Military capabilities on orbit are ramping up, but aside from a handful of explosive anti-satellite demos in recent decades, the rising tension has yet to get physical.
A new startup out of California—called Fortastra—today announced it closed an $8M seed round to develop spacecraft aiming to provide physical security to government and commercial sats for when that day inevitably comes.
The round was led by Upfront Ventures, with further participation from Generational Partners, Forward Deployed Venture Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and Wave Function Ventures.
Orbiting fortress: SpaceX veteran and Hermeus cofounder Mike Smayda founded Fortastra this year with a goal of developing and integrating a “multidisciplinary” set of tech to guard the growing number of critical payloads on orbit, including national security spacecraft. Fortastra’s projected capabilities include remote sensing, autonomous capabilities, and some sort of end effector to handle third-party hardware in the vacuum of space.
The company will use the seed funds to validate sensor hardware and begin building out the integrated software and autonomy models necessary to perform reliable protect-and-defend maneuvers in orbit, according to Smayda.
“Where we need to be world-class is in these operations where we’re close in…there’s not a lot of data to support these types of operations, [and] there aren’t a ton of items that have operated in space close to other items,” Smayda told Payload. “That needs to be our core competency.”
Money matters: While Fortastra’s tech can undoubtedly service the DoD, Smayda said there is a greater market potential.
“It’s no secret that space is becoming more contested. There are aspects that are government problems today,” Smayda said. “[But] I do see an emerging market for commercial-security services.”
The tech required to approach and interact with another piece of hardware on orbit also lends itself well to lower-stakes operations. Smayda foresees other use cases where Fortastra’s eventual remote sensing and RPO proficiencies could lend a hand.
In the meantime, lead investor Upfront Ventures told Payload it is confident the government has the funds to support Fortastra’s development, regardless of commercial interest.
“We believe that there is enough budget to sustain the R&D of this company, full stop,” Upfront general partner Nick Kim told Payload. “We also believe that the space economy is going to develop in a way where superiority in that domain is going to be a national-security priority.”