Achieving Space Superiority

The United States faces adversaries on land, sea, air, and every digital realm imaginable. Space, however, has been a comparatively benign environment for much of modern history. For decades, the biggest flex between nations was one-upping each other with spacecraft aimed at advancing scientific and technological understanding across our universe. Those days are over. Today, space is an increasingly hostile domain where the infrastructure that enables critical U.S. systems, such as satellite-based navigation, observation, and communications networks — including those crucial to national security — are under threat from adversarial interference. As the U.S. has become increasingly powerful, our adversaries have been looking for ways to exploit our reliance on the in-orbit technology that confers that power. Recognizing the lack of a formidable security layer to protect our critical space infrastructure, adversaries have begun aggressively developing capabilities to disrupt, neutralize, or destroy this technology and strip us of our military advantage. Maintaining our global dominance and protecting our way of life in the rapidly evolving space domain means rapidly evolving the technology, protocols, and collective mindset we apply to the warzone emerging beyond earth’s atmosphere. While the U.S. military responded to this growing risk in 2019 by creating the Space Force, it acknowledged the need was a long time coming, as adversarial threats were already, “growing in scope, scale.” Six years after the agency’s creation, it’s still playing catch up. In March 2025, Space Force Gen. Chance Saltzman told the crowd at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium that the Space Force doesn’t yet have the best trailing tools available to those who need them. “We have a disconnect between the plan and the operational reality, between the end and our means,” he said. Securing space is far larger than the government can handle alone. A recent directive by President Trump to establish a Golden Dome over the U.S. designated space as an increasingly critical layer to leverage in the new era of missile defense — and one in which commercial innovation will play a pivotal role in strengthening. Nobody understands this more acutely — and is better equipped to respond to this challenge — than those who’ve been working on this problem ever since space was first recognized as a warfighting domain. This is True Anomaly. Founded in 2022 by U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force veterans, the company is developing a holistic hardware and software platform exclusively focused on establishing U.S. space superiority. Since launching, True Anomaly built and launched an autonomous satellite vehicle called Jackal designed to monitor and report threats in any orbital environment (and with any payload configuration), and which runs on Mosaic, True Anomaly’s AI-enabled, full stack software based on the company’s collective decades of space operations experience.

“Our ambition is to be the dominant defense technology partner for the United States and its allies for space superiority — full stop,” says True Anomaly CEO and Co-Founder, Even Rogers. “Doing that means building the foundational systems that can iterate with a relatively new threat landscape that is rapidly changing.” Eclipse has partnered with True Anomaly since leading the company’s Series A in 2023, and most recently participated in the company’s $260 million Series C round. Headed by Rogers, who played a significant role in developing the Department of Defense’s foundational doctrine for space engagements, the company’s unparalleled expertise in the emerging war domain of space and military operations and tactics sets it apart from the growing cadre of defense startups. True Anomaly has also executed at an exceptional speed. In the three years since its founding, the team has flown two test flights of Jackal, is gearing up for a third, and will be one of two participants in the Space Force’s Victus Haze demonstration, a critical step in proving the viability of commercially-developed spacecraft and determining the Department of Defense’s space strategy going forward. Timelines like this are unheard of in the traditional world of defense, led by the military and the legacy systems integrators with which they develop technology. It’s a feat that would have been impossible without the deep expertise of how we got to this problem in the first place — and the ambitious goal to apply the startup approach of rapid iteration, high-volume product shipping, and an unflinching acceptance of inevitable, often public setbacks in an industry historically run by deliberate perfectionists. Background Since the mid-2010s, the risk of space-based warfare has increased exponentially, yet the Department of Defense hasn’t been able to respond with the resources and level of innovation needed to build up our space defense capabilities — and certainly not with the urgency required in order to establish U.S. space superiority before it’s too late. Still, launching a private company to solve a very public challenge wasn’t the initial idea. The winding path to True Anomaly can be traced back to the early days of the founding team’s military careers during a transformative time in military history. When Rogers joined the Air Force in 2012, space wasn’t yet a designated warfighting domain, but concerns over adversarial threats to U.S. satellites were growing. That risk level shot up dramatically over the next few years when adversaries began testing weapons designed to target extremely high altitude systems. During that time, Rogers held Commander and Officer roles in weapons and tactics training at Space Command, became a Weapons Officer for the Space Aggressor Squadron, and began work as a Service Chiefs Fellow for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) researching the training and tactics that would be necessary to create state of the art space warfare protocols for the U.S. “Suddenly, we had gone from thinking about ‘How do we keep spacecraft alive and healthy?’ to ‘How do I take this constellation of satellites that are critical presidential communications or nuclear communications — no fail type missions — and defend it against an asymmetric conventional weapon?’” says Rogers. The age of existing satellites was a major part of the problem: Designed in the late 1990s and launched into orbit in the early 2000s, these spacecraft that are imperative to national security simply aren’t sophisticated enough to detect novel threats like ground-to-space missiles or ground-based laser and communications jamming systems. While working with the Space Security and Defense program, Rogers assembled a small team to run tests on novel capabilities that would determine the tactical and technological innovation needed for the U.S. to lead in the final warfighting frontier of space. “We were tasked with building a tactics manual and testing the systems performance in orbit, and developing the driving figures of success and failure in a domain across a massive set of permutations,” says Rogers. “At the end of that, we had the foundational doctrine for space engagements.” Yet, this achievement led to a disappointing discovery: Although they could map out the proper methodologies to guide training and the development and testing of novel, tactical spacecraft, there was no system in place to quickly design, build, and test new capabilities — and certainly not at scale. While the military is responsible for running the foundational studies to ascertain what new operational capabilities are needed, it relies on partnerships with large systems integrators to develop the technology. In this new warfighting paradigm, the process is simply too slow, inefficient, and under-resourced to quickly bring disruptive technology into existence. The urgency of changing the status quo came to a head in 2021, when Russia launched a weapons test system into low earth orbit. At the time, Rogers was working as a Fires Officer in the U.S. Space Command. Meanwhile, future True Anomaly Co-founder Kyle Zakrzewski was an Air Force reservist working in the Space Aggressor Squadron. When asked by their general officers what capabilities were available to respond to the potential threat from Russia, both could only tell the truth: “Nothing.” Not only were there no options then, there was no active development pipeline that could ensure the answer would be any different five — or even 10 years — down the road. “It became very clear to me that the Space Force, the National Security Space Enterprise, and its allies needed an industrial partner that was completely focused on space superiority,” says Rogers. “I realized what I was trying to do was very difficult inside a massive system. It required operating like a startup.” This understanding made forming True Anomaly an inevitable decision for Rogers and Zakrzewski.

