During the past year of COSMOS development we've added many new Enterprise features to support our participation in the U.S. Space Force SSC Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution Command and Control (FORGE C2) program. One of these was Command Authority which was released in COSMOS 5.18.0. Command Authority allows a single user to take command authority for a specific target in the COSMOS system. At that point, no other users can manually command or start scripts from that target.

In this screenshot we see the 'admin' user has taken Command Authority for both the INST and INST2 targets. COSMOS Enterprise Admins have the ability to release command authority for any user to prevent locking the system in case a user forgets to release command authority.

Command Authority is enabled via the Administrator Console in the Scopes tab. It is enabled scope wide for all targets in that scope. Once Command Authority is enabled, all operators must first go to the Command and Telemetry Server's Targets tab to first take command authority before sending commands or running scripts. They also need to remember to release command authority at the end of their shifts or have an Admin user release their authority. A special caveat to this rule is that scripts scheduled by Calendar or Autonomic are not affected by Command Authority.

Command Authority was created for our most demanding Enterprise customers which need to enforce strict controls over their targets.