U.S. Space Force Hones Realistic Training For On-Orbit War

The U.S. Space Force is overhauling its training systems and doctrines to recognize a new operational reality: Space is no longer benign.

Warfighters once drilled using real-world systems in nonthreatening training environments, but Space Force Guardians now face a congested, contested domain. The service is responding by fielding a new architecture called the Operational Test and Training Infrastructure (OTTI) that merges virtual environments with live ranges to ready personnel for on-orbit conflict.

• The service might buy additional satellites for training purposes
• Initial digital environment is expected by year-end

The OTTI program executive office, founded in 2023, falls under the service’s Space Systems Command in partnership with Space Training and Readiness Command (Starcom). It is tasked with a tall order: quickly provide the Space Force with the types of live ranges, synthetic training environments and threat-replica aggressor forces that its sister services have developed over decades. In September, the Space Force established System Delta 81 within the OTTI program executive office to deliver the training capabilities, ranges and underlying infrastructure to connect and integrate test and training events.

Space Force leadership assigned Maj. Gen. James Smith, Starcom’s commander, three priority areas related to OTTI: blue team simulation, red threat emulation  and their integration, Smith said at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, in late September.

The service is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in OTTI and earmarked nearly $439 million for the initiative in its fiscal 2025 budget request. It began establishing the National Space Test and Training Complex in Colorado Springs in 2022 to unify operations for ranges dedicated to electromagnetic, orbital, cyber and digital warfare and to provide joint all-domain training to personnel across the services and from multiple agencies.

That range collection allows for safe and secure live training, along with realistic training for high-end activities that may be too risky to perform live, says Space Force Col. (ret.) Kyle Pumroy, who served as the first commander of Space Delta 11, which is responsible for delivering realistic and test and training environments for the service as well as joint and allied forces from Schriever SFB, Colorado.

The ranges could include training-dedicated satellites and threat-surrogate systems to make the live environment more realistic, says Pumroy, now a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute Spacepower Advantage Center of Excellence in Washington. Ultimately, operations units could integrate their simulators into a data feed that is connected to all applicable range elements. “That’s where we’ll be able to do realistic combat training and demonstrate our combat credibility,” he says.

Work to establish the ranges is ongoing. The service awarded six companies study contracts in 2024 to establish a future electromagnetic warfare (EW) test and training range. The Space Force has tapped companies such as Slingshot Aerospace, Parsons Corp. and Sonalysts to support elements of OTTI, including mission-specific simulators, threat-replica models, synthetic training environments and artificial-intelligence-augmented aggressor forces, according to fiscal 2026 budget documents.

The service also wants to create a high-fidelity training facility akin to the Joint Simulation Environment (JSE) used by the U.S. Air Force and Navy to operate fifth-generation fighters. Starcom is in talks with the JSE user group to integrate space-relevant simulation capabilities and establish a dedicated space facility, Maj. Gen. Timothy Sejba, who led Starcom until July, said in a July webinar. “Something like JSE is something that we will eventually need,” he said. “I would argue we probably need it sooner rather than later.”

In the near term, Starcom could field a new digital range, called the Swarm, by year-end, Sejba said. The service opened a nascent version for the most recent iteration of its primary exercise series known as Space Flag, which took place in May. In the long term, the Space Force wants to move the Swarm to the cloud to scale the size and scope of future exercises, allowing Guardians to train together in the simulated environment from various locations, Sejba said.

Starcom transitioned its headquarters this summer to Patrick SFB, Florida, from Peterson SFB, Colorado; its full operational capability is expected by 2027. The move positioned the command for greater interaction with the burgeoning simulation and gaming industries residing an hour east in Orlando, Sejba said.

Since taking the helm at the Space Force in November 2022, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman has campaigned for a modernized test and training environment and called for the service to take advantage of cutting-edge simulation tools.

At the same time, “we do want to go to a live aggressor force,” where Guardians train against a red team element, Saltzman told reporters at the conference. Training against a live aggressor is already employed for electronic warfare, Chief Master Sgt. of the Space Force John Bentivegna added.

To support that vision, the Space Force is considering procuring additional satellites dedicated to test and training as unit costs and launch prices decline, the way other services might buy extra Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighters for that purpose, Saltzman said.

Off-the-shelf products are also of interest. The OTTI office released a commercial-services offering in January that is open until late 2029 seeking capabilities that include: 1-m-class (2.2 ft.) electro-optical telescopes for small-object detection in all orbital regimes, including cislunar; software applications for orbital, EW and cyberranges; distributed synthetic training environments with prototypes delivered within 18 months; ruggedized, field-deployable satellite-communication systems; and wearable fitness devices meeting Pentagon security and privacy standards.

Once operational, the OTTI infrastructure would transform the way Guardians prepare for conflict. When U.S. Air Force Col. (ret.) Jennifer Reeves, a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute, trained as a space weapons officer in the 1990s, she worked on retired sensors used to run scenarios on the Defense Support Program’s early warning satellites. “You would sit in the ops center next to people doing the job, but then you’re running a tape and doing a scenario of World War III,” Reeves says.

Using real-world systems introduced the risk that scenario data might bleed into the operational network. While stopgaps existed, they diminished training realism, she says.

Space training platforms were often the first line item to be cut when budgets tightened, Reeves adds, “Our space guys for years have just been figuring out: How do we still do a great job if we don’t have the requisite, appropriate level of training resources?”

If the Space Force cannot prepare for realistic threat scenarios, “the stakes are mission failure,” says Even Rogers, co-founder and CEO of True Anomaly and a former U.S. Air Force weapons officer. His company plans to introduce a suite of OTTI capabilities in the coming months, including a version of its Jackal multimission spacecraft that is deployable on ride-share missions and can be operated as a dedicated training platform or threat replicator. The suite would also include a configuration of its Mosaic integrated software platform for range control, he says.

Technology company Deloitte also has ambitions in this arena. The company launched its first internally funded satellite in March to test 20 cyberthreat scenarios in low Earth orbit using its Silent Shield intrusion-detection payload. After stress-testing the system, the company wants to provide it to customers as “a real, on-orbit environment where they can test their own offensive and defensive tactics,” principal Ryan Roberts told Aviation Week at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference.

Meanwhile, the Space Force is integrating orbital warfare into joint exercises. Some 700 Guardians took part in the recent Resolute Space 2025, part of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s Resolute Force Pacific exercise. For the first time, the drill combined live satellite operations with virtual and synthetic environments—a step toward training in operationally limited conditions where adversaries may attempt to jam GPS or disrupt satellite communications while operating alongside joint and allied forces.

Such cross-domain exercises matter, Reeves says. “Those multidomain brethren need to know what happens when the space resources blip,” she says.