The Pentagon Just Hired Three Companies to Practice Pulling Dead Satellites Out of Orbit. The Same Technique Works on Live Ones.

Three private companies just received Pentagon study contracts to learn how to grab a satellite out of orbit.

The official framing is tidy: Firefly Aerospace, D-Orbit, and Katalyst Space Technologies will compete to show defense agencies how commercial operators could capture and remove aging US government spacecraft. Clean up old hardware. Responsible stewardship.

Here's the part nobody's saying out loud: every skill you need to remove a dead satellite is identical to the skill required to capture a live one.

The Hardest Problem in Space

Think about what satellite capture actually demands.

You have to find a specific object moving at 7 kilometres per second. Match its velocity — in three dimensions, across hundreds of kilometres of approach — without GPS in some orbital regimes. Grapple it, potentially while it's tumbling. Redirect it to a graveyard orbit or burn it up on re-entry.

Until recently, only nation-state space agencies attempted this. Now three commercial companies — none of them household names — are being asked to solve it for the Pentagon.

That's the number on the SkyLens live tracker right now. Every single one of them exists in an environment where satellite-capture technology is about to go commercial.

Who Are These Three Companies?

They aren't Boeing or Lockheed. They're the next generation.

None of them are household names. That's often how the Pentagon prefers it. Awarding a competitive study contract is how you develop a sensitive capability before you announce that it exists.

China Already Did This. Nobody Said Much.

In late 2022, China's SJ-21 satellite approached a defunct Compass-1G navigation satellite — and moved it to a graveyard orbit 300 kilometres higher. Smoothly. Quietly. No press release.

The US Space Force watched. They catalogued it. Then, mostly, they said nothing publicly.

In 2020, Russia's Cosmos 2542 spent months trailing a classified US reconnaissance satellite close enough that the State Department formally complained it was behaving in a "threatening" manner.

Neither mission was called a "disposal." Neither required that label. Both demonstrated that the capability to approach and interact with another nation's satellite — benignly or otherwise — is real, operational, and spreading.

The Math That Keeps Space Lawyers Awake

A satellite-capture vehicle has no civilian mode switch. It either has the capability or it doesn't.

The vehicle that docks with your own dead satellite to de-orbit it uses the same sensors, the same proximity manoeuvring software, the same grappling hardware as a vehicle designed to intercept someone else's active satellite. You cannot physically separate the capability from the application.

There are no international treaties governing satellite capture. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits weapons of mass destruction in orbit and the militarisation of celestial bodies. It says nothing about one satellite approaching another. The legal vacuum is enormous.

Why Commercial? Why Now?

Defence agencies have been funding satellite servicing research in government labs for decades. Bringing commercial competitors into a study contract signals something different: they want this solved fast, and they want multiple approaches on the table.

The urgency isn't hard to find. China's Qianfan constellation is growing rapidly — hundreds of new satellites launched in the last two years, many with undisclosed secondary payloads. Russia has continued testing proximity-manoeuvring capabilities despite the war in Ukraine consuming resources. And the orbital environment is only getting more crowded.

Every new satellite in orbit is an asset. Every asset is potentially a target. And now three private companies are learning how to reach out and touch them.

What Comes Next

Firefly, D-Orbit, and Katalyst will present their approaches through the study phase. One or more designs could become an operational program. If that happens, Earth orbit will have something it's never had before: commercial, on-demand satellite removal — with all the implications that carries.

The stars don't negotiate. The satellites in front of them are starting to play a very different game.

Track the full orbital environment — including which objects have unknown operators — on the SkyLens live tracker. And follow more stories on the evolving space security landscape at the SkyLens blog.