Every year, the Space & Missile Defense Symposium chooses two topic areas pertinent to that year’s SMD focus, and they provide members of the space and missile defense community the opportunity to submit and present innovations and technical ideas.

For the program known as Technology Track, the committee sends out a call for entries several months in advance for two-page written abstracts describing the basis of their work with enough detail to allow for an evaluation of that work in the two major topic areas. This year, the committee received more than 25 submissions for which the panel chose five in the area of Cyber Resiliency, Testing, and Development; and six for Weapon System Performance Testing and Evaluation.

“These are submissions to present their work and have a discussion about that work at the conference, and not submissions for funding, so there is no ‘Big Reveal’ so-to-speak,” said Stephen Cayson, chief operating officer for CFD Research and a member of the SMD planning committee. “The topics can really run the gamut between someone wanting to present new work they have developed, and someone wanting to report on the status of something they have been working on.

“Research and development work can quickly become classified and we are working in a public forum, so we usually lean toward established work, since a lot of the new work is sensitive and often, not something that can be discussed in an open setting.”

Cayson said the committee has scoring criteria for the submissions and, sometimes, it can get very competitive.

Technology Track is a 2-day event at the 21^st Annual Space and Missile Defense Symposium which runs Tuesday through Thursday at the Von Braun Center.

On Tuesday, Paul Page with the Space & Missile Defense Command presents “Cyber Hardening by Replicating and Simulating”; Yaron Shragal with Draper Labs presents “CHROME: A State of the Art System for Comprehensive, Non-intrusive Cyber Resiliency”; Rob Goldsmith of SMDC/ARSTRAT presents “Cyber Resiliency and Mission Assurance”; Denise Jefferson of Northrop Grumman presents “A Tool to Inject Credible Warfighter-focused Non-kinetic Attack Effects into the BMDS M&S Environment”; and Connor Wood and Justan Provence, also of Northrop Grumman, present “Micro-service Data Pipelines”.

“We encourage our Technology Track presenters to keep their presentation down to twenty minutes to allow for ten minutes of questions and discussion,” said Cayson. “We really have a lot of great discussions come out of these presentations.

“Technologists are an underserved class in our community and we like to give them the opportunity to get together with other professionals and give them a chance to meet others working on similar projects, to develop that network, and to learn from each other.”

Wednesday, James Buford, Gary Freeman, and David Mallett, all from the Aviation & Missile Research, Development, and Engineering Center at SMDC/ARSTRAT present “New and Improved Advanced Measurements Optical Range (AMOR) Capability for Advanced Sensing Capabilities”; and Perri Nejib of Northrop Grumman does a presentation called “Resiliency by Design, Defeating All Threats Cyber and Ballistic Missile-start Secure, Stay Secure, Return Secure”.

Phil Carey of the CMDS Project Office; Craig Burrow with Intuitive Research & Technology Corporation; and Bruce Peters from Torch Technologies present “Accelerating High Energy Laser System Capability for Air and Missile Defense”. Later that afternoon, E. Blair Carter and his team from the Aviation & Missile Research, Development, & Engineering Center present “A Simulation Toolkit for Rigorous Interceptor Design and Evaluation”; Northrop Grumman’s Connor Wood does a second presentation on “Modeling and Simulation Integration with Hardware and Software Development”; and Mike Curry with Draper Labs finishes up with “A Unified Framework for Interactive Tradespace Exploration”.