Costa served as the Space Force’s first-ever CTIO from 2021 until her retirement from federal government service in June 2024. During her tenure, she was responsible for strategies and policies aimed at advancing the military branch’s research and development of critical emerging technologies — such as AI and machine learning, digital training environments and IT infrastructure. 

“I’m proud to join Seekr and collaborate with a team that shares my vision for trusted AI,” Costa said in a statement. “Seekr addresses critical AI development needs, including explainability and data security, enabling government agencies to launch mission-critical applications simply and securely. I am excited to bring my 35 years of high-stakes federal and commercial experience to unlock AI’s full potential for government.”

A career technologist, Costa has over three decades of experience in advocating for emerging science and tech across both government and industry. Prior to her role as Space Force CTIO, she held positions at U.S. Special Operations Command, MITRE and Engility Corp.

At the Space Force, she helped develop and modernize the organization’s cloud-based repository for space domain awareness data known as the Unified Data Library. Notably, she worked to upgrade the system with AI and ML tools in order to streamline the service’s access to critical government and commercial sensor data.

As a member of Seekr’s advisory board, Costa will help “address the critical need for commercial-grade AI solutions vetted for government use” with an emphasis on the defense sector, according to a company press release.

The Virginia-based startup specializes in helping users address accuracy, bias and transparency concerns while building custom AI models.

The company’s flagship SeekrFlow platform allows government agencies to develop trustworthy large language models by offering additional tools that scan and grade information that the models are being trained on. Last year, the platform passed assessment by the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) and is available for purchase via the online Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Dr. Lisa Costa, whose deep defense and national security expertise will accelerate our efforts to deliver advanced AI solutions for government, solving previously intractable problems dealing with complex datasets such as satellite and UAV imagery,” Seekr President Rob Clark said in a statement.

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“From helping define the role of Special Operations in the War on Terror to shaping homeland defense and bringing irregular warfare to space, my career has been marked by pivotal roles and groundbreaking initiatives. Leading innovation and operationalizing AI, cyber operations, and space has been truly rewarding,” Costa said Tuesday in a post on LinkedIn announcing her departure from government service.

Costa took helm of the Space Force’s Chief Technology and Innovation Office in 2021, where she was charged with creating strategies and policies to advance research, development, test and evaluation across the service. As CTIO, she worked to deploy relevant tech to ensure the Space Force — which some have called the Defense Department’s first truly digital service — had an edge over U.S. adversaries. 

Among the capabilities she helped develop for the Space Force is the Unified Data Library (UDL) , a cloud-based data repository that ingests and consolidates data from government and commercial sensors to support the service’s space domain awareness missions. Costa worked to modernize the system to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning tools in order to streamline access to the critical data.

She also pushed the Space Force’s modernization of the “Spaceverse” — a digital environment that connects disparate guardians for training — and the Integrated Operations Network, the IT infrastructure that will serve as the foundation for the service’s digital footprint. Last year, she announced that the Space Force was working on a digital modeling strategy to develop standards for its modeling and simulation activities.

A career technologist, Costa advocated for emerging science and tech across the government. Prior to her role as CTIO, she served as the chief information officer and director of communications systems for U.S. Special Operations Command, and also previously held positions at Engility Corp., PlanetRisk and MITRE.

“But working alongside elite military units and collaborating with various departments, agencies, universities, and industry partners has been my most profound honor,” Costa wrote in her post. “It underscores the importance of our collective efforts toward national security and prosperity. I am deeply grateful for these experiences, colleagues, and mentors who have shaped my journey.”

Costa did not provide additional details in her LinkedIn post as to where she will be working in the future, only that she eagerly looks forward “to the next chapter where I can bring my expertise to new challenges and opportunities.”

Col. Nathan Iven will be the acting CTIO until the position is filled, the Department of the Air Force told DefenseScoop. He was previously serving as the deputy.

Updated on June 18. 2024, at 3:55 PM: This story has been updated to note that Col. Nathan Iven will be the acting CTIO until the position is filled.

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“There are all kinds of uses for AI and machine learning that we tackle, we’re just taking a little more cautious approach right now,” Col. Zachary Warakomski, senior cyber officer at the Space Force, said Thursday during CyberScoop’s annual CyberTalks event.

In September, service leaders transmitted a memo to guardians that put a temporary hold on using generative artificial intelligence tools that leverage web-based datasets — such as ChatGPT. Despite mentions of generative AI’s potential for enhancing future operations, the service’s Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Lisa Costa cited cybersecurity and data concerns in the memo as to why the Space Force needed a pause.

The Pentagon’s new Task Force Lima — launched specifically in response to generative AI — also issued new interim guidance on Nov. 9 that advises how the department should treat the technology in the near term.

