For the past year, the Space Force has been working closely with the Air Force and Navy to learn from their experience developing an advanced, realistic training and testing environment for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — with an eye on one day creating a similar capability for the space domain.

Col. Corey Klopstein, program executive officer for Operational Test and Training Infrastructure at Space Systems Command, said his team started discussions last year with the Air Force’s Advanced Training Capabilities Division about how the Space Force could be involved with the effort, known as the Joint Simulation Environment. The Space Force has since joined the JSE user group and is working with the program office to find ways to bring space capabilities into the simulation environment and eventually develop an advanced test and training capability of its own.

“The Space Force needs to provide space effects to the joint warfighter to ensure the joint warfighter can validate in their training events and their exercises, whether or not they’re going to be effective,” Klopstein said March 5 at the Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. “The Space Force also needs a high-fidelity environment to be able to validate not just our system performance in the threat environment that we anticipate, but also our tactics, and validate our tactics.”

The JSE is typically associated with the F-35 because the Navy and Air Force developed it as a high-end test capability for the advanced fighter jet. Though there’s currently just one JSE system located at Patuxent Naval Air Station in Maryland, the program is weeks away from flipping the switch at a second site at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada and plans to eventually host the capability at all of its F-35 bases.

As the services expand their JSE footprint, the goal is for the system to become the premier combat training environment for U.S. and coalition partners. As part of that process, they’re working with the Space Force to integrate simulated space capabilities and scenarios into the environment to help make training more representative. That could include things like space-enabled electronic warfare, navigation or communications.

Klopstein described that work as “ongoing,” noting that the Space Force is funding an effort to develop standards and specifications to bring those capabilities to the JSE.

Longer term, the Space Force is crafting a plan for an advanced simulation capability of its own. The service has training devices, but for the most part they’re not interconnected, meaning that guardians assigned to different missions can’t train together.

Klopstein said the Space Force is in the process of creating distributed — or cross-mission — and high-end training systems. On the distributed side, it has been using a system called Swarm for large, tactical training exercises like Space Flag.

Realistic simulation is also key for the Space Force’s testing enterprise, which relies heavily on virtual systems to validate that satellites and other space capabilities work as envisioned. Unlike the other services that can test their ships on the water or their aircraft in flight, the Space Force can’t validate most of its systems in the space environment, which makes the quality of its ground-based testing infrastructure even more important.

Klopstein stressed that as space becomes more congested and adversaries increase their threats against U.S. systems, the service needs an advanced simulation capability that factors in a changing space environment.

“We’ve got to make sure that our systems can survive in a threat environment that we haven’t had to consider in the past,” he said. “Gathering quantitative data that is representative of our systems that gives us the confidence level that the systems can perform in this threat environment is something that we’ve got to do going forward.”

The service hasn’t decided what a JSE for space could look like and hasn’t announced any specific timeline in that regard, but Klopstein said the service wants to learn from the Air Force’s work on the program and carry those learnings into a future system.

“The partnership that we’ve started … is only going to continue to broaden going forward,” he said. “We are looking to be able to prototype and partner with [the Air Force] to leverage that work that’s been done and potentially build out the Space Force synthetic and high-fidelity training environment that we need.”