Space tag: Jackal, Puma spacecraft to chase each other Victus Haze demo

WASHINGTON — With the first, threshold-setting missions for the Space Force’s Victus Haze demonstration now complete, space firms Rocket Lab and True Anomaly will undertake several sets of maneuvers over the next six months in a celestial game of tag — trading roles as chaser and chased, according to executives from both companies.

The point of the game is to demonstrate rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO), which involve close maneuvers around a target satellite to either surveil it, as is the primary goal of Victus Haze; help it, for exampling by refueling; or, in the case of on-orbit combat, hurt it.

Victus Haze is the second of several Victus demos planned under the service’s Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) program.

The first mission, named Victus Nox and launched in September 2023, was praised by senior Space Force officials as a game-changer for the service in future great power competition. Under that demonstration, Firefly Aerospace launched a maneuverable space vehicle developed by Boeing’s Millennium Space Systems.

Victus Haze goes a step further and is “interesting because [the two firms will] be taking turns for various roles throughout the mission [to] practice tactics and operational concepts for dealing with on-orbit threats,” Even Rogers, founder and CEO of True Anomaly, told Breaking Defense. “And so, we change, we switch roles, but we don’t have a designated role, it just depends on the mission we’re doing.”

While the Space Force has given the two players a set of objectives to fulfill and set mission boundaries, he explained, the on-orbit game play is not scripted and neither company knows exactly how the other’s spacecraft will act.

Brian Rogers (no relation), Rocket Lab’s vice president of global launch services, said that the design of Victus Haze thus is very different than most RPO demonstrations up to now, which instead have involved highly scripted maneuvers using “cooperative” satellites as the target.

“If you look at missions like this in the past, it’s frankly been a dead satellite or a self-deployed fly-along payload. Like everything is very much kindergarten. This is not,” he told Breaking Defense.

Rocket Lab’s Rogers added that another key aspect of how Victus Haze is structured is that the Space Force isn’t really “developing new capabilities” under the project, but is focused on “setting up these use cases” that Rocket Lab and True Anomaly are then operationalizing.

“They’re saying: ‘Hey, Rocket Lab, True Anomaly, go do this thing.’ And we go do it,” he said. “So … there is no hugely expensive or or wildly classified bespoke capability that has been developed to go do this. It is more like the government facilitating a training ground and commercial companies [are] executing.”

Still, citing Space Force sensitivities, both executives were coy about the precise activities, beyond imaging each other’s spacecraft, involved in the future Victus Haze mission sets. But public releases have described some early successes in the friendly cat-and-mouse game.

True Anomaly’s Jackal spacecraft launched May 3 on a SpaceX Falcon 9, after a delay caused by a duo of failures last year with Firefly’s Alpha rocket. True Anomaly on July 1 announced it had completed an early RPO mission to find and chase down Rocket Lab’s Puma, a variant of its Pioneer-class bus, which launched on June 19.

In a June 22 press release, SSC described the Victus Haze mission scenarios as designed to demonstrate space domain awareness and “characterization” capabilities. Rocket Lab’s Puma is carrying a sensor payload developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and provided by SSC as government furnished equipment. True Anomaly’s Jackal spacecraft is equipped with its own sensor suite.

“The task was to acquire the Rocket Lab satellite with our on-board sensors, so we used some awkward cueing for that maneuver towards Rocket Lab, circumnavigate the Puma target, and take multiple images over the circumnavigation,” True Anomaly’s Rogers said. “And we had a criteria for how what we needed to achieve egress.”

Likewise, Rocket Lab stated in a July 8 video that it had completed its RPO tasking, having “racked, approached, and photographed the target satellite in under 59 hours (25 hours ahead of deadline).”

While the exercise isn’t hostile, the TacRS program and its Victus demonstrations are being managed by the Space Force’s new Combat Power Program Acquisition Executive office, headed by Col. Bryon McClain, responsible for space warfare. According to the service’s fiscal 2027 budget documents, TacRS falls under “the Combat Power mission area[,] which provides the systems required to protect and defend space-based capabilities and ensure space superiority by enabling and executing combat operations in space.”

Further, both True Anomaly and Rocket Lab (partnering with RTX) are working on space-based interceptors for the Trump administration’s Golden Dome missile shield initiative.

The TacRS program has at least three more Victus demonstration projects in the works. The FY27 budget documents said that the “spend plan” for FY26 includes $29.8 million in base funding and $135 million in reconciliation funding. The FY27 request is for $86 million, with a total of $300 million requested through FY31.

The service last February announced a $21.81 million award to Firefly Aerospace for the third demo, called Victus Sol. However, Space Systems Command officials at the time were circumspect about what exactly would be involved in that effort, other than to say that it would be the first to put an “operational system” on orbit.

In addition, according to the budget documents, testing will begin late this year on Victus Surgo and Victus Salo, both of which are characterized as “maneuverable, prepositioned” space domain awareness missions. While noting that FY27 funds will be used to finalize assembly, integration and testing for both demonstration, the documents do not provide planned launch dates.

True Anomaly’s Rogers said that the upcoming Victus Haze missions will involve “a series of sorties” based on increasingly complex and challenging maneuvers by both spacecraft.

“The timelines will shrink, the expectations for operating within a certain margin will increase, and the behaviors of your target will change,” he said.