Phase II Amount
$1,000,000
Slingshot Aerospace, in partner with THE THIRD FLOOR Inc--a premiere immersive visualization company with a global footprint, will provide the Slingshot Orbital Notebook that provides the next-generation collaborative training and visualization capability to our space warfighters to increase their training & education effectiveness and to prepare them for the complexities of the space domain to maintain space superiority. Core competencies to succeed as a space warfighter involve understanding difficult concepts like astrodynamics, the effects of various aspects of the orbital environment, and how spacecraft maneuver and rendezvous with other objects in orbit. This foundation is key to orbital warfare, space electronic warfare, and space battle management. Students and instructors today still use dated, impromptu tools such as beach balls to depict Earth and hula hoops to teach fundamental orbital mechanics, training methodologies that were established before the world wide web. The Slingshot Orbital Notebook is designed to promote data visualization techniques designed to facilitate multi-variate, time-series data to drive comprehension of space subject matter. It will allow students to experience and experiment with varying parameters of orbits while leveraging real and virtual objects through immersive user interfaces within the Slingshot Platform. Instructors and students will also have a web-based collaborative environment that leads to new ways to practice, test, and challenge students to critically think and work the problem without being burdened with complex software and tied to a desktop in the classroom. Developing our space warfighters demands more adaptive, interactive, and tailorable tools than are used today. Instructors and students deserve the next generation, state of the art, easy-to-use adaptive tool to experiment cause and effect relationships and provide an immersive experience across mediums. We must provide this next generation training in all aspects of space warfighting whether at our service academies, initial skills training, space warfighter follow-on training, continued and professional development courses and graduate degree programs.
