MAUI — In response to rising demand from US allies for sovereign military space capabilities, space tracking company LeoLabs is pivoting from a services-centric model to offering its newest radar, the highly mobile Scout-S, directly to governments, according to senior officials.
“Historically, we focused on operating assets and providing products,” said LeoLabs CEO Tony Frazier. “Due to our hybrid business model, Scout-S will be available both as a system we operate on behalf of customers, providing priority access, and as a government-owned option.” Frazier told Breaking Defense on Monday.
Speaking at the sidelines of the annual Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) conference, he stated the company can now offer access as a commercial service, a contractor-owned and operated system funded by the government, or a government-owned and operated system.
This strategy is already yielding results, Frazier and other officials said, with the firm in discussions with over a dozen allied countries, at least one of which has expressed interest in purchasing multiple units. However, the officials declined to disclose the per-unit price of the radar.
Scout-S, which fits inside a standard shipping container, debuted in late June during US Indo-Pacific Command’s multinational Valiant Shield exercise. The system’s multiple S-band antennas can detect, and more importantly, continuously track, multiple space objects in very low Earth orbit (VLEO) at approximately 180 kilometers up to about 1,000 kilometers, Frazier said.
(Not incidentally, many of China’s growing fleet of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites now operate at altitudes between 900 and 1,000 kilometers.)
Frazier noted that LeoLabs plans to produce Scout-S in the “single digits” next year, with the goal of scaling up to “dozens” annually.
Meanwhile, the firm will integrate multiple Scout-S radars to “fill the gaps” in its network of 12 larger global radar sites, improving space situational awareness services for customers including the US Space Force, said Dan Ceperley, LeoLabs chief operating officer and co-founder.
“We have the most commercial radars of any company in the world, but it still leaves much of the globe uncovered,” he said. “[D]epending on the satellite orbit, it can go hours before it’s observed. We need to reduce that.”
The ability to rapidly detect satellites and maintain continuous tracking is increasingly critical as more satellites become highly maneuverable and routinely conduct rendezvous and proximity operations for missions ranging from on-orbit repairs to targeting adversary assets, Ceperley added.
“We started discussing over a year ago the need to move from periodic observations to persistent custody, and that is the core of this initiative,” Frazier added.
