Need for New International Cooperation Framework

Global, persistent access to AIS and reliable and timely access to data from unattended sensors can extend situational awareness across the globe.

Existing and proposed commercial systems lack transparency for all international partners, being driven by profit incentives or hampered by classification and sharing issues inherent with intelligence collection. Instead of facilitating the ubiquitous exchange of information at the lowest possible cost, situational awareness derived from commercial or intelligence sources is enjoyed by the "haves" and but unavailable to the "have-nots."

Nations without the ability or means to establish, situational awareness in their "unwired" territories have little or no information about the illegal activities occurring there. There may be no perceived address these unseen threats. Resource allocation and force structure decisions that would improve governance are starving for data.

The ability to detect and monitor suspicious activity and to share that information will enable international partners to collaborate and cooperate to enhance their collective security.

Fractional Ownership Model

In the collaboration model, multinational participants partner to deploy a constellation of relatively inexpensive nano-satellites and a network of small, moveable ground terminals that together create an efficient, persistent communications infrastructure.

Partnership is provided in return for investment in the system. Investment may be monetary or in-kind contributions such as launch services or ground station operation.

Fractional ownership models have been successful in providing previously unaffordable capabilities to partner nations who cooperatively share and manage assets.

Two slightly different models have been successful in the establishment of the Strategic Airlift Capability ( SAC) by NATO and the Disaster Monitoring Constellation ( DMC).

In the first example, the SAC agreement, 10 NATO countries plus two partner countries agreed to acquire and operate three Boeing C-17 transport aircraft. Each nation agreed to support a certain number of flight hours for these aircraft and the corresponding share of maintenance and operations costs. A central coordination activity was established and jointly funded to manage SAC aircraft according to the Memorandum of Understanding between the partner countries.

The second example, the DMC, consists of six countries that agreed to cooperatively manage imaging satellites. A commercial company manages the tasking and operation of the satellites on behalf of the countries for commercial purposes, but when needed, these capabilities are turned to emergency, scientific, and disaster support.

At the CANEUS Shared Small Satellite workshop, we will analyze several collaboration models that define alternatives for sharing the capacity of the system between the partners and providing services to external subscribers.

For example, a Consortium Member country would be entitled to a share of the available bandwidth from the total constellation. The satellites would relay data from that nation's sensors to a ground terminal (which may be in another country), and from there to an enterprise server (in yet another country, perhaps) for distribution to the country owning the data. That country could then choose to share this information to enhance cooperation with the other constellation partners and / or its neighbors who may not be participating.