A US military exercise in space got underway with barely anyone noticing

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Sneaky

The Space Force wants to cut the time to field new satellites from years to weeks, days, or hours.

True Anomaly's Jackal satellite, seen here, plays one part in the Space Force's Victus Haze mission.

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True Anomaly

Rocket Lab quietly launched a small satellite from New Zealand on Friday in a high-flying military exercise to test the US Space Force’s ability to rapidly respond to a crisis in low-Earth orbit.

The launch was scarcely announced in advance. The only public indication of an impending launch was the release of a warning for pilots and sailors to steer clear of the rocket’s flight path. Rocket Lab did not provide a livestream of the launch, as it does for most of its missions. As of Monday morning, officials from Rocket Lab and the Space Force had not acknowledged the launch in any official public statements.

But the US military’s catalog of space objects was updated over the weekend to reflect the launch. A new satellite, designated Victus Haze Puma, showed up in the catalog with a launch date of Friday from Rocket Lab’s privately run spaceport at Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand. The Space Force cataloged the spacecraft in a polar orbit ranging between 215 miles and 286 miles (347-by-461 km), with an inclination of about 97.5 degrees from the equator.

A pretty sporty mission

Victus Haze is the US military’s latest responsive space mission. The Space Force announced plans for the mission in 2024 when it selected Rocket Lab and True Anomaly to build and launch two satellites into low-Earth orbit. At a high level, the idea was to launch a small satellite built by True Anomaly first, posing as a satellite from a potential adversary, like China or Russia. Rocket Lab was supposed to have a satellite on standby to go up and inspect True Anomaly’s spacecraft, ready to launch on short notice once military officials gave the order. The objective of the Victus Haze mission is to demonstrate how the military and its commercial partners might be able to quickly go up and assess a threat in orbit.

That is apparently what happened last week. Rocket Lab had another launch on its schedule for a commercial customer last week, but the company announced a postponement last Tuesday “to conduct additional checkouts,” without offering any additional details. Safety notices began to appear on aviation and maritime websites a couple of days later, just hours before the launch window for Victus Haze opened on Friday.

The launch time, estimated to be approximately 6:20 am EDT (10:20 UTC) on Friday, was set to coincide with the passage of the orbit of one of True Anomaly’s satellites over New Zealand. True Anomaly’s Jackal-0004 satellite launched from California on May 3 on a SpaceX rideshare mission. Publicly available orbit data indicated Rocket Lab’s Victus Haze Puma satellite approached within 60 miles (100 km) of the Jackal satellite just eight hours after launch, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who expertly tracks space activity using open source data.

Based on previous statements from officials, the Victus Haze mission will unfold with additional maneuvers to bring Rocket Lab’s Puma satellite closer to True Anomaly’s Jackal. Eventually, the satellites are expected to switch roles, with Jackal serving as the inspector and Puma acting as the target.

True Anomaly, a Colorado-based company specializing in building highly maneuverable satellites for national security missions, announced last Thursday that its latest Jackal spacecraft had achieved all of its “test objectives” following its arrival in orbit in early May to demonstrate the satellite’s capabilities for “end-to-end uncooperative rendezvous and proximity operations.”

“Jackal has been fully commissioned and is prepared for its next phase of mission,” True Anomaly said, without articulating what the next phase would entail.

The tests of the Jackal satellite platform and True Anomaly’s software stack included the tracking of other objects in space using narrow- and wide-field cameras and validation of “moving object detection and tracking algorithms, confirming Jackal’s ability to execute closed-loop tracking of maneuvering targets during simultaneous vehicle maneuvers,” True Anomaly said.

This sounds just like the goals for Victus Haze, which follows the Space Force’s successful Victus Nox responsive space mission in 2023. With Victus Nox, the Space Force partnered with Millennium Space Systems to build and test a small satellite in less than a year. Engineers then handed the satellite over to Firefly Aerospace, which integrated the payload with its Alpha rocket and successfully launched it just 27 hours after receiving orders from the Space Force.

Victus Haze is a more complicated demo, involving more satellites, more rockets, and multiple spaceports. True Anomaly’s contribution to Victus Haze was originally booked to launch on Firefly’s Alpha rocket, but a launch failure grounded the rocket for nearly a year. It ended up launching on SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Space Force officials have long pursued responsive launch initiatives to cut the time required for fielding new satellites from years to weeks, days, or hours. Victus Haze’s cost was borne by a mix of government funding and private capital, totaling about $92 million.

“This demonstration will ultimately prepare the United States Space Force to provide future forces to combatant commands to conduct rapid operations in response to adversary on-orbit aggression,” Space Systems Command said in a statement when announcing the Victus Haze mission in 2024.

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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