Investor & Partner Brief, Introduction
Space is now a battlefield for technological supremacy. While the U.S. relies on decades-old, largely ground-based tracking to manage space domain awareness (SDA), China has quietly built a space-based SDA framework that enables autonomous operations, giving them advantages in both protecting their own assets and monitoring others.1 This comes amidst an exponential increase in space traffic, projected to grow from ~30,000 tracked objects today to more than ~100,000 by 2030, adding complexity and further amplifying operational demands.2
The U.S. estimates $175B will be allocated to the Golden Dome project, including ~$30B for space-based tracking over the next 3 – 5 years. Combined with existing global SDA market projections (~$30B), total spending could reach ~$60B by 2030.3 Independent analyses suggest Golden Dome’s full scope could total significantly more: $252B – $3.6T over 20 years.4
Rapid growth combined with technologically advanced adversarial threats creates a critical opportunity for systems that can achieve the scale and sophistication required to secure and maintain space safety and superiority.
The Fundamental Problem
Operations in space require answering two deceptively simple questions: where are spacecraft and debris now, and where will they be in the future? These questions drive critical decisions from basic collision avoidance to advanced maneuver planning.
In the US and amongst allied nations, answers to these questions have historically relied upon ground-based sensors. Ground-sourced data limitations create multiple uncertainty sources: weather, atmospheric disturbances, lighting conditions, coverage gaps, large observer-target distances, limited sensor quantity and distribution, hardware limitations, and sparse revisit rates.
With space becoming increasingly congested and contested, dependency on “the way things have always been” is no longer viable. Industry normalization has masked that today’s data and manual monitoring processes are unacceptably uncertain and inefficient. This drives unnecessary collision-avoidance maneuvers, reduces adversarial threat tracking effectiveness, and increases collision likelihood.
As an example, SpaceX’s Starlink, one of the few constellations using autonomous collision avoidance, has dramatically increased maneuvers per satellite by adopting far more conservative maneuvering thresholds, highlighting both the operational burden and the limits of autonomy under uncertain data. These types of maneuvers can incur substantial costs in operator time, fuel, and spacecraft lifetime, and can even paradoxically reduce overall orbital safety.5, 6
Studies show a single maneuver can increase positional uncertainty by 1000x as observed with today’s systems, with degraded effects lasting for days.7 The 2009 Cosmos-Iridium collision provides a stark example wherein a single misreported station keeping maneuver increased collision probability by a staggering ~40 orders of magnitude, directly causing the collision and creating ~1,800 cataloged debris objects.8 Approximately 800 remain in orbit as of 2026, continuing to threaten operations.
During maneuvers of any kind, the uncertainty impacts operators as much as observers. As one major constellation leader explained, their conjunction management team faces peak stress during orbit raising phases because threats are abundant and data sources are highly uncertain.
When maneuvers amplify positional uncertainty, the effects extend beyond collision risks; they also erode our ability to detect and characterize active adversarial threats, undermining both commercial safety and national security.
Dozens more large constellations and thousands more spacecraft planned in coming years will exponentially exacerbate today’s risks. As Col. Owen Stephens, Director of Contracting at the
U.S. Space Force’s Space Rapid Capabilities Office, reflected in a panel discussion at the 2025 SmallSat Conference, “The problem is… are [existing data] actually accurate enough to enable the autonomous nature of [onboard collision avoidance systems]? The answer is… no.”9
Advancing Space Domain Awareness
Global governments have long recognized the value of space-sourced non-Earth imaging, as evidenced by investments in space-based space surveillance programs. Yet dedicated assets remain scarce, and historically their data have been tightly controlled, limiting contributions to broader, community-wide awareness. But that landscape is shifting. Political pressure to lower commercial barriers, coupled with urgent needs to expand space intelligence, has led NOAA to relax historically stringent regulations. Recent precedents create new opportunities for commercial players to address critical SDA gaps.10
One study demonstrated not only the value of space-sourced observations, but also that spacecraft can play an active role in monitoring their own conjunction threats. In that research, a single spacecraft successfully self-observed 96% of its conjunctions. By combining its own onboard observations with traditional conjunction data messages, it improved in-track positioning accuracy by a factor of two.11 This result highlights both the capability of a single spacecraft to contribute meaningfully to its own space safety, but also the tangible benefits of augmenting ground-based data with space-based sensing.
Another study, though considered preliminary due to self-reported schedule and scope constraints, demonstrated the tremendous potential of space-ground data fusion pointing to even greater gains in more comprehensive experiments or operational applications.12 It showed accuracy improvements of 10 – 50% for participating spacecraft in LEO, and scaled even further in GEO, achieving more than 10x improvements. Even more significantly, the results revealed dramatic gains in detecting, characterizing, and incorporating unexpected non-cooperative maneuvers, enabling rapid post-maneuver recovery during complex mission phases.
The power of observation multiplies with scale, particularly when multiple spacecraft provide diverse vantage points. A study of multi-observer configurations showed striking improvement, up to 1,000x, when increasing from two to six observers.13
Taken together, these insights validate the transformative value of space-based space surveillance. Across a variety of data fusion methodologies, studies find that integrating space-based and ground-based sensor data consistently “surpasses ground-based space surveillance performance” alone.14 No matter how the analysis is conducted, space-ground fusion consistently provides measurable improvements. This combination of multiple observers and fused sensor inputs lays the foundation for far greater situational awareness than ground-based systems alone can provide.
