Scout

Scout Space (SCOUT Space Inc.) is an aerospace company headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia that develops on-board sensing, processing and autonomous decision-making technology for spacecraft. Its stated mission is to enable customers to carry out complex missions and avoid threats, and to deploy technologies that protect space infrastructure.

The company organizes its offering around four capability areas: satellite sensors, mission autonomy software, edge processing, and mission design. Its electro-optical and infrared sensors are intended for missions in low Earth orbit, geostationary orbit and beyond, in both non-resolved and resolved imaging configurations and in customizable form factors; named products include Owl, a long-range space domain awareness sensor for LEO/GEO and lunar applications, and Sparrow, a low-SWAP close-range optical system for rendezvous, proximity operations and docking in LEO. Its flight software, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Space Force, is designed to let satellites navigate, coordinate across multiple spacecraft and inspect assets autonomously, including without ground communication, using a modular architecture. Edge processing work covers custom compute configurations plus integration and optimization support so that the flight software runs on customer hardware. The mission design offering is a modeling and analytics capability for simulating and validating mission architectures before launch.

According to a startup-network profile, SCOUT was founded in January 2019 as a C-corporation and first launched in-space products and services in June 2021, with the goal of building an orbital distributed sensor network to improve space domain awareness.

Founding story

The company was started around a single goal: deploying technologies that protect space infrastructure so that human activity can expand beyond Earth, framed as enabling space safety, transparency and improved space domain awareness.

Business model

Scout sells hardware and software to spacecraft operators: satellite sensors, on-board autonomy flight software, edge compute configurations with integration and optimization support, and mission modeling and analysis services. It also performs government-funded development work, including TACFI contracts with the U.S. Space Force, and describes both government and commercial relationships.