Vantor—the artist formerly known as Maxar Intelligence—is expanding its relationship with the DoD through another in-space awareness contract.
The company will work with Space Force’s Joint Commercial Operations program to provide in-space imagery and analysis on high-interest objects in space, particularly those objects located in blind spots that can’t be seen by ground-based sensors.
“Often, we’re not delivering just a picture. We’re providing that additional analysis and intelligence,” Susanne Hake, general manager of Vantor’s US government business, told Payload. “I would compare it to what we’ve been doing, and what Vantor’s been doing in the Earth imaging and the Earth observation market as well, where we started off just providing images…We started doing object detection, and then that moves into more of a site monitoring use case.”
Under the contract, Vantor will provide the Space Force with in-space observations and analysis that will help defense officials track not only the location of certain objects, but also their velocity, attitude, maneuvers, and more information.
Turn around: Vantor is performing its non-Earth imaging (NEI) for the DoD using the same set of satellites already positioned in orbit to image Earth. Seven of the satellites Vantor has in orbit are also capable of performing NEI, Hake said, which each satellite does down to six-inch resolution.
- These satellites are able to shift focus from Earth imaging to in-space imaging when they are passing over open ocean or the poles—areas where there are fewer objects of interest to snap photos of.
- “We’re not seeing any sort of trade-off needed between the two,” Hake said. “We’re hoping to be able to collect, as we move into 2026, up to 1,000 NEI images a day.”
- The satellites also don’t need to burn fuel to shift focus from Earth to space, the company said. The satellites use inertial systems to reposition themselves as needed.
Join the club: In-space monitoring, where available, is increasingly becoming a part of DoD’s strategy for tracking. In addition to this contract with the Space Force, Vantor has won two other in-space tracking contracts lately as it builds out its in-space monitoring business:
- The Commercial Collision Avoidance Gap Pathfinder program, through the Office of Space Commerce;
- Participation in SDA’s Tools, Applications, & Processing Lab for domain awareness.
All said, between these contracts and the company’s projected growth of its in-space tracking business, Vantor believes the business will be a multi-million dollar line item by next year.
