New Spacecraft Aims to Police Satellites in Orbit

In the coming years, fleets of orbit-policing spacecraft could zip around the planet, keeping an eye on space-tech ventures by China, Russia, and ill-intentioned actors elsewhere in the world. The mobile spacecraft concept presents a major shift away from the old-school way of doing things in space, in which satellites maintain simple orbits and try to avoid one another. Soon, those simple satellites will be looked after—and possibly hunted by—more agile spacecraft.

The spacecraft, called Jackal, was thought up by a group of former U.S. Space Force and Air Force officers. In 2022, the group founded Colorado-headquartered True Anomaly, with an aim to address the limitations they perceived in existing technologies that monitor near-Earth space.

“We have telescopes and radars on the surface of Earth that detect and track objects in space,” says Even Rogers, True Anomaly’s CEO. “But because of the distance, there can be substantial error in our understanding of the position and velocity of satellites.”

Rising Satellite Collision Risks

Space is vast, and for a long time those errors were not a big deal. But in the past 15 years, the number of satellites in orbit has increased tenfold. The amount of space debris has grown accordingly. That means more close approaches and a soaring risk of collisions.

On top of that, advanced satellites that can actively remove orbital debris by dragging junk into the atmosphere to burn up and others that can operate in-orbit servicing and refueling missions to tend to aging satellites may be just a few years away. These developments, if they come to fruition, will make orbital space that much more chaotic. Leading those developments appears to be China, which stunned the world in 2022 by using a robotic grabber to pluck one of its satellites from its orbital slot and drag it into a graveyard orbit.

Western experts don’t think the desire to keep space tidy is all that drives China. In December 2024, reports emerged of Chinese stalker satellites creeping around the geostationary ring—a region 36,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface where many spy and telecommunication satellites are stationed. Space situational-awareness companies also observed China performing strange maneuvers in low Earth orbit, which they compared to aerial dogfighting.

“We know that China is well ahead of everybody else at the moment,” says Juliana Suess, a space defense analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “They have been able to do some very sophisticated proximity maneuvers in space, which obviously could have a nefarious purpose.”

Dallas Kasaboski, a space analyst at the Analysis Mason consultancy, points out that other countries are not that far behind. Japan-headquartered Astroscale performed a series of in-orbit capture demonstrations between 2021 and 2023 with its ELSA-d mission. In 2024, the company’s ADRAS-J spacecraft completed a close-up inspection of a discarded rocket stage earmarked for active debris removal. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently announced its Tetra-4 and Tetra-5 missions—to be conducted in collaboration with Astroscale, Northrop Grumman, and Orbit Fab—both missions aiming to test out orbital refueling systems. True Anomaly’s Jackal, however, is one of the first Western-designed pieces of tech openly addressing the perceived space threats.

“China and Russia are building counter space capabilities to take away the advantage of the U.S. and its allies in space,” says Steve Kitay, the senior vice president for space defense at True Anomaly. “We are providing the Jackal spacecraft to be able to respond to that.”

Jackal Spacecraft for Orbital Security

While most satellites save their precious fuel to keep themselves in their assigned orbital slots as long as possible, Jackal—which weighs roughly 250 kilograms, including propellant—is fitted with 20 thrusters and a large fuel tank, and is meant to cruise from spot to spot, patrolling its assigned region of space. True Anomaly envisions having dozens of Jackals in orbit around Earth and even all the way to the moon to ensure what Kitay calls “space superiority.”

“The Jackal will go around and inspect suspicious satellites,” Kitay said. “This way, we would be able to provide much more characterization of what those satellites are about than, for instance, ground-based radar or telescopes.”

A response to the Chinese “dogfighters” and “stalkers,” the Jackals, however, won’t be performing any jaw-dropping in-space acrobatics. Using its novel chemical thrusters, the Jackal will be able to speed up or slow down by pushing itself into a slightly lower or higher orbit than that of the satellite it sets out to investigate. At full throttle, the Jackal will be able to change its speed up to 800 meters per second in low Earth orbit and up to 1,000 meters per second in the geostationary orbit, while circling the planet at velocities of thousands of miles per hour.

The first Jackals will be fitted with a payload suite including a four-megapixel camera and a set of short and long-wave infrared sensors to guide the spacecraft’s maneuvers around an object of interest. In the future, the U.S. Space Force, which cofunds True Anomaly’s tests, might want to outfit the Jackals with defensive weapons such as orbital lasers or microwave energy systems to keep the adversary’s robotic grabbers and dogfighters at bay. True Anomaly launched three demo satellites into low Earth orbit last year and announced plans to deploy its first experimental space defenders into geostationary and cislunar orbits (an orbit between Earth in the moon affected by the gravity of both) in 2026.

“We are now moving into an era where satellites are no longer just about the service they provide, being it broadband Internet or Earth imaging,” said Kasaboski. “Now, satellites are also becoming a support infrastructure that in the future will be able to do all sorts of things from servicing to refueling to responding to all kinds of emerging threats.”

This article was updated on 15 May 2025 to correct the weight of the Jackal spacecraft, and to clarify the speeds Jackal can achieve in different orbits.