An ongoing military exercise happening hundreds of miles above Earth has—for the first time in an unclassified setting—demonstrated how future satellites might evade and pursue one another in a future conflict.
That was the announcement Wednesday from True Anomaly, one of the companies involved in the exercise. True Anomaly’s Panther satellite, also known as Panther, played the cat-and-mouse game with another spacecraft named Puma, based on Rocket Lab’s Pioneer satellite platform.
“This is what we’ve really been building towards for the past four years,” said Even Rogers, True Anomaly’s co-founder and CEO.
The two satellites, each somewhere between the size of a dishwasher and a refrigerator, are part of the Victus Haze mission managed by the US Space Force. Victus Haze is the latest in a series of “responsive” Space Force missions aimed at demonstrating how the military and its commercial contractors can rapidly launch and deploy new satellites in reaction to an emerging threat or need.
Launch, approach, inspect, evade
The scenario for Victus Haze, set in motion earlier this year, involved the launch of True Anomaly’s Jackal satellite in May. Jackal initially took the role of an adversary’s satellite, and Rocket Lab’s Puma satellite, already built and in storage, was on standby to quickly launch and approach Jackal for a close look at what it was doing. Rocket Lab was on call to launch its Puma spacecraft within 24 hours of call-up by the Space Force.
That happened last month, when military officials informed Rocket Lab it was time to go. The company quickly rolled its Electron rocket and Puma satellite to a launch pad in New Zealand and launched them June 19, less than 17 hours after receiving the call-up. Within 38 hours, Rocket Lab had fully activated and prepared the Puma satellite for its first orbital maneuver, beating the Space Force’s requirement of 72 hours.
The launch set up Puma for a series of burns to move in close to True Anomaly’s satellite. The Space Force’s criteria for success was to complete the rendezvous and photograph the target satellite in less than 84 hours. Rocket Lab reported it did the job in less than 59 hours, culminating in a head-to-head inspection and survey, with each satellite snapping pictures of the other.
One of the images, released by Rocket Lab, shows its satellite’s view of True Anomaly’s Jackal.
“You can see that we are actively tracking them,” Rogers told Ars. “Our solar arrays are deflected, tracking the sun, and we are staring right down their boresight, which is just a really cool demonstration of our capability. We were tracking them while they were tracking us, and maintaining power-positive status.”
It’s easy to see the military utility for this type of capability. Imagine a mysterious military satellite launched by Russia or another space power. It suddenly starts approaching a multibillion-dollar US spy satellite with unknown intentions. To some degree, this is already happening in the real world. If US forces had a satellite on the shelf, they could quickly launch it directly into the same orbit as the adversary’s satellite to take a closer look, and perhaps in the future, take action.
The rapid launch and initial rendezvous and inspections were only the opening salvo in the Victus Haze exercise. On July 14, True Anomaly and Rocket Lab received orders for Mission 2 of Victus Haze. The task? Pursue and evade one another over and over again. True Anomaly’s Jackal, or Panther, satellite was commanded to move in on Rocket Lab’s Puma vehicle, which sensed the threat and fired thrusters to “vanish into the dark.”
“Jackal’s crew produced a validated mission plan in under 30 minutes from tasking,” True Anomaly said in a statement. “Jackal executed ingress and a burn sequence over 23 minutes to close on Puma. When Puma maneuvered away during the approach, Jackal downlinked what it saw, and our team replanned, revalidated, and implemented a new mission plan in rapid succession.”
As Rocket Lab’s Puma backed away, True Anomaly’s Jackal executed more burns to reengage and image its prey. Military and company officials haven’t released any photos from the most recent Victus Haze demo, and they declined to disclose exactly how close the satellites came to one another.
“Due to operational security, further details involving sensor suites for characterization, phenomenology, payloads, distances, or docking will not be shared,” a spokesperson for Space Systems Command said in response to questions from Ars.
True Anomaly’s ground controllers, working out of an operations center in Colorado, managed the maneuvers with the help of an algorithm generating “hyper-accurate” targeting estimates from measurements onboard the Jackal satellite. All of this was done without coordination between True Anomaly and Rocket Lab. “No scripted target behavior,” True Anomaly said.
