AST, Kayhan, LeoLabs team to demo capability to reduce Space Force satellite tracking times

LeoLab’s space monitoring radar facility in Collie, Western Australia. (LeoLabs)

AUSTIN — Three commercial firms have demonstrated a collective capability to help the Space Force more quickly detect and track satellites launched simultaneously into low Earth orbit (LEO) — a growing launch practice that is challenging the service’s abilities to spot potential on-orbit crashes.

AST SpaceMobile, Kayhan Space and LeoLabs provided space situational awareness data for the five satellites launched Sept. 12, 2024, on SpaceX’s Bluebird Block 1 mission to the 18th Space Defense Squadron (SDS), CEO of Kayhan Siamak Hesar told the 11th Annual Space Traffic Management Conference here sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin.

AST is a satellite company collaborating with cellular telecommunications firms to create an on-orbit constellation to provide internet services. LeoLabs uses radars around the globe to detect and track satellites. Kayhan has created highly precise software designed to help satellite operators keep tabs on where their birds are in juxtaposition to those of other operators, as well as dangerous space junk.

The goal of the collaborative effort was to show that commercial data can help close the time lag between when a satellite is released into orbit from a rocket to when the Space Force can reliably track it and put the trajectory coordinates into the military’s catalog of space objects, he explained.

That catalog currently is used by the 18th SDS to provide satellite operators with warnings of potential collisions with other satellites and space junk — although the Defense Department is working with Department of Commerce to offload that warning mission to a civilian system run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That time lag, known as the “COLA gap,” for collision avoidance gap, is a growing problem for the Space Force as more and more satellite operators are utilizing “ride share launches” to LEO where multiple birds are lofted together on a single rocket, Hesar explained. Once the rocket makes it safely to space, these satellites, sometimes as many as 100, are released simultaneously.

This means that their radar signatures overlap, making it extremely difficult for the radar systems used by the 18th SDS to either identify them or track their trajectories until much later when they have moved farther apart, he told Breaking Defense following his presentation. Thus, it often takes the 18th SDS “months” to be able to put their tracking data into the public database and/or provide any warnings of potential collisions.

“So basically, those operators are flying blindly, even though they are able to track their own satellites — well, potentially, some of them are not, some of the are,” he told the conference. “But other operators don’t know they exist, and that causes that creates a big risk.”

The three space monitoring firms used the “deployment parameters” about the satellites being carried on the Bluebird mission provided to them by SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 is the rocket most widely used by US satellite operators for ride shares. They then pooled data from the GPS receivers on board the satellites tracked by AST, radar observations from LeoLabs’ global network, and ran Kayhan’s software to distinguish individual satellites as they broke away from the rocket. LeoLabs’ observations also were used to track the five “spacecraft structure release mechanisms,” which are the devices that decouple the satellites from the launcher, that did not have GPS on board.

Hesar told Breaking Defense that the demo was able to reduce the COLA gap from an average of about two months down to a week.

The experiment demonstrated the “great things” commercial space firms “can do when we collaborate together, and the capabilities that we can bring to the table and also to help the government,” he summed up.