By Abbey White, Staff Writer, SatNews
Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. Coverage and analysis from across the conference, tracking the forces shaping the next phase of the SmallSat market.
MOUNTAIN VIEW. The mood at the SmallSat Symposium has shifted from anxiety to resolve. While previous years were defined by fear of orbital overcrowding, this year marks the moment the industry decided to act. Experts at the Space Domain Awareness panel officially retired the “Big Sky” theory, the old assumption that space is too vast for collisions to matter. Yet panic did not replace this outdated concept. Instead, a sophisticated, militarized professionalism has taken command.
The narrative is no longer about dodging debris but establishing a chain of custody. The Strategic Edge has moved from a theoretical concept to a contracted reality where commercial innovators act as the primary eyes and ears for national defense.
Clarifying the Mission
A critical development involves a clear separation of church and state, or rather, safety and security. Dr. Ed Lu, CTO of LeoLabs, brought necessary precision to the room by arguing that we must stop conflating civil traffic management with defense requirements.
“We have to make a clear distinction between Space Safety/Commercial uses and Defense/Intel/Military usages,” Lu told the audience. While civil safety is about coordination, the military mission relies on transparency in a contested domain. “Adversary satellites that are trying to not be tracked well, that are trying to show up at times when you don’t expect them . . . that’s going to happen.”
That assertion is not a warning of impending doom but a statement of market opportunity. While the Department of Commerce handles civil air traffic control, the Pentagon and its commercial partners are free to focus on the high-fidelity tracking required to monitor these complex and sometimes contentious maneuvers.
Demanding Accountability
Moving toward defense-grade awareness drives a new culture of accountability, ending the days of ambiguous anomalies. Nicol Verheem, CEO of TRL11, argued that the industry is ready to move from probability to visual proof.
“There should be attribution of guilt,” Verheem asserted. “If I cause debris and it damages your spacecraft, right now insurance pays for your damage, but I won’t pay for it.”
Verheem’s company is deploying on-orbit video sensors to close this loop. This technology signals market maturation. Just as dashcams brought clarity to insurance claims on Earth, visual sensors are bringing attribution to orbit, signaling a sector ready to police itself.
Closing the Data Gap
The technology on display proves the commercial sector is moving faster than the government. While legacy systems rely on ground-based radar, startups are launching sensors directly into the environment they need to monitor.
Dan Terrett, co-founder of Odin Space, outlined a grid of sub-millimeter sensors that will finally illuminate the blind spots in our orbital maps. He described the tech as “effectively little weather stations dotted all over space monitoring rates of impact.”
This capability sparked a lively debate on terminology, a sure sign that the industry is taking its engineering standards seriously. When Terrett used the common phrase “lethal non-trackable debris,” Lu pushed back by rejecting the idea that anything is inherently impossible to track.
“Anyone who uses that acronym should go to jail,” Lu declared, drawing a laugh but making a serious point. “It is not a physical limit. The current limit is just the limit at which the Space Surveillance Network run by the Department of Defense [is able to] catalog and track.”
The implication is empowering. The limit is merely a legacy hardware problem, and commercial companies like LeoLabs and Odin Space are already solving it.
Agility is Security
Maneuverability serves as the final piece of this new security architecture. Dr. Brad King, CEO of Orbion Space Technology, highlighted that better eyes are only useful if you have the legs to move.
“If you need to get out of the way, you’re going to need us to move out of the way,” King said.
King noted that propulsion creates a constructive feedback loop. As satellites become more agile, they become harder to predict, which drives demand for even better tracking data. “Every time one of our customers uses one of our propulsion systems, the satellite gets harder to track and harder to predict,” King observed. This is not a flaw but the engine of a healthy, competitive ecosystem whose evolving capabilities constantly sharpen each other.
A Mature Domain
The Wild West days are fading. In their place, a structured, defensible domain is emerging. The Department of Defense is no longer just a regulator. It is a customer buying data from companies that have solved problems the government has only recently acknowledged.
As the session closed, the focus shifted from the fragility of space to the robustness of the new business models supporting it.
“Nobody’s going to spend enough money to do it unless there’s enough money to be made in selling the product,” King reminded the room.
Fortunately for the industry, the business of national security is booming.