In November, Brigadier General Nina Armagno gave an excellent presentation on Air Force Space Command’s Enterprise Ground Services (EGS) to industry. The event was organized by the National Defense Industry Association Rocky Mountain Chapter. She painted a clear picture of what EGS is, how it needs to evolve and better support U.S. space resiliency, and asked for industry’s feedback.
EGS is not a new kind of ground system or acquisition program – it’s a new approach to satellite ground infrastructure to support General Hyten’s vision for the future Space Operations Enterprise. General Armagno provided a good definition – EGS is an initiative designed to:
- Improve AFSPC warfighting capability
- Focus operators on mission effects vice routine tasks
- Expose data to enable exploitation by applications & services
- Create a set of government owned standards and interfaces
- Use early prototyping activities to test and enforce their use on legacy and future AFSPC ground systems
- Transition legacy AFSPC ground systems and ensure future ground systems build to a common ground architecture
- Embracing the EGS vision & objectives, and contributing through the development of things like new applications and capabilities
- Supporting the DoD in developing open architecture standards, and recommending the best ways to work together
- Support EGS by developing applications and capability that move in the direction of enhancing cross-mission data exploitation and leveraging common services, as opposed to optimizing within stovepipes