“Puma wasn’t playing a role,” the company continued. “It was maneuvering to lose us, and we didn’t know how in advance. That’s the entire reason to do this on orbit instead of in a lab: the human decisions, the unexpected conditions, and the adversary’s freedom to act are all real, and integration that hasn’t held up against them hasn’t been tested at all.”
This cat-and-mouse game sounds a lot like dogfighting in space, something Rogers, who started True Anomaly in 2022, has discussed with Ars in the past. Rogers previously served in a space aggressors unit in the US Air Force, taking up against US space operators in war game and military exercises.
But orbital dogfighting is a lot different from what you may have seen in Top Gun.
“Dogfighting in space doesn’t quite have the drama of an aerial dogfight,” Rogers told Ars earlier this year. “The tempo is slower, and the relative velocities are slower.”
Relative is the key term. It’s important to remember this all played out as the satellites soared approximately 300 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth, speeding around the planet at some 17,000 mph (7.6 kilometers per second). But in the same orbit, the satellites’ motion relative to one another is more like a carefully choreographed dance than a game of chicken.
There’s more to come on Victus Haze. The two satellites are designed to swap positions as aggressor and target throughout a series of demonstrations playing out over the next few months.
“Victus Haze was envisioned to remove the simulation and to learn in the orbital environment against a thinking adversary,” Rogers said. “We’ll keep executing and learning.”
Two to tango
While True Anomaly touts its prowess in high-tempo satellite maneuvers, Rocket Lab kicked off Victus Haze by setting a new record for rapid, responsive launch. Victus Haze builds on the Space Force’s Victus Nox mission, which launched in 2023 with a then-record 27-hour call-up for Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket and a satellite built by Millennium Space Systems.
Victus Haze adds complexity by including a second satellite in the exercise. Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket and Puma satellite were in a ready state at Launch Complex 1, the company’s privately owned spaceport in New Zealand, when the Space Force issued launch orders.
“Within that first hour, we basically had three independent teams moving in parallel,” said Brian Rogers, Rocket Lab’s vice president of global launch services.
The launch team immediately started final preparations on the Electron rocket and the Puma satellite. Rocket Lab was supposed to launch a different rocket at Launch Complex 1 with a commercial satellite the same week. Victus Haze took priority.
Meanwhile, guidance engineers calculated the exact trajectory the Electron rocket would have to fly to inject the Puma satellite into an orbit near True Anomaly’s Jackal satellite. That required a nearly instantaneous launch window. And Rocket Lab’s satellite control team kicked into gear for around-the-clock operations.
From Rocket Lab’s perspective, Victus Haze came with an unexpected twist. The company’s engineers knew they were going to launch in pursuit of a True Anomaly satellite. That was announced in 2024 when the Space Force awarded contracts for the Victus Haze mission. But Rocket Lab didn’t know which one. True Anomaly was supposed to launch its Jackal satellite for Victus Haze on a Firefly Aerospace Alpha rocket. Instead, it launched on a rideshare mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in May. At the time, nobody outside of True Anomaly or the Space Force knew this was the spacecraft for Victus Haze.
“The idea was it was supposed to be a surprise to exercise the team, and no, we didn’t know what thing we were going to go be chasing,” Rocket Lab’s Rogers said. “That was all meant to be part of this little war game.”
Most of Rocket Lab’s launches carry commercial satellites, and although the rapid call-up of Victus Haze is a uniquely military requirement, the exercise helped fine-tune the company’s procedures to improve performance on all future missions.
“The 24 hour call-up and RPO mission was very much a national security application,” Rogers said. “We have seen what I would call a responsive space mission for the commercial market. We have had some commercial customers who either lost their other ride to space, they were on a rideshare and got bumped or something, or it is a business-critical need to get on orbit. And we get a phone call very late, and they say, ‘We’ve got to get on orbit to make our business work. What can you do for me, Rocket Lab?’
“There are just not many companies in the world—in fact, probably only two at most—that you can call and can make that happen,” Rogers said. “We’ve actually done that three or four times in the past year. We’re likely to have another one this year. It’s not going to be quite the 24-hour call-up for launch. That’s not the level of intensity, but it is three months away from launch. Sign a contract, submit the regulatory requirements, and get somebody on orbit.”
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