RPO itself is nothing new. In a report last September,
the Secure World Foundation, a private foundation promoting cooperative
solutions in space, detailed dozens of military RPO operations in
geostationary and low earth orbits since the Cold War. Most of these
involve American, Russian, or Chinese spacecraft sidling up to each
other’s satellites, presumably to see what they look like or to
eavesdrop on their communications.
There are also emerging peaceful uses of RPO, such as space tugs that can repair or relocate failed satellites or remove dangerous space junk. The Secure World Foundation helps run an organization called Confers
that is setting voluntary technical standards for commercial RPO. True
Anomaly is one of around 60 Confers members. “If we ever want to do
things like cleaning up space debris, we have to develop these
technologies,” says Brian Weeden, the foundation’s director of planning.
However, True Anomaly is the first RPO startup explicitly focusing on
the military market, he says.
Rogers’ last job for the government was leading teams within US Space
Command that planned how and when to deploy defensive and offensive
military space systems. He and his cofounders, Dan Brunski, Tom Nichols,
and Kyle Zakrzewski, also former Air Force and Space Force officers,
“knew the problem better than anybody else, dealt with the limitations
of technology on a day-to-day basis, and were frustrated with those
limitations,” Rogers says. Rather than wait for a large industrial
defense contractor to get around to it, they decided to solve the
problem themselves. The deployment of space weapons by America's rivals,
he says, “is much closer than most people would think.”
According to US Security Exchange Commission filings, True Anomaly has already raised over $23 million from investors. This includes a December investment from Narya,
a venture capital firm cofounded by US Senator JD Vance, a MAGA-leaning
Ohio Republican. (Rogers says that True Anomaly itself has no political
affiliation.)
The company recently signed a lease on a 35,000-square-foot factory
in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado. As well as manufacturing the Jackal
satellites, True Anomaly engineers are designing a cloud-based control
system to integrate autonomous agents and human operators, using
commercial game engines like Unity to build interactive real-time
applications and developing high-fidelity physics software to help the
Jackals maneuver in space. True Anomaly has already applied for a trademark
covering, among other things, hardware and software for “orbital
space-to-space imagery, rendezvous proximity, and target acquisition
systems.”
“What is different about True Anomaly is the way it seems to be
presenting its satellite as more of a pursuit system than an imaging or
an intelligence-gathering system,” says Kaitlyn Johnson, deputy director
of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic &
International Studies. “This does concern me because it could cause
unintentional escalation. Especially with the founder’s Air Force
background, it might be read by our adversaries as a military-directed
company that was starting to pursue this capability.”
The company’s first challenge could be keeping its own floating
computers intact. “Cooperative RPO is already hard,” says Johnson. “You
can see that from the demonstrations by Astroscale and Northrop
with their servicing satellites, which were years in the planning.” A
cooperative RPO mission by NASA in 2005 called DART failed when the
spacecraft malfunctioned, crashed into its target satellite, and was
destroyed.
Pursuit missions of adversarial satellites are likely to be much
riskier still, says Johnson: “You don’t have the same data coming from
the other satellite. You maybe don’t have the diagrams and diagnostics
of what the satellite looks like so that you know what you’re about to
encounter.”
Any collision in orbit can generate many thousands of pieces of space
junk, each of which could damage other satellites, creating yet more
debris. Researchers worry about increasing orbital debris ultimately
triggering a catastrophic cascade known as the Kessler Syndrome.
Rogers says that collision avoidance is a possibility “that we track
very closely and aggressively. We’re committed to acting responsibly and
sustainably in the space domain.”
Rogers himself is no stranger to risk. Before starting True Anomaly,
he founded and led a crypto hedge fund called Phobos Capital. And prior
to that, he incorporated a company called 3720 to 1, Inc—a reference to
the odds of Han Solo successfully navigating an asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back, according to C-3PO.
Whether Rogers’ pursuit of a satellite venture is more likely to
succeed, or just another piece of gung-ho science fiction, should be a
lot clearer after SpaceX’s rocket launches in October.
This story originally appeared on wired.com.