The first version of Jackal went from ideas on a whiteboard to a physical product launched into space within 14 months — and with less than $50 million — of True Anomaly’s founding. While it didn’t go as planned, achieving perfection right out of the gate wasn’t to be expected. Still, it was a massive wake-up call the company didn’t realize they needed. While putting together an all-star team of people with a wide and varied range of expertise and perspectives is imperative, it’s equally important to have the right processes and protocols in place for those various skill sets to function together. This happens in real time when operating at lightning-fast startup speeds, and since True Anomaly launched with a definitive problem and a definitive market (versus a technology in search of a market, as many startups do) it took a few shake ups in order to learn the best structure for the company to thrive. “The first launch not being a success was one of the best things that happened to the company, because it reminded us that trying something completely new means you’re going to fail sometimes,” says Zakrzewski, who serves as True Anomaly’s Chief Engineering Officer. “And it’s much better to fail early and fail forward.” That meant failing in a data-rich way, says Zakrzewski, and having the documentation that allowed the engineering team to develop a root-cause analysis process. This helped the company not just identify the technical cause responsible for the mission failure, but the operational flaws in the overall organization that also contributed. “These learnings allowed us to reboot our entire approach — recraft the team and get a sharp eye on the kind of culture you need to have in this field,” says Zakrzewski. “You have to have a culture of accountability and a product owner’s mindset.” That mindset comes from everyone from the most entry level to the most senior having the context and understanding of the company’s strategic mission in order to make everyday decisions that map back to the overall goal. “This is the fastest way to have an operationally relevant warfighting system versus a more risk-averse approach, where you spend a lot more time in analysis before just getting the technology out there to see how it actually performs in the real world,” says Zakrzewski. “In the process, it’s going to be messy sometimes.” Nine months later, in late 2024, True Anomaly flew their second test flight. This additive success of MXII vs. MXI indicated significant product and process maturity — unlocking the next level of product development and company expansion. True Anomaly maintains a culture of “fly, fix, fly”, which understands that breaking things is an expected and valuable part of rapid, iterative product design in a brand new, unproven industry sector. Instead of shying away imperfect performance, True Anomaly leans in, resulting in products that are mission-ready in years, not decades.

A New Era In March of 2025, the U.S. Space Force released its planning framework for space warfighting, designating space superiority as its number one priority. Achieving this goal is likely impossible without the startup approach of rapid iteration, frequent product shipping, and — perhaps most importantly — a willingness to embrace regular setbacks or even failure, as evidenced by True Anomaly’s incredible progress in a short time. It also indicates a new era and style of government partnerships, says True Anomaly Chief Strategy Officer Frank DiPentino, who previously served as Director of Advanced Concepts, Tactics, and Wargaming at the U.S. Space Force Space Security and Defense Program. Historically, public-private collaborations on aerospace projects were marked by incremental improvements on individual portions of architecture. Now, a large industrial complex cannot move fast enough to meet the technical needs necessary to secure what DiPentino calls the “challenged and operationalized domain” of space. “There’s been a Copernican shift in the way the government and private industry works together,” says DiPentino. “These are brand new mission areas that we haven’t explored before. There are needs about countering adversary capabilities that the U.S. hasn’t encountered before. Private industry is uniquely suited to this, and it’s an exciting time for us to be working with the government to build a superior space defense system.”

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