COLORADO SPRINGS—LightRidge Solutions, a private equity portfolio, is building space-based assets that offer protection against on-orbit attacks, sensors that can detect the contrails of stealth aircraft, and other ground- and space-based assets.
ATL Partners formed this private equity portfolio in 2021 with two operating units. GEOST makes small, low-cost, capable assets that aim to change the economics of ground- and space-based sensors that conduct space situational awareness and protection. Ophir is the second unit, which uses lidar lasers for contrail detection.
LightRidge has multiple customers: the intelligence community, commercial space customers and the Space Development Agency (SDA). “We have sensors in LEO [low Earth orbit], we have sensors in GEO [geostationary Earth orbit], we have ground sensors and we have a contract for cislunar,” LightRidge CEO Bill Gattle said at the Space Symposium here.
Josh Hartman, LightRidge chief strategy and growth officer, says the company has proved a “resiliency payload” and is now putting those payloads on a Tranche 1 tracking satellite for the SDA.
Most satellites do not have protection from on-orbit threats, he notes. The solution is to see the threat, understand its nature and issue a countermeasure. That could be electronic jamming, the use of a filter or reaching out to a big-brother satellite that is better equipped to mitigate the threat, Hartman explains.
SDA has made such resilience a higher priority for its Tranche 2 satellites, which Gattle reads as validation for this technology.
“We see other architectures proliferating and seeking that same sort of protection,” Hartman says, adding its costs about $1 million per satellite.
And Ophir uses a lidar laser that looks out behind a stealth aircraft to determine when the environment looks like it might create a contrail, says Hartman, who also is the president of GEOST. “You definitely don’t want that to happen, so they are able to figure that out before it happens and change their operations,” he says.
The company already has two assets on orbit and is on contract for five other systems and is ramping up production. GEOST has already grown sixfold in terms of employees and revenue, and Gattle says LightRidge is looking at new acquisitions that “have come from places where the mission is understood and proven it works.”
