EraDrive Wins $13M Space Force Award to Field Satellite Autonomy Modules

EraDrive, a Palo Alto startup developing autonomous capabilities for satellites, has won a $13M Department of Defense award under which the Space Force will buy an undisclosed number of the company's Era-Node vision-based autonomy modules. The funding establishes an accelerated pathway for the Space Force to acquire the modules for future spacecraft.

The award came through the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) program, which provides direct procurement funding for new capabilities rather than the research focus of SBIR and STTR awards. The structure allowed EraDrive to move from selection to contract within a single fiscal year.

Lawrence Robertson, the Air Force's lead for space experiments, said the speed was unusual for a small company. "Getting a small company's technology onto a government contract usually takes years. Working with the APFIT office and NASA Ames, we got EraDrive selected and on contract within the same fiscal year. That's the pace we need to keep up with what the commercial sector is building," Robertson told Payload.

Autonomous capabilities for military satellites have been on the DoD's wish list for years. Serving as the Space Force's top acquisition official in 2024, Frank Calvelli said autonomous satellites would be vital to helping the DoD get around downlink bottlenecks. EraDrive CEO Sumant Sharma said the company's technology spans more than navigation in GPS-denied environments. "The way we think about GPS-denied navigation, space domain awareness, RPO, and autonomous operations is basically these are just like four different flavors of autonomy, which are just backed by the same stack," Sharma said.

Sharma said many offerings in the market fall short of true autonomy, with many autonomous operations working by uplinking a list of commands a satellite can perform between ground links. Era-Nodes instead let the operator define an envelope of permissions within which the satellite is free to operate. While EraDrive has yet to fly its fully integrated Era-Node module in orbit, nearly all of the components and software onboard have flight heritage. Over the past two years, the company has flown at least seven experiments of its autonomous software, called Era-Core, onboard NASA's Starling satellites, demonstrating that it can identify and track moving targets and autonomously cue other satellites to adjust to keep space objects in view.

The award advances the DoD's stated goal of easing downlink bottlenecks through onboard autonomy, a priority Calvelli flagged in 2024. Sharma said EraDrive aims for each Era-Node in orbit to become part of a sensor network, "giving operators fleet-level intelligence for collision avoidance and SDA whether or not they fly our hardware."

The APFIT award creates an accelerated acquisition pathway for the Space Force to buy Era-Nodes for future spacecraft, though the number of modules under the award was not disclosed. EraDrive has not yet flown its fully integrated module in orbit.