Warakomski said that moving forward, the Space Force wants to be “very clear” on how it plans to implement artificial intelligence.

One mission that Warakomski said could be improved with AI and ML is space domain awareness, “particularly when you think of the nearly 45,000 things that are on orbit, or pieces of debris that we are tracking — things of that nature. So, you’re looking at sensor tasking, pattern recognition.”

The service has been considering how these technologies could be integrated into space domain awareness operations this year, from conducting threat assessments, automating anomaly predictions and sifting through large amounts of data.

Better command-and-control ops could also be enabled by AI, particularly as the Department of Defense pivots to Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), Warakomski said. The new warfighting concept aims to connect thousands of military sensors and shooters under a single network.

“Certainly, when we look at command and control, battlefield management and the larger combined JADC2 effort across the DOD, there are all kinds of uses” for artificial intelligence, he said.

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CTIO Lisa Costa recently saw a draft of the service’s digital modeling strategy, which was developed in conjunction with the Space Force’s field commanders, direct reporting units and other personnel across the Department of Defense. Costa emphasized that the document aims to standardize and streamline how the Pentagon’s newest and most digitally focused service uses modeling and simulation techniques throughout its enterprise.

“We are getting after standards for digital twins,” she said during a webinar hosted by the Mitchell Institute. “You would think with the use of digital twins by very large sectors of different industries, that there would be commercial standards out there. But they’re not. They’re very bespoke.”

Digital twins use real-world data — including both physical and behavioral characteristics — to create a true-to-reality, simulated copy of an environment, object or person. Different variables of the model can be altered to study new capabilities, run “what-if” scenarios or predict future operational outcomes.

The technology has been critical for a number of Defense Department programs — including the development of the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, upgrades to the Navy’s aging shipyards and the Pentagon-wide Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative.

The Space Force has been on a journey to build up its operational test and training environments for guardians that will also validate the service’s tactics. It requested $340 million from Congress for fiscal 2024 to enhance its training infrastructure with better simulators, improved ranges and other digital capabilities.

But Costa said the service’s new digital modeling strategy is working to achieve an open standard so that the same digital model can move with a concept or capability all the way through the development pipeline — not just for training purposes.

That could look like a digital twin concept being developed through work done by the Space Warfighting Analysis Center (SWAC) — the Space Force organization responsible for creating operational concepts and force design guidance — and then moving to the service’s acquisition officials to help with requirements and costs analysis. That model could also follow the capability into the operational environment, she added.

“That same model, with more fidelity as it goes through this pipeline, is then able to be used for test, training, [tactics, techniques, and procedures] development, etc.,” Costa said. “In other words, what I always say is we don’t want a test pipeline and then a training pipeline — all of it is the same pipeline.”

When asked if it would be possible for commanders to one day be able to run those models in the background during conflict in order to help make decisions in real time, Costa suggested there could be opportunities.

“You could actually think about having a switch where I’m in simulation mode one moment and then operational mode in the next,” she said.

Updated on Nov. 9, 2023 at 10:50 AM: A previous version of this story stated that Space Force CTIO Lisa Costa had already signed off on a new digital modernization strategy. After publication, a Department of the Air Force spokesperson told DefenseScoop that Costa misspoke and the strategy hasn’t been signed off yet. This story has been updated to reflect that clarification.

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Lisa Costa sits at the helm of the nascent Space Force’s Chief Technology and Innovation Office, where she is charged with developing strategies and policies to advance research, development, test and evaluation across the service and deploying cutting-edge digital technologies to keep the Space Force at an edge over adversaries. As the Defense Department’s first truly digital service, the Space Force looks to Costa to understand how it can ensure its newly established organizational structures can integrate digitally. Some key efforts under her leadership include the Integrated Operations Network, the IT infrastructure that will serve as the foundation for the service’s digital presence, the Unified Data Library, a cloud-based repository for space domain awareness, and the “Spaceverse,” a digital environment that connects disparate guardians for training.

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Lisa Costa, Space Force chief technology and innovation officer, said this week the service will issue a request for proposals in early fiscal 2024 to enhance its Unified Data Library (UDL), which provides a central platform for Space Force data to be used internally and shared with other military services, industry and academia.

To support that procurement and other work with the data library, the Space Force plans to ask Congress for $364.5 million over the next five years, according to its fiscal 2024 budget request. Of that, $187.37 million — a big step up from the $29.5 million it got in fiscal 2023 to support the program — is requested to continue to enhance UDL’s infrastructure, connect the system to additional space surveillance and domain awareness sensors and expand “planned sensor communications upgrades and the integration of non-traditional and commercial data,” per budget justification documents.

