The military routinely sends satellites to follow rival vehicles and test their capabilities, but scaling up this kind of reconnaissance is increasingly recognized by the U.S. military as a challenge best handled by the private sector.
That’s why two space startups, True Anomaly and Rocket Lab, completed a rendezvous mission for the U.S. Space Force last week. It was so complex it was like something out of “Top Gun.” Two rival satellites meet in orbit, close enough for one to capture images of the other.
The exercise, called Victus Haze, demonstrated a close inspection of a spacecraft immediately after it arrives in orbit, essential in a world where the United States, Russia and China are deploying new space weapons.
“China and Russia are regularly launching capabilities into space, and one of the missions of the Space Force is to understand what those capabilities are,” True Anomaly CEO Even Rogers, a veteran of U.S. military space activities, told TechCrunch. “There are currently gaps in our collection capabilities.”
In the June mission, SpaceX’s rocket-building rival Rocket Lab, which recently announced its Iridium acquisition, launched a spacecraft called Puma just 16 hours and 42 minutes after being notified. This is notable because most rocket launches are completed months in advance.
The Jackal spacecraft, built by True Anomaly, was waiting in orbit to intercept it. As part of the exercise, the company had no idea where the Puma would land in space, but it used its onboard sensors to find and identify a target from 2,000 kilometers away. The Jackal then flew close to the target (precisely classified as how close) and orbited, capturing images of various parts of the vehicle before returning to the start of the orbit.
Excluding human spaceflight missions by NASA and the Space Force, “this is probably the most complex rendezvous and proximity operation between two spacecraft in modern history,” True Anomaly’s CEO said.
Bringing two spacecraft traveling at nearly 17,500 mph together in orbit is no easy task. Previous civilian demonstrations, such as those performed on Northrop Grumman’s maintenance satellites or Astroscale’s orbital debris retrieval mission, operate on slower time frames.
Now things get interesting. Both companies are ready to take on new, increasingly difficult exercises in the coming weeks. This could include Rocket Lab’s Puma attempting to avoid True Anomaly’s Jackal and performing a self-checking maneuver.
True Anomaly, founded in 2022 by Rogers and a cadre of former military space experts, planned to build both hardware and software to enable new missions assigned to the U.S. Space Force when it was created in 2019. After several years of development missions, last month’s demonstration began to bring that vision to fruition.
“This is the secret sauce of this company,” said Seth Winterroth, a partner at Eclipse Ventures who serves on True Anomaly’s board of directors. “This is not one spacecraft architecture or one piece of software or a specific set of payloads. This is a deep, deep understanding of what tactics and doctrine look like in this domain.”
True Anomaly has raised just over $1 billion, including $650 million in March. Now the company will be competing for multiple task orders in the Space Force’s $6.2 billion Andromeda program, which specifically looks to the private sector for this kind of mobile reconnaissance.
“Aviation heritage is everything and proven capabilities speak loudest to this opportunity,” Rogers said.
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