Slingshot’s space domain awareness package. Photo: Slingshot Aerospace

Space Domain Awareness provider Slingshot Aerospace on Tuesday debuted what it says is the “world’s first” package to provide sovereign nations with their own space tracking capabilities, decreasing their reliance on outside help in gaining insights into the space above their skies.

Slingshot’s offering gives potential customers options to choose their sensors, which include the company’s Horus and Argus starting arrays that peer into Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geosynchronous orbit (GEO), respectively, and Varda, a gimbaled electro-optical sensor that can see objects in LEO and GEO in daytime.

Countries that have assets in space currently rely on a “powerhouse,” typically the U.S., to provide them with space domain awareness so they can keep their spacecraft safe, and to know who is flying over their space, Erik Ekwurzel, chief data and intelligence officer of Slingshot, told Defense Daily last week.

Some of Slingshot’s customers want a “sovereign capability” to begin to “have more control over their own destiny” around space domain awareness, he said. This control prevents them from potentially being cut off from the data that the U.S. or others typically provide them, he said.

Customers that acquire their own sensors will also be able to tap into Slingshot’s global network, which consists of more than 220 sensors at 22 sites, and at the same time expand the “federated sensor network so that everybody who is in the federation will have much more global access to data,” Ekwurzel said.

Additionally, Slingshot’s customers will be able to license the company’s cloud-based sensor orchestration and data processing suite, which can provide capabilities such as anomaly alerts, space object catalog maintenance, tasking orchestration, and more.

With space becoming increasingly congested, “it’s just becoming harder for people to make sure that their satellites don’t bump into something,” Ekwurzel said.

This story was first published by Defense Daily