Shifting market sands: LeoLabs moves to sell new mobile space radar directly to allies

MAUI — In large part as a response to increased demand by US allies for “sovereign” military space capabilities, space tracking firm LeoLabs is shifting its services-focused marketing strategy to offer its newest radar — the highly mobile Scout-S — directly to governments, according to senior company officials.

“So, a key thing that’s changed for us is where historically we’ve always focused on operating the assets and [providing] the products, due to our hybrid business model, we’ll make Scout available both as a system — where we will operate it with customers on their behalf, but also provide provide them priority access to it [and] they can essentially take advantage of the radar service — but then we also are entertaining government-owned options,” LeoLabs CEO Tony Frazier told Breaking Defense on Monday.

Speaking on the margins of the annual Advanced Maui Optical Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) conference here, he said that the company now is positioned to offer access to Scout’s capabilities as a commercial service, as a contractor-owned and operated system funded by a government, or as a government-owned and operated system.

And that strategy already is paying off, Frazier and other LeoLabs officials said, with the firm in talks with over a dozen allied countries ― at least one of which has expressed interest in buying multiple units. The officials would not, however, reveal the price per unit of the radar.

Scout-S, which fits in a standard shipping container, debuted in late June during US Indo-Pacific Command’s multinational Valiant Shield exercise. The system’s multiple S-band antennas can detect, and more importantly constantly track over time, multiple space objects operating between very low Earth orbit (VLEO) at some 180 kilometers (112 miles) above the Earth up to about 1,000 kilometers, Frazier said.

(Not incidentally, many of China’s growing fleet of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites now operate at some 900-1,000 kilometers in altitude.)

Frazier said that LeoLabs intends to produce Scout-S in the “single digits” next year, with a goal of scaling up to “dozens” per year.

Meanwhile, the firm will also be integrating multiple Scout-S radars deployed to “fill the gaps” in its network of 12 larger radar sites around the globe in order to improve the space situational awareness services currently provided to customers, including the US Space Force, Dan Ceperley, LeoLabs chief operating officer and co-founder, told Breaking Defense.

“We’ve got the most commercial radars of any company in the world, but it still leaves a lot of the world uncovered,” he said. “[D]epending on the satellite orbit, it can go hours before it’s observed. We’ve got to cut that down.”

The ability to rapidly detect satellites and then keep them in sight is ever-more important as more and more satellites become highly maneuverable, and routinely undertake rendezvous and proximity operations for various missions from on-orbit repairs to targeting adversary birds, Ceperley added.

“We started talking over a year ago about the need to move from periodic observations to persistent custody, and that’s really what this is all about,” Frazier added.