A collaborative effort between commercial space and defense companies—Varda Space Industries, LeoLabs, and Anduril—achieved a significant milestone by successfully demonstrating advanced hypersonic vehicle tracking capabilities. This achievement was announced on September 8th.
The demonstration involved LeoLabs’ radar system meticulously tracking the hypersonic reentry of a Varda Space Industries capsule, which had previously landed in Australia during May. Anduril’s Lattice software, leveraging artificial intelligence, processed the raw tracking data, transforming it into actionable intelligence. This private-sector initiative aligns with the Pentagon's Golden Dome initiative, an effort focused on enhancing the detection, tracking, and neutralization of enemy hypersonic missiles during flight.
Hypersonic missiles, capable of exceeding Mach 5 and exhibiting unpredictable flight patterns, pose a formidable threat to national security. Varda's capsule, designed for in-orbit pharmaceutical manufacturing and return to Earth, presented a unique opportunity to simulate a hypersonic threat. The capsule, protected by cutting-edge heat shields, reentered the atmosphere at speeds exceeding 18,000 miles per hour before deploying parachutes for a controlled landing. The May reentry in Southern Australia was monitored from Varda’s headquarters in El Segundo, California.
Before its hypersonic descent, the W-3 capsule performed a series of orbital maneuvers. LeoLabs' global radar network tracked these movements, transmitting the data to Anduril’s Lattice platform. Lattice, an AI-powered software solution, excels at processing large datasets and delivering rapid insights. While the companies emphasize the broader space domain awareness applications of this technology, the timing of the announcement and the test specifics underscore its potential military applications. “Regular, rigorous component and systems testing for defense modernization is incredibly important,” Varda CEO Will Bruey stated in a press release.
Varda highlighted that its recoverable capsules, enabling repeatable and instrumented reentries, provide a more cost-effective alternative to traditional testing methods. LeoLabs, situated in Menlo Park, California, actively markets its space-tracking radar systems for missile-defense applications and recently unveiled a mobile radar system designed for rapid deployment to monitor launches and reentries. LeoLabs CEO Tony Frazier described the Varda demonstration as “an important step in better understanding how we can push LeoLabs technology to adjacent mission sets,” such as tracking hypersonic glide vehicles. He emphasized that the test demonstrated how integrating commercial radar data with AI-driven analysis can lead to faster and more accurate threat identification. A Varda spokesperson confirmed that the demonstration was internally funded and that the companies “expect to try again in the future.”