GoKawiilAn ongoing military exercise happening hundreds of miles above Earth has—for the first time in an unclassified setting—demonstrated how future satellites might evade and pursue one another in a future conflict.
That was the announcement Wednesday from True Anomaly, one of the companies involved in the exercise. True Anomaly’s Panther satellite, also known as Panther, played the cat-and-mouse game with another spacecraft named Puma, based on Rocket Lab’s Pioneer satellite platform.
“This is what we’ve really been building towards for the past four years,” said Even Rogers, True Anomaly’s co-founder and CEO.
The two satellites, each somewhere between the size of a dishwasher and a refrigerator, are part of the Victus Haze mission managed by the US Space Force. Victus Haze is the latest in a series of “responsive” Space Force missions aimed at demonstrating how the military and its commercial contractors can rapidly launch and deploy new satellites in reaction to an emerging threat or need.
Launch, approach, inspect, evade
The scenario for Victus Haze, set in motion earlier this year, involved the launch of True Anomaly’s Jackal satellite in May. Jackal initially took the role of an adversary’s satellite, and Rocket Lab’s Puma satellite, already built and in storage, was on standby to quickly launch and approach Jackal for a close look at what it was doing. Rocket Lab was on call to launch its Puma spacecraft within 24 hours of call-up by the Space Force.
That happened last month, when military officials informed Rocket Lab it was time to go. The company quickly rolled its Electron rocket and Puma satellite to a launch pad in New Zealand and launched them June 19, less than 17 hours after receiving the call-up. Within 38 hours, Rocket Lab had fully activated and prepared the Puma satellite for its first orbital maneuver, beating the Space Force’s requirement of 72 hours.