The goal of the collaborative effort was to show that commercial data can help close the time lag between when a satellite is released into orbit from a rocket to when the Space Force can reliably track it and put the trajectory coordinates into the military's catalog of space objects, said Kayhan CEO Siamak Hesar..
Dan Ceperley, the company's chief operating officer, told Breaking Defense that VLEO — typically defined as between 150 and 350 kilometers in altitude — is increasingly being used, including by Russia and China.
Absolute positioning is critical in contested and denied environments.
Hiding in the sun, launching mini satellites and radar absorbent materials are just some of the tricks nations are using to hide their military satellites in orbit.
"I would imagine that as Department of Commerce continues to mature this concept, we will definitely want to take advantage of what they're doing," said Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein.
The company said that on Thanksgiving, for instance, a Russian satellite's sub-satellite — in a Matryoshka-style — released yet another satellite, in what a LeoLabs analysis said could've been timed for fewer American eyes on the sky.
Russian and Chinese anti-satellite tests are responsible for "pretty much 20 percent" of "conjunction" warnings, that is predictions that two space objects are likely to collide, in 2022, said the State Department's Eric Desautels.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping adversarial cyber operations at machine speed, requiring defenders to increase operational tempo while imposing pain and cost.
"More geographic coverage helps revisit rates, so we see satellites more frequently. Which is quite critical," LeoLabs CEO Dan Ceperley told Breaking Defense.
"It’s a new and encouraging step in the right direction in terms of space domain awareness and a welcome collaboration within the industry," said Denis Bensousan, of London-based insurance firm Beazley.
"I'm happy to announce that with our partners at the DoD, we've signed a memorandum of understanding of agreement that will drive our mutual work," Don Graves, Commerce deputy director, told the second public meeting of the National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Kamala Harris.
"It's a big acknowledgement that [Low Earth Orbit] is expanding rapidly. It's of national importance. It's of commercial importance. And there's a need to have more eyes on the sky," CEO Dan Ceperley told Breaking Defense in an interview.
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While Russia's Defense Minister has claimed that debris from the ASAT test doesn't endanger the US and Russian crew on the ISS, the laws of physics beg to differ.
"I think we need to recognize that the space domain has evolved over the past several years," says Secure World Foundation's Victoria Samson. "And then our governance needs to evolve with that."
LeoLabs CEO and co-founder Dan Ceperley says the firm has a mission "to drive a new era of transparency in LEO."