Anduril, the autonomous weapons maker, doubles the size of its space unit

Subramanian said Anduril would fully absorb ExoAnalytic in the acquisition, adding the company’s 130 employees to Anduril’s 120 space sector employees. ExoAnalytic has the “best catalog and capability” for tracking objects in geostationary orbit, Subramanian said, providing visibility into an area of ​​valuable real estate used by the U.S. military and foreign governments for communications, missile warning and espionage.

According to its website, ExoAnalytic’s sensor network has collected billions of observations with “high-quality astrometric and photometric measurement data.” The dataset allows ExoAnalytic to discern satellite maneuvers, stability changes, anomalies, and more.

ExoAnalytic’s technology also has applications in missile defense, improving Anduril’s position to play a role in the Pentagon’s Golden Dome program. “They are experts in digital signal processing, seeker theory, seeker design and target estimation, discriminating the hard body, discriminating the target from other things that might be in the environment,” Subramanian said.

“In a case of using missile defense, it’s really important to know where the missile is,” he said. “When you look at these images, it’s just a bunch of very blurry pixels, and it’s possible to turn that into ‘here’s where the missile is,’ and then even get the super resolution, internal to that, which is ‘here’s the shape of the missile. Here’s what you see. Here’s the important things you need to be aware of on this hard body.’ It’s really, really sophisticated stuff. I wish we could delve deeper into this topic, but given the sensitivity of what we do, we can’t.

While Anduril will continue to serve ExoAnalytic’s commercial customers, the company will develop new products that are “less commercial in nature and more fit for purpose,” Subramanian said. In other words, Anduril will adapt its space technology for military use.

“Our ability to do things on Earth, like the events that have unfolded over the last few weeks, depends on our ability to access and leverage space for these missions,” Subramanian said. “So we want that to be the thesis of our business unit. That’s what we’re focused on. We don’t do GPS. We don’t do weather. We’re focused on protecting space, ensuring access to space, guarding space, making sure we can track everything, and that’s what we’re going to continue to invest in quickly.”