SHIELD-1 Mission: Orbital Staging of Responsive SDA Assets for Counterspace Defense

The surge of Resident Space Objects (RSO) and space-faring actors has led to an increasingly congested, contested, and complex space environment that must be addressed. Russia and China have both successfully tested anti-satellite weapons. In parallel, new kinetic and non-kinetic threats have appeared. The U.S. must improve its threat response capabilities from months/years to hours/days to ensure the safety of its assets and provide accountability for antagonistic behavior.   Katalyst Space Technologies proposes to advance SHIELD, a system for deploying space domain awareness (SDA) assets to anywhere along the GEO belt in less than 24-hours, towards the SHIELD-1 on-orbit demonstration mission through stakeholder engagement and mission analysis with our commercial partners. SHIELD is an SDA asset that houses multiple deployable units capable of close-proximity resident space object (RSO) inspection missions. SHIELD provides on-demand SDA; taking the response time to near-zero by being prepositioned near the point-of-conflict to characterize and deter threats. SHIELD will provide the ability to proliferate SDA assets around high-value assets (HVA) and at strategic orbital locations in GEO to provide operationally responsive SDA along with performance and resiliency that comes with multiple deployment modalities and autonomous multi-agent mission-level tasking.