Redwire Emphasizes Role of Digital Tools to Deliver Innovation Faster to Warfighter

Al Tadros, CTO of Redwire, speaking at AIAA’s ASCEND space conference in July, emphasized that to achieve sustained space dominance “requires you to be able to operate like a logistics chain.”

A guidance, navigation, and control engineer by training, Tadros said the space industry has been very conservative about embracing autonomy, with its desire to have an operator in the loop. “They want to go into safe mode, wait and investigate before taking an action. In a warfighting environment and combat mindset, that isn’t always a luxury we have.”

The Golden Dome for America, the Trump administration’s ambitious missile defense program, requires the U.S. to respond quickly to multi-domain threats that will evolve quickly across space and ground. He contends that without digital engineering and AI “we are going to be vastly behind in our capabilities to address threats.”

Digital engineering is the basis for a lot of what Redwire does, allowing the company to quickly do upfront ideation, concept development and requirements generation.

“That’s how we build confidence [with customers] on a rapid pace that we can do what we say,” he explained.

Redwire leans heavily on its digital tools, integrated with AI, to support program execution and to assess threats, counter threats and war game scenarios. According to Tadros, the discipline is more prevalent in a lot of other industries compared with the space industry.

“Digital engineering has a huge amount of capability in our industry that’s really under recognized,” he said.

That’s something that Redwire hopes to change, with the firm’s unveiling of Acorn 2.0 during the Small Satellite Conference earlier this month. The advanced modeling and simulation software supports the rapid mission concept development and analysis needs of aerospace and defense customers. The suite of tools and applications enables customers to rapidly simulate and validate prospective solutions, including hybrid architectures; meshed networks; multi-domain operations; virtual, cyber, test, and evaluation ranges; high-fidelity spacecraft communications; and supply chain digital twins.

The company hosted a panel during the event focused on revolutionizing mission operations with autonomy using tools like Acorn 2.0. During the panel, Col. Owen Stephens, director of Contracting for the U.S. Space Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office, said, “The government needs to think about what a machine can do better than a human and…automate that. There are some things the human must do. Instead of treating it like a buzzword, ‘Give me autonomy,’ we need to step back a level and think about it as a system of systems.”

Redwire panelist Dean Bellamy, EVP of National Security Space, agreed, stating that with Acorn 2.0, Redwire uses agent-based modeling to develop mission concepts early on in a program.  For example, deciding how much sensing and on-board computing of objects should be done at the edge versus sent to the ground for processing.

Learn more about Redwire’s digital engineering capabilities in this recent SpaceNews’ op-ed authored by Chairman & CEO Peter Cannito.