EraDrive, the Palo Alto, CA-based startup building autonomous capabilities for satellites, won a $13M DoD award, under which the Space Force will buy an undisclosed number of the company’s Era-Node vision-based autonomy modules.
The Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) award is intended to provide direct procurement funding for new capabilities, unlike R&D-focused awards such as SBIR and STTR. EraDrive’s award creates an accelerated pathway for the Space Force to acquire Era-Nodes for future spacecraft.
“Getting a small company’s technology onto a government contract usually takes years. Working with the APFIT office and NASA Ames, we got EraDrive selected and on contract within the same fiscal year. That’s the pace we need to keep up with what the commercial sector is building,” Lawrence Robertson, the Air Force’s lead for space experiments, told Payload via email.
Keys to the castle: Autonomous capabilities for military sats have been on the DoD’s wish list for years. While serving as the Space Force’s top acquisition official in 2024, Frank Calvelli said autonomous sats would be vital to helping the DoD get around downlink bottlenecks. But EraDrive officials claim that its tech provides a range of capabilities beyond just flying in GPS-denied environments.
“The way we think about GPS-denied navigation, space domain awareness, RPO, and autonomous operations is basically these are just like four different flavors of autonomy, which are just backed by the same stack,” EraDrive CEO Sumant Sharma told Payload.
EraDrive isn’t the only company building autonomous capabilities for satellite operations. But Sharma told Payload that he believes that many offerings in the market fall short of true autonomy.
- Many autonomous operations work by uplinking a list of commands the satellite can perform between ground-links.
- Era-Nodes, however, give more control to the satellite—where the operator can define an envelope of do’s-and-don’ts, which satellites are free to operate within.
Ducks flock together: While EraDrive has yet to fly its fully integrated Era-Node module in orbit, nearly all of the components and software onboard have notched flight heritage.
Over the past two years, EraDrive has flown at least seven experiments of its autonomous software—called Era-Core—onboard NASA’s Starling satellites, demonstrating that it can identify and track moving targets, and autonomously cue other sats to adjust themselves to keep space objects in view.
Going forward, EraDrive hopes each Era-Node in orbit can become part of a sensor network, “giving operators fleet-level intelligence for collision avoidance and SDA whether or not they fly our hardware,” Sharma told Payload via email.
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