Space News:

One of the teams that won an Air Force contract last month at a “Space Pitch Day” event claims to have the answer to one the Pentagon’s toughest problems: spotting and tracking advanced missiles that fly at high speeds in unpredictable trajectories.

Rhea Space Activity (RSA) and its partner Lunar Resources pitched to the Air Force a concept to deploy two spacecraft to manufacture a large mirror in space. The mirror would be installed, in orbit, into a telescope that would be used to detect hypersonic vehicles, said Shawn Usman, an astrophysicist and founder of RSA, a two-year old space startup that advises small businesses and recently decided to start developing its own projects for national security applications.

Defense officials have identified Chinese and Russian hypersonic air vehicles as looming threats that are likely to penetrate current anti-missile shield systems. Spotting and tracking hypersonic missiles is hard because they are 10 to 20 times dimmer than what the U.S. normally tracks by satellites in geostationary orbit. The Pentagon is studying options to defend against these weapons and has concluded that the best vantage point to detect and track them is from space, particularly from lower orbits.

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