Orbital Operations Is Building Space Bodyguards for Military Satellites

The Macro: Space Is Becoming a Place Where Things Get Threatened

For most of the space age, satellites were untouchable. You launched them, they did their job, and nobody messed with them. That era is over. China demonstrated a direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon in 2007. Russia did the same in 2021, creating a debris field that forced the ISS crew to shelter in place. Both countries have deployed inspector satellites that can maneuver close to other nations’ spacecraft.

The US military depends on space for almost everything. GPS for precision navigation. SBIRS satellites for missile warning. Wideband Global SATCOM for military communications. If an adversary could disable or destroy even a handful of these assets, the operational impact would be severe. The Department of Defense knows this. Space Force exists because of this. The question is what to do about it.

The current options are limited. Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicle can dock with and reposition geostationary satellites, but it was designed for life extension, not defense. Astroscale is building debris removal vehicles. True Anomaly is working on space domain awareness. Impulse Space is focused on in-space transportation. Nobody has built a purpose-designed, high-thrust vehicle that can respond quickly to threats against critical satellites. The gap is real and the customer is the US government, which has a procurement budget that dwarfs most commercial markets.

The Micro: Rocket Engineers Who Actually Built Rockets

Ben Schleuniger and Ross Doherty are not the kind of space startup founders who watched a SpaceX launch and decided to start a company. Ben spent his career at NASA working on propulsion, then went to SpaceX, then became an early employee at Relativity Space. Ross worked at Aerojet Rocketdyne and Blue Origin before joining Relativity Space, where he worked on turbomachinery for the Aeon-R engine. Between them, they have over 15 years of hands-on aerospace engineering experience at the organizations that actually build and fly things.

Their company, Orbital Operations, is developing a high-thrust, reusable space vehicle specifically for satellite defense. The key technical claim is a cryogenic management system that delivers 100x the thrust of current in-space propulsion. That multiplier matters because current electric propulsion systems are efficient but slow. If a satellite is being approached by an adversarial vehicle, you don’t have months to maneuver into a defensive position. You need thrust and you need it fast. They’re working on their first demo, with the intention to launch an operational vehicle by 2027.

The team is just two people right now. They came through YC’s Winter 2025 batch. A defense-focused space hardware company is an unusual YC pick, but the batch has been broader than usual.

The Verdict

I think Orbital Operations is one of the most interesting companies I’ve looked at recently, and also one of the hardest to evaluate. The founders clearly know propulsion engineering at a level most startup teams never approach. The market need is genuine and growing as space becomes more contested. The customer, primarily the US DoD and Space Force, has deep pockets and an urgent problem.

The challenges are the ones inherent to any hardware company, magnified by the fact that this is space hardware. Development cycles are long. Testing is expensive. A single failed demo could set the timeline back years. The 100x thrust claim needs to be validated in actual space conditions, not just lab tests. And the regulatory and contracting environment for defense space systems is notoriously complex. Getting a DOD contract as a two-person startup is possible but not easy.

In 30 days, I’d want to see progress on their demo vehicle. What stage is the build at? At 60 days, the question is whether they’ve engaged with potential government customers through SBIR grants, Space Force contracts, or defense accelerator programs like AFWERX. At 90 days, any successful test of the cryogenic management system would be a major milestone. Space hardware companies live and die by technical demonstrations. If the propulsion works as claimed, the rest of the business case follows almost automatically. The US government will pay a premium for something that actually protects its most critical space assets. Getting there is the hard part.