Gravitics unveiled Diamondback, a smaller orbital carrier designed to fulfill missions from protecting US national security satellites to deploying space-based missile interceptors, on Tuesday at Payload’s Space Investor Summit.
The orbital carrier model: Gravitics CEO Colin Doughan compared the company’s tech to a police station. Having police stations in key neighborhoods—complete with police cars that can quickly get to incidents—balances limited assets with the need for a fast response time.
In this analogy, Gravitics’ spacecraft is the police station, where assets (such as deterrent tech or space-based interceptors) can stage before they’re needed. A third stage acts as a police car to quickly send assets to respond to problems, Doughan told Payload. And, because the assets are housed in Gravitics’ spacecraft, they’re protected from thermal fluctuations, radiation, and micrometeorites, ensuring they’re in prime condition when it’s go time.
Meet Diamondback: Gravitics built Diamondback based on its commercial spacecraft designed to carry science experiments and other cargo to space stations.
“You can put an initial response capability in an orbit early, when you’re not sure yet how many you want, but you do want global coverage from early days,” Doughan said. “The government can scale volumetrically with bigger carriers, or they can scale from a federated fleet perspective and quickly get an initial operating capability up in orbit that has global coverage.”
In March, Gravitics was selected for a Space Force STRATFI contract worth up to $60M to build the tech for the Defense Department. Diamondback is what the company will be building under that contract, Doughan said.
Defense *clap clap*: “When we spoke with [Golden Dome Director Gen. Michael] Guetlein in February, he said, ‘This is the first true deterrent I have for space,’” Doughan said. If they are stationed throughout LEO and GEO, Gravitics’ spacecraft can reach any cislunar orbit in 12 hours, and some locations in LEO in under two hours, he said.
The goal of that quick response: Stop trouble before it happens. That means that if an adversary spacecraft is preparing to attack a US military satellite, Gravitics’ craft could deploy a jammer or dazzler—both non-kinetic ways to prevent an attack without creating debris, Doughan said.
Outside the box: The tech has obvious defense operations—including housing both assets to protect critical national security satellites, as well as space-based interceptors for Golden Dome.
“They are small enough that even our smallest vehicle would be able to hold multiple SBIs depending on the size,” Doughan said. “We become a high-capacity magazine for someone wanting to do space based intercept.”
But Doughan also said it could have civil applications when minutes matter, such as staging emergency rescue tech, or supplies for astronauts.
