Slingshot Aerospace’s dual acquisitions transform spaceflight safety and sustainability for satellite operators at a time of unprecedented and growing risk on-orbit.
The acquisition of Numerica Corporation’s Space Domain Awareness (SDA) division includes the world’s first and only, commercial, LEO to GEO, daytime and nighttime, optical sensor network for satellite tracking.
The acquisition of Seradata brings the company’s industry-leading SpaceTrak satellite and launch database into Slingshot’s portfolio and establishes Slingshot’s footprint in the UK/European market.
Both of these acquisitions fast track Slingshot’s ability to drive the space economy toward sustainability by providing satellite and launch operators with the most robust and authoritative space situational awareness (SSA) and space traffic coordination solutions available today.
Today, satellite operators across the commercial, civil, and defense sectors rely on siloed tools and data that significantly limit the efficiency of day-to-day operations. Both of these acquisitions accelerate the development of Slingshot Digital Space Twin™, a virtualization of the space operating environment that fuses data together from multiple sources, providing an accurate live, historical, and future representation of objects in orbit, space weather like geomagnetic storms, and the radio frequency spectrum. These acquisitions also enhance the world’s first space traffic coordination solution, Slingshot Beacon, used by satellite operators to cut through the noise of conjunction alerts and facilitate coordination to prevent collisions.
“We are constantly improving our customers’ abilities to monitor, simulate, and optimize their space flight operations,” said Melanie Stricklan, Co-founder and CEO, Slingshot Aerospace. “By merging the unique capabilities of Numerica and Seradata with those of Slingshot, we are creating a first-of-its-kind, unified platform – providing our customers with the most holistic and robust insights available. In addition to more than tripling the size of our team over the last year, we are rocketing forward with this game-changing suite of products that enable a more sustainable and responsible approach to space operations today and in the future.”
Numerica Space Domain Division Acquisition
The Numerica Space Domain Awareness (SDA) division acquisition includes:
- An autonomous global network of proprietary sensors and software comprising more than 150 sensors and 30 telescopes across 20 locations around the globe with advanced data processing capabilities.
- New team members including research scientists, orbital analysts, software engineers, and applied mathematicians.
- Numerica SDA offices in Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, Colorado, where Slingshot will continue to operate and expand.
The global sensor network—with locations in the USA, France, Spain, Morocco, Greece, Australia, Namibia and Chile—precisely observes tens of thousands of objects from satellites to debris and provides around-the-clock optical tracking, regardless of the presence of daylight. These sensors can track satellites and debris as small as 10 cm in size and autonomously deliver vital information to operators in real-time. Integrating this comprehensive data into Slingshot Aerospace’s products further enhances data fidelity, empowering space operators to confidently make mission-critical decisions.
“Some of the brightest engineering minds in the space industry built our advanced technologies over several decades,” said Jeff Poore, President, Numerica. “Slingshot’s acquisition of Numerica’s Space Domain Awareness division will create a suite of highly differentiated products that will help our space customers operate more safely and efficiently than ever before.”
The Space Domain Awareness division of Numerica will be fully integrated into Slingshot Aerospace. The Air and Missile Defense divisions of Numerica will continue to operate as usual.
Seradata Acquisition
The Seradata acquisition includes:
- Seradata’s SpaceTrak, the industry’s most authoritative database and analytical system, covering all launches and satellites since Sputnik in 1957, plus future planned spacecraft/launches.
- New team members, including expert space industry researchers and analysts who will continue to develop SpaceTrak.
- A base of operations in the UK, expanding Slingshot’s capacity to serve customers globally.
Seradata’s SpaceTrak database is relied upon by industry-leading organizations around the world, including governments, space agencies, aerospace manufacturers, launch providers, satellite operators, insurance companies, universities and space researchers that need trusted data to drive informed decisions.
“Combining what Slingshot and Seradata have each built creates an incredibly robust knowledge graph that will provide the space industry with world-class decision support, data and analytics,” said Tim Fuller, Managing Director, Seradata.
Slingshot Aerospace and the future of Space Sustainability
The exponential growth of launch and satellite activities requires reliable data and insights to guide safe space operations and protect our modern way of life that depends on space. Collisions with space debris or other objects present a real and present danger that can have catastrophic and cascading effects. Slingshot’s products provide extremely high fidelity data in a digestible form, delivering reliable, actionable insights to customers to improve the efficiency of their daily operations and increase confidence for mission-critical decisions.
Slingshot Aerospace, Inc. builds space simulation and analytics products that help worldwide commercial and government organizations accelerate space sustainability to create a safer, more connected world. The company synthesizes data from multiple trusted sources, including the newly acquired global sensor network and the Seradata SpaceTrak database, to bring the space domain into the digital environment. With these insights, Slingshot Aerospace customers are empowered to confidently make decisions and achieve clarity in the complexity of the space domain. Slingshot Aerospace was launched in 2017 and maintains offices in Austin, TX, El Segundo, CA, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, CO.