Many operators treat conjunction management as a form of mission insurance, essential for protecting fleets where a single collision could cripple operations. One large constellation leader explained that they use existing commercial services as a stopgap to augment their efforts, paying for even modest improvements over publicly available data, as the cost of a single collision could be devastating.
This persistent demand for improved accuracy underscores the broader system-level value quantified by NASA’s 2024 orbital debris cost-benefit analysis, which demonstrates that reducing uncertainty in conjunction predictions produces “robustly positive” returns.15 These include fewer collisions, reduced impact on spacecraft resources and lifetimes, and lower operator effort from fewer inaccurate conjunction warnings and unnecessary maneuvers. The analysis showed that a 10x improvement in accuracy delivers benefits up to 100x the associated costs.16
In summary, space-based sensing, multi-observer configurations, and space-ground data fusion have been shown to enhance accuracy, reduce unnecessary maneuvers, and lighten operator workload; benefits that translate directly into operational efficiency, mission assurance, and risk reduction. Yet no commercial solution currently integrates these capabilities at scale, leaving operators exposed to avoidable risk and inefficiency. KeeperSpace addresses this gap, providing a unified, scalable platform that turns distributed space-based observations into actionable situational awareness and autonomous threat management.
KeeperSpace Solutions
KeeperSpace leverages the reality of exponentially growing space populations as the foundation of its solution. Rather than viewing spacecraft proliferation as solely compounding the traffic problem, our approach leverages both existing and future spacecraft as sensing nodes and autonomy enablers, forming a distributed network within our patent-pending architecture to enable scalable space domain awareness.17
TARGOS: Targeted Guardian Operating System
TARGOS transforms spacecraft into active participants in space safety, supporting collision avoidance and defense threat monitoring. At its core, TARGOS AI-enabled platform improves positional accuracy of targeted threats and autonomy through space-ground data fusion and onboard decision-making.
MESH: Monitoring & Exchange System Hub
The MESH coordinates multiple TARGOS-enabled spacecraft to create a distributed, collaborative network. When one spacecraft identifies a potential threat, the MESH utilizes AI-powered intelligence to automatically identifythe best-positioned network observers to provide additional data, ensuring no operator faces threats alone.
We are building in stealth, reach out for more details about TARGOS and MESH
https://v1.keeperspace.com/contact-us/: Learn more about how KeeperSpace is redefining space operations by previewing our foundational solutions
With mounting security threats and dozens of new large constellations planned by 2030, the space domain requires unprecedented awareness coordination capabilities across civil, commercial, and defense sectors. KeeperSpace is building the architecture to connect and integrate insights from distributed, multi-domain space assets, transforming the challenge of increasing space traffic density into a coordinated advantage that enables safer, more efficient, and commercially scalable operations. In KeeperSpace’s envisioned future, every spacecraft has persistent access to immediately actionable SDA intelligence, and autonomous collision avoidance & threat monitoring become the norm.
Early adopters and partners position themselves at the forefront of a high-growth market while securing the strategic advantage and operational resilience essential for the future of space operations.
For technical inquiries, partnership opportunities, or implementation discussions, contact: info@keeperspace.com
1 China’s Different Approach to Space Situational Awareness. (2024, December 2). China Studies Institute, CASI / Air University.
2 European Space Agency. (2025, April 1). Around 100000 satellites are expected to be in orbit by 2030 [Image]. ESA.
3 Nova Space. (n.d.). Space Situational and Domain Awareness [Product page]. Nova Space.
4 Harrison, T. (2025, September 12). Build Your Own Golden Dome: A Framework for Understanding Costs, Choices, and Trade-offs (Working Paper). American Enterprise Institute.
5 Lewis, Hugh. (2025, July 2). Starlink Manoeuvre Update July 2025. LinkedIn Articles.
6 Lewis, Hugh. (2025, July 22) “SpaceX Quietly Changed its Approach to Space Safety.” LinkedIn Articles.
7 Oltrogge, D. (2024). Deep operator and SSA collaboration for space sustainability. Science Direct, 11(2).
8 Ibid.
9 Redwire. (2025, August 12). Revolutionizing Mission Operations with Autonomy. YouTube.
10 Maxar Intelligence. (n.d.). Non-Earth imaging. Maxar Technologies.
11 CSA & Defence R&D Canada Ottawa. (2019). On-Orbit Observations of Conjuncting Space Objects Prior to the Time of Closest Approach. Amos Tech, 2019(Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference (AMOS)), 7. Amos.
12 Oltrogge, D. (2024). Deep operator and SSA collaboration for space sustainability. Science Direct, 11(2)
13 Zhang, Z., Zhang, G., Cao, J., Li, C., Chen, W., Ning, X., & Wang, Z. (2024). Overview on space-based optical orbit determination methods employed for space situational awareness: From theory to application. Photonics, 11(7), 610. https://doi.org/10.3390/photonics11070610
14 Hussain, K.F., Safwat, N.E., Thangavel, K., Sabatini, R. “Space-based debris trajectory estimation using vision sensors and track-based data fusion techniques.” Acta Astronautica, January 2025.
15NASA. (2024). Cost and Benefit Analysis of Mitigating, Tracking, and Remediating Orbital Debris. NASA, Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy(May 2024).
16 Ibid.
17 KeeperSpace. (2025). [Title Confidential] Provisional Patent, filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. USPTO.