AMOS 2025 — Defense tech company Anduril Industries and propulsion startup Impulse Space revealed today they are teaming up to build and fly a jointly funded demonstration satellite for rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) — in response to what company officials see as increasing Space Force demand for such capabilities.
While loathe to specify exactly what types of Space Force missions the team has in mind, senior officials from both firms told Breaking Defense in an interview that they are confident that the service will be interested in commercially available satellites with low cost, high thrust maneuverability as on-orbit threats multiply.
“What we aim to demonstrate with this mission is the ability for us to commercially fund this, demonstrate it working and be an enabler to future DoD missions, and we see the demand for those missions,” said Gokul Subramanian, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering. “I just think freedom of maneuver is going to be the enabler for every space mission going forward.”
“We are focused entirely on the defense market, and we see a significant market there,” he added.
Eric Romo, president and chief operating officer of Impulse, chimed in: “100 percent! I agree with that. We flew our first Mira vehicle a little over a year ago; about a year and a half ago now actually. Time flies. And after that mission we heard loud and clear from Space Force, ‘This is a capability that we need to [have]: high thrusts, high maneuverability spacecraft for a reasonable price.”
RPO capabilities are foundational to the Space Force’s plans for improving space domain awareness as adversaries increasingly deploy satellites that could threaten US spacecraft and terrestrial forces. In addition, the need for “maneuver without regret” has been championed by top brass at US Space Command for years now — who argue that RPO will be key to orbital warfare.
Under the teaming agreement, Impulse is providing its Mira spacecraft, which will be integrated on the firm’s Helios kick stage featuring the Deneb engine, which the company touts as providing more rapid insertion into to geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO), some 36,000 miles above the Earth.
Impulse in October 2024 won a $34.5 million contract from the Space Force and the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit to provide a Mira vehicle for the future Victus Surgo and Victus Salo missions under the Tactically Responsive Space program.
Anduril said it is bringing the payloads to the joint venture, including a new long-wave infrared (LWIR) imager, a mission data processor based on its Lattice software, as well as providing third-party sensors. Anduril already is providing Lattice to the Space Force under a November 2024 contract to link together the various radar, telescopes and spacecraft that make up the service’s Space Surveillance Network for keeping eyes on the heavens.
“Long wave provides significant benefits on orbit, particularly the ability to see very dim targets and the ability to see targets when they are not made visible by the Sun. So if you’re on during the eclipse or on the dark side of the Earth, you’ll be able to see targets. And so that sensor will be able to enable us to do long-range acquisition and be able to guide the RPO activities,” Subramanian noted.
Anduril and Impulse intend to launch their Mira spacecraft version, which has a mass of about 300 kilograms without payloads, in late 2026, Romo said. It will fly aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch of the company’s first Helios mission, alongside the Mira designed for the Victus Surgo mission.
Subramanian noted that the companies chose GEO — where a preponderance of the Space Force’s high-priority satellites currently fly — because that is where they are “seeing a strong demand signal.”
Romo stressed, however, that it wouldn’t be difficult to reconfigure the design to undertake missions in low Earth orbit (LEO), and it might cheaper to boot.
“There’s pretty minimal changes between the vehicle that you’d send to LEO and to GEO. There’s some differences in the radios and antennas and things like that between LEO and GEO, but the core propulsion system, power system, all that sort of thing will be the same,” he said.