The Thinking Agent for Logical Operations and Strategy (TALOS) tool is an AI-powered agent able to study and clone various spacecraft operations into a simulated environment of the space domain, according to a Slingshot news release. Members of the Space Force have already tested and used TALOS during training exercises, and the company is now looking at how the technology can assist the service even more.

“TALOS builds upon years of collaboration with the U.S. Space Force’s Operational Test and Training Infrastructure (OTTI) and Slingshot’s proven virtual environments,” Slingshot Aerospace CEO Tim Solms said in a statement. “It embeds AI agents that simulate realistic threats, optimize real-world operations, and support mission command decision-making with unprecedented speed and precision.”

The tool was built leveraging Slingshot’s behavior cloning pipeline, which allows AI agents to learn how to perform a task by directly imitating an example from the real world. According to the company, TALOS is geared towards replicating and simulating satellite tactics, including “representative behaviors, space warfare maneuvers and dogfighting strategies.”

“Once assigned a mission, TALOS evaluates its surroundings, reasons through potential strategies and tactics, and executes its objective within a simulated, physics-accurate orbital environment,” a company news release stated.

Although TALOS is relatively new, the Space Force’s 57th Space Aggressor Squadron — the service’s unit that provides simulations of adversary space systems that can be used during training — recently tested the tool during exercises. Guardians used TALOS to create realistic and adaptive simulations of enemy satellites and their behaviors, as well as during the planning phase of the service’s first Space Flag exercise.

As the Space Force undertakes a large effort to build out its training infrastructure under the Operational Test and Training Infrastructure (OTTI) program, service officials have highlighted capabilities like TALOS as important tools for modernization. OTTI is envisioned as a high-fidelity virtual environment that will rely heavily on AI-enabled capabilities that can automatically simulate threats to critical space systems.

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Over 700 Space Force personnel stationed at multiple military bases are participating in the exercise, where guardians will test and train on space-based capabilities to conduct orbital warfare, electromagnetic warfare, cyber warfare and more. During the event, the service will present threat-informed scenarios simulating a fight with an adversary and allowing for troops to use operational military satellites — as well as commercial assets — to counter them.

“As the scenario increases in challenges and complexity, this gives our blue forces a thinking adversary to spar against,” Lt. Col. Shawn Green, commander of the Space Force’s 527th Space Aggressor Squadron, said Tuesday during a briefing with reporters. “Our goal is to create a relevant, realistic, informed threat replication for blue to fight through so that we can increase the probability of success in war.”

Resolute Space 2025 is part of the Department of the Air Force’s massive exercise known as Resolute Force Pacific (REFORPAC), intended to demonstrate the ability of both the Air and Space Forces to rapidly deploy against adversaries in the Indo-Pacific. It is a central piece of the DAF’s new Department Level Exercise (DLE) series that includes other major Air Force training events, such as Mobility Guardian and Bamboo Eagle, happening concurrently.

The Space Force’s exercise began July 8, and will feature guardians stationed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, as well as Peterson, Buckley and Shriever Space Force Bases, according to the service. Other personnel stationed throughout the Indo-Pacific will also participate in Resolute Space 2025, which is slated to wrap up in early August.

To simulate enemy capabilities and attacks, Green said the Space Force created a mission planning cell that will synchronize fires across space-based orbital, cyber and electromagnetic warfare — presenting various moves and countermoves that guardians will have to fight through.

Resolute Space 2025 will also integrate with elements of the REFORPAC exercise, which aims to ensure the Space Force can effectively fight alongside the Air Force in the future.

“We are working to fuse our different mission areas with the time-phased scheme of maneuver as part of the larger scenario,” Green said. “We’re doing that by providing space electromagnetic warfare, orbital warfare [and] cyber warfare. And we’re using those types of activities to fuse into this large, globally integrated exercise for live, virtual, synthetic scenarios so that our training is realistic, relevant and challenging.”

Col. Jay Steingold, Resolute Space director, told reporters that the exercise also spans across other key mission areas — including space domain awareness; satellite communication; positioning, navigation and timing (PNT); intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR); missile warning; command and control; and military-commercial integration.

