The Joint Task Force-Space Defense Commercial Operations cell has been renamed the Joint Commercial Operations cell to better reflect its collaborative nature across the globe and emerging mission sets.

Its new name will maintain the same acronym, ‘JCO,’ to strengthen continuity with established partners while also becoming more inclusive of its diverse participants and mission sets.

The JCO network includes Allies, partners, academia, and industry, who have joined the JCO’s global construct to help achieve 24/7 space operations worldwide.

“This name change aligns the JCO within U.S. Space Command’s new operational command structure, but the JCO mission continues without interruption,” said U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Richard Zellmann, Deputy Combined Joint Force Space Component Commander (D/CJFSCC), U.S. Space Command. “The abbreviated name captures the joint, operational nature of the organization as well as the JCO’s continued collaboration with our global Allies and partners, who are crucial to supporting the protect and defend mission. The JCO has been a superb example of U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command collaboration.”

The JCO will continue to support the National Space Defense Center’s core protect-and-defend mission and remain an extension of the NSDC operations floor, leveraging commercial providers to provide diverse, timely Space Domain Awareness (SDA).

In addition, the JCO will accommodate emerging missions including Surveillance Reconnaissance Tracking (SRT), Near Earth Imaging (NEI), Cooperative Jamming and Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI), Data Exploitation and Enhanced Processing (DEEP) Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) and Satellite-based Ground Radio Frequency (RF) to support the broader U.S. Space Command mission set.

In April 2019, the NSDC first began incorporating commercial capabilities through its Sprint Advanced Concept Training (SACT) series.

The JCO has leveraged the bi-annual SACT live-virtual experiment and exercise series as an opportunity to provide commercial vendors of space data and analytics capabilities to explore integration of their products in a realistic space operations environment.

The repeated success of the SACT series ultimately led to the operationalization of the JCO to actively contribute valuable operational SDA data to the NSDC through daily collaboration. SACTs are designed to improve collaboration between USSPACECOM and its components, allied and partner nation space enterprises, and the commercial space industry.

The mission of the JCO is to provide the space defense enterprise with timely and accurate identification, analysis, and warning of potential counterspace activity, leveraging industry and allied capabilities at the non-classified level to enable maximum distribution and collaboration in support of operational and strategic objectives.