According to what Costa said Tuesday at an AFCEA NOVA event, that latter part is key in enhancing the platform.

“UDL was built based on the premise that we were just going to process Space Force data,” Costa said. “Well, that’s relatively small, right? It’s really the commercial data at scale that we need to combine with our Space Force data.”

As the platform stands currently, there’s a large backlog of data waiting to be added to it because it wasn’t built to ingest data from external sources.

“The current process is such that you have to go to the vendor, and you have to say, ‘Hey, I want to put this data in.’ And then they have to create an interface that allows you to bring it in and to normalize it,” Costa said.

For roughly 95% percent of that data, it’s not necessary to normalize it, she noted. Instead it can be used in its raw state, which could save a lot of time.

“So why would we wait, right? We want to allow guardians to be able to plug in data, and then we’ll mark it, right? We’ll say this hasn’t been validated or verified, or whatever it is,” she explained. “But we want guardians to be able to, at speed of mission, put data into the UDL and to be able to process it, normalize it if they need it themselves, as opposed to, you know, having that kind of linear process.”

At the same time, the Space Force is working to modernize — and, in a way, revolutionize — the way its guardians interact with data sets and other information by moving beyond traditional dashboards to more immersive environments akin to the metaverse.

The key to bringing that vision to life is overhauling the service’s Integrated Operations Network, which Costa said is “35-year-old foundational technology” the Space Force “has been left with,” questioning the need in the future for ground stations that take down data from satellites for processing and which she said “might be a smoking hole.”

“We are looking at building out the space-based Internet of Things,” she said, asking for industry’s help. “We need computation on orbit. We don’t want to have to download collected data down to a ground station, do processing on it, then upload it again, then do additional tasking, etc. We want to do that computational processing as close to the sensors as possible and do that retasking while that data is still in space. We don’t want to have to move it back and forth.”

Once that foundational, next-generation network is in place and secured, the Space Force can look to deliver a transformative metaverse-like experience for guardians, many of whom are under the age of 34, and more than 80% of those cohorts are what Costa called “gamers.”

The ability to “start to look at how you can kind of emphasize the key things that someone needs to pay attention to for decision advantage” will have impacts on many industries outside of Space Force and the U.S. military, she said.

“This is not just a DOD or Space Force need. This is a Wall Street need. This is a corporate need. So anything you develop in this area is going to be huge,” Costa said.

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Artificial intelligence and space technology are critical for enabling the Pentagon’s vision of Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), among other modernization efforts.

“Fundamentally, I would like to use edge-based devices to do most of our AI compute,” Lisa Costa, chief technology and innovation officer for the Space Force, said Monday during a panel at the virtual Space Innovation Summit.

“Now you have to remember that most assets that we’ve put up into space don’t have the storage nor the compute power [to do that], so you still have to move that data to algorithms. But I would like to not have to do it on the ground and then have to, you know, move everything up” into space, she said.

Lindsay Millard, principal director for space in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, said AI and machine learning are a “huge priority” for the R&E directorate.

“What we’re looking at is … how do we balance compute on the ground versus compute at the edge. And what I mean by that is what do we [do to] leverage our incredible cloud architectures that we have on the ground to inform what is a relatively miniscule amount of compute power that we have right now on orbit,” she said.

“Trusting our ability to flash an FPGA [field programmable gate array] on orbit and not have that bricked … is also something that we’re looking at,” she added. “What is the balance between what we do on the ground versus on orbit, and how do we make sure that we can accurately update that on orbit if our mission changes for particular satellites?”

Costa said more work needs to be done to figure out the right balance.

Tackling that problem will help the Department of the Air Force as it pursues an Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), which is the Air Force and Space Force’s contribution to Joint All-Domain Command and Control.

Communication and data transport between satellites — and between satellites, aircraft and ground systems — will be critical for that initiative.

As the Pentagon seeks to leverage algorithms in space, it needs to make sure satellites have sufficient edge-computing capability and new software code can be uploaded rapidly, Air Force Chief Information Officer Lauren Knausenberger noted.

“You have the modern space companies really thinking through this,” she said. “How can I make sure that my satellite is really well-equipped, not just for the capability that I know it needs to have today, but for that capability that it might need in a couple of weeks? How do I push code rapidly?”

For example, SpaceX’s Starlink has been agile in upgrading its systems during the Ukraine-Russia war in response to Russian attempts to jam its signals, she noted.

Costa wants the Space Force to leverage the digital “infrastructure” that the commercial sector is building.

“I don’t expect DOD to be at the forefront of putting infrastructure into space” when it comes to things like cloud computing and storage and other technology that enables “really computationally heavy AI in space” without having to download data to ground stations, she said. “I want to take advantage of industry’s investment in putting infrastructure into space.”

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