Personnel will be able to use on-orbit space assets designed for training guardians, as well as satellites owned by commercial partners during the exercise, Steingold added.

“We have satellites that we are able to utilize to provide training for our U.S. Space Force guardians, whether that be an understanding of how they quote-unquote fly, or in terms of payload capacities and capabilities and general training on orbit,” he said. “We’re certainly leveraging our commercial partners and their capabilities — not only from their developmental standpoint, but also what they bring to bear in terms of cost savings.”

While the Space Force has held exercises in the past, those events were largely focused on individual mission areas and not at the scale of Resolute Space. Steingold said that while large-scale exercises are costly and time-consuming to plan and execute, participating in Resolute Space 2025 is imperative to improving the service’s capabilities, training and overall integration with the joint force and international allies.

“This is the opportunity to really dig in and find out if we have any weaknesses whatsoever, so we can fill them,” he said. “Whether it’s capabilities that our [Operational Test and Training Infrastructure] partners can bring from a training environments perspective, to actual warfighting capabilities that we need to take us further into the future to ensure the safety and security of the space domain.”

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The capability — dubbed “Swarm” — is in nascent development, but envisioned as a multi-classification digital environment where guardians from various units can come together against simulated adversaries. According to Maj. Gen. Timothy Sejba, head of the service’s Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM), early versions of Swarm were built for the Space Force’s primary mission planning and operational support exercise series known as Space Flag.

“The Space Flag that we just completed here about a month and a half ago, many of the threats that we faced were simulated in that environment,” Sejba said Thursday during a webinar hosted by the Mitchell Institute. “You had crews from across the Space Force that were actually executing over a two-week period to understand how they would actually perform in the environment.”

Sejba noted that the environment is currently only available to STARCOM on-prem, and that the service is focused on delivering the “initial aspect of Swarm” by the end of 2025. At the same time, the Space Force is planning to move the capability to the cloud sometime in the next two years so it can scale the size and scope of its future training and test exercises, he added.

“We’re quickly building not only the red threats that we need to represent, but also all of the blue systems that are coming online over the next several years,” Sejba said. “Then we’re quickly moving it to the cloud so we can get to a distributed training capability that allows each of those guardian units to actually be able to [train] from their home stations, but do it over and over.”

That means guardians from multiple units in different locations can simultaneously train in the simulated environment and prepare for more complex threats, such as fighting against multiple adversaries at once, he noted. 

Swarm is part of the Space Force’s broader effort to modernize and build out its training infrastructure — a task that is both one of Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman’s top priorities and a significant challenge for the Pentagon’s newest service. The service’s flagship development program is the Operational Test and Training Infrastructure (OTTI), which seeks to combine digital, cyber and live-training ranges under one system.

Developing OTTI from scratch, however, has been a challenge. Sejba highlighted that while the other services have had decades to build their test and training infrastructures, the Space Force has only had a few years to do so.

STARCOM also recently divided the OTTI effort into two distinct paths, Sejba noted. One tackles the need for a distributed training capability that is being built out by Swarm, while the other focuses on developing a high-fidelity, realistic simulation environment — a system akin to the Air Force and Navy’s Joint Simulation Environment (JSE), which is used to train pilots for complex combat scenarios.

“Something like JSE is something that we will eventually need. I would argue we probably need it sooner rather than later so that we’ve got our own capability to do some of this high-end testing [and] training,” Sejba said. “When I explore something like JSE, in that kind of environment you can very quickly translate that to what that might look like for space and the kind of high-end training that you’d be able to do for guardians in the near future.”

Sejba acknowledged that a limited budget likely means it will be several years before STARCOM has a true JSE-like training environment, but the Space Force is in the meantime leveraging prior work done by the Air Force and Navy to develop the system.

“We know what it’s going to take to be able to adopt that environment,” he said. “We’ve done plenty of research to see if that’s the right environment for us to go forward with, and we certainly know what some of the other services need also from a space effects standpoint.”

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