Turion Space

Turion Space builds Droids, small spacecraft that photograph other spacecraft. The two flown so far weigh around thirty kilograms each and carry telescopes pointed sideways rather than down, producing resolved images of satellites and debris that feed the US Space Force's data library. Turion was the first American company licensed to sell such imagery commercially, and Starfire, its ground software, plans the manoeuvres and tasks the fleet.

Ryan Westerdahl spent years doing failure analysis at SpaceX before founding the company in 2021, and is open about the strategy: the far ambition is asteroid mining, and the fundable first rung is selling the Pentagon manoeuvrable eyes in orbit. The design goal he quotes is delta-v per dollar, spacecraft that can afford to move, because in orbit seeing something usually means going to it.

What exists is two camera satellites and software; the rest is still ahead. The company counts more than forty thousand images delivered, a figure with no independent benchmark behind it. A robotic docking arm once planned for the second Droid never flew, and Droid Alpha, the larger vehicle that would actually rendezvous with targets, is being built under a $32.6 million Space Force agreement with a first flight aimed at early 2027. The revenue to date is almost all defence innovation money, the kind that funds prototypes rather than programs.