Redefining space security: five startups to watch

Space is getting crowded and crowded. From satellites to debris, much is going on up in orbit — having full grip of what is going on is a necessity, especially for defense purposes. Managing and responding to threats as effectively as possible is essential to ensure maximum protection. 

During NATO DIANA (Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic)’s Defense Tech Day 2026, five companies pitched their innovative solutions for enforcing space security. Each of their technologies can help improve Space Domain Awareness by improving satellite communication, creating context awareness, and reacting to potential threats. All of them belong either to the Belgian or Dutch DIANA cohorts. 

What is Space Domain Awareness?

Space Domain Awareness (SDA) is, in a nutshell, the practice of knowing what is in space, what it’s doing, and what it means. In a way, SDA is comparable to air traffic control, but for space, which knows where satellites and debris are. In addition, SDA has a threat detection layer bolted on. 

In the military context, SDA becomes all about threat detection, deterrence, and warfighting readiness. The technology maps onto military needs: protecting critical infrastructure, distinguishing hostile intent from routine activity, and ensuring rapid, effective response to emerging threats. 

Tightbeam Photonics: laser links that cut through the noise

Founded by a team of astronomers out of the University of Toronto, Tightbeam Photonics is tackling a growing satellite bottleneck. Radio frequency spectrum is crowded, slow, and expensive, and it's becoming harder to move all the data satellites generate back down to Earth. 

Their fix is free-space optical communication — essentially firing lasers between satellites and ground stations — paired with adaptive optics chips borrowed from decades of telescope work. The chips correct for atmospheric distortion that normally scatters laser signals, replacing room-sized, costly optical correction systems with a compact, far cheaper unit. The company is now raising funding to build out its ground station network.

GlobVision: a common operating picture for space

GlobVision pitched ESCAPE, an AI-enabled SDA platform built to solve a problem every operator in the field runs into: space data comes from too many different sources, such as ground radars, optical telescopes, and space-based sensors.  None of it means much until it's stitched together.

ESCAPE can process data streams from this variety of sources, fusing them into a single picture that flags risks and provides operators with the context they need to act. The software layer is designed in a sensor-agnostic way, meaning it can handle whatever system a customer has already in place. The company said it is designed for both classified and unclassified settings and includes a sovereign version for governments that don’t want to host their SDA infrastructure abroad.  

NorthStar Earth & Space: persistent eyes in orbit

NorthStar Earth & Space presented an SDA platform built around its constellation of space-based optical sensors. This fleet of satellites features cameras trained on orbital activity, working together to provide continuous coverage of space from low Earth orbit to geostationary orbit — a circular orbit located 35,786 kilometers directly above Earth's equator.

Having sensors in space means sidestepping weather and daylight, limitations that can blind conventional ground stations.  That raw observation data feeds into a scalable software layer that fuses it with information from partner sensors and customer sources, producing a continuously updated picture of orbital activity along with the analytics operators need to act on it. The company said it ran the system for the U.S. government for three years and deployed it in Ukraine, too. 

Neuraspace: faster decisions in a crowded orbit

Neuraspace lacks no ambition: it describes itself as the European champion in SDA. As the orbit gets crowded, the old way of avoiding collision — slow, manual analysis by human operators – can’t scale fast enough as more satellites are present in space. The company has built a platform that automates collision avoidance and orbit optimization. 

Neuraspace says the system makes decisions up to 100 times faster, improves maneuver screening 60-fold, and delivers orbit determination up to 20 times more precise than what's available from public tracking sources. The defense-specific version includes two key features: a network of sensors to expand coverage and a transponder-like system for satellites. This latter functionality lets satellites communicate with each other, declaring their intent — much like ships broadcast their identity and heading at sea. Human operators on Earth can thus distinguish routine operations from potential threats. 

Ecosmic: an operating system for space security 

Italy’s Ecosmic is building what the company defines as the “operating system for space security.” Valkyrie answers a question that is increasingly relevant as more infrastructure moves up to orbit: how do you actually know what's happening in space, and whether it's a threat? Most commercial sensor networks are narrow and disconnected, capturing only a partial picture of what is going on. 

Valkyrie features a three-layer feedback loop. A data layer pulls data from a network of federated ground and space-based sensors, which the system can task to capture images. An intelligence layer fuses data, conducting analyses to spot anomalies. A reaction layer enables operators to respond quickly. The system is already showing its benefits, as it now protects more than 70 satellites. 

Space security: a stack of capabilities 

What these five companies point to is that space security is not a problem solvable by a single technology, but by a stack of capabilities – sensing, communicating, and reacting. What’s more, these capabilities are coming from the commercial sector, rather than from defense organizations. 

As more infrastructure moves into orbit and as space becomes a formally recognized military domain, the question is now how to integrate these technologies in the best way possible.