True Anomaly

Jackal is an orbital vehicle built to chase things that do not want to be chased. It flies in an ESPA-Grande form factor built around a large propellant tank and twenty thrusters, a layout that spends volume on delta-v so the vehicle can keep maneuvering long after a conventional smallsat has run dry. Cameras working in visible, short-wave and long-wave infrared handle the last few kilometres, and Mosaic, the company's own autonomy and ground software, does the flying. True Anomaly builds and operates the vehicles itself and sells the mission as a service.

The founders came out of the US Air Force's 4th Space Operations Squadron, and the company exists because of what they saw there: the Space Force could watch an adversary satellite but could not get close enough to learn anything about it, and the acquisition system was not going to fix that quickly. The bet is on autonomy. A rendezvous flown with a ground operator in the loop is planned over months, while one flown by the vehicle itself can happen in days, which is the difference between recording what an adversary did and being able to respond to it.

The first flight test went badly. Two Jackals launched in March 2024 and True Anomaly never established two-way communications with either one, so the close-approach objective was never attempted, and the company has never said publicly what went wrong. The capability arrived in 2026. Mission X-3 spent roughly six weeks tracking a maneuvering target while maneuvering itself, and in June the Space Force issued a snap alert under VICTUS HAZE: Rocket Lab launched the target sixteen hours and forty-two minutes later, and Jackal found it, closed on it, circumnavigated it and imaged it inside sixty-one hours against a seventy-two hour requirement. What has not been settled is the customer. A $650 million round values the company past $2 billion on a revenue base that is essentially one buyer, and the Golden Dome interceptor programme it is often credited with $3.2 billion of is a ceiling shared across twelve companies and twenty contracts. Space Force officials have said space-based interceptors may not survive the final architecture on cost.