT-processors and help the Space Force determine which systems to use. The AFRL students worked with the SDA TAP Lab to transfer their research to another group of students, who continue to refine and improve their work throughout the 2025-2026 school year. The DIU students retained their intellectual property and started their own company, Kharros, that further markets and sells the tools they created over the summer.
Looking Ahead to Stay Ahead
As we head into 2026, many of the Innovation Hub’s government partners are already working on new and improved prototypes. The Human-AI Teaming (HAT) TAP Lab officially launched late last year and is working towards new AI/ML training. (See previous AG coverage of the HAT TAP Lab). Select lieutenants on casual status will embark on new projects with our government teams, tackling cybersecurity and other challenge areas as they await their officer training. Finally, the SDA TAP Lab is working to install a new all-sky camera with the existing sensor array on the IHub roof, which will allow for a more robust set of data to be used by IHub teams.
Maintaining a strong and secure space domain is critical for national security and our day-to-day lives. Through prototyping, our Space Force guardians and their allies can ensure the United States stays at the forefront of technology innovation in space.
Effort sponsored in whole or in part by the Air Force Research Laboratory, USAF, under Partnership Intermediary Agreement No. FA9550-22-3-0001. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the Air Force Research Laboratory.