Startups Are Now Flying the U.S. Space Force's Orbital Missions

The U.S. military's newest space operators don't work for the government. They work for startups.

What happened

In a June exercise called Victus Haze, the U.S. Space Force had two private companies run a live orbital operation, TechCrunch reported. First, Rocket Lab launched a satellite — nicknamed Puma — just 16 hours and 42 minutes after receiving the order, aboard its Electron rocket. Then True Anomaly's autonomous Jackal spacecraft, already in orbit, was tasked with finding and inspecting Puma: it located the satellite from about 2,000 kilometers away using onboard sensors, maneuvered in close, and captured imagery before backing off.

True Anomaly's chief executive, Even Rogers, called it "probably the most complex rendezvous and proximity operation between two spacecraft in modern history" outside of NASA and Space Force human missions, per TechCrunch. The point of the drill is what the military calls "responsive space" — the ability to launch and maneuver satellites fast, on demand, rather than on a years-long schedule.

Why the military is outsourcing it

The logic is speed and cost. Traditional defense procurement moves slowly; a booming commercial space industry can now do things — launch on short notice, fly autonomous inspection satellites — that used to require bespoke government programs. Rather than build everything in-house, the Space Force is contracting startups that already built these capabilities for other markets. Rogers framed the mission in national-security terms, noting that China and Russia are constantly launching new hardware into orbit, and that part of the Space Force's job is to understand what those capabilities are. (Rendezvous and proximity operations means flying one spacecraft up close to another to observe or interact with it — a delicate, fuel-hungry maneuver.)

The business behind it

For the companies, military space work is a large and growing revenue stream. True Anomaly — founded to build autonomous spacecraft for inspecting and tracking objects in orbit — has raised more than $1 billion, including a $650 million round in March, per TechCrunch. Rocket Lab, already a workhorse launcher of small satellites, is selling exactly the "launch on demand" the Pentagon wants.

Both compete for work under a Space Force program known as Andromeda, a roughly $6.2 billion effort to buy maneuverable reconnaissance and space-domain-awareness capabilities from private vendors. That structure — a big, multi-year pot of money open to commercial firms — is the mechanism turning startups into military space contractors alongside traditional primes.

Why it matters

For the space industry, Victus Haze is a proof point that commercial companies can perform sensitive, time-critical military operations — opening a durable government market for a sector that has long depended on volatile private funding. For defense, it reflects a broader shift toward buying capability off the shelf from a fast-moving commercial base, trading some control for speed and cost. And for investors, it validates the thesis behind heavily funded space startups: that autonomous spacecraft and responsive launch have real, paying customers — chief among them the Pentagon. Boursel gives no investment advice; the takeaway is less the militarization of commercial space than the commercialization of military space — the government increasingly renting the orbital capabilities that startups built, and paying startup valuations to do it.