Slingshot Aerospace’s space simulation and analytics products have attracted the attention of the U.S. Space Force, which has awarded the Austin- and Los Angeles-based company a $25.2 million, 39-month contract to create a Space Force version of Slingshot’s Digital Space Twin and the Slingshot Laboratory training product.
To be more specific, the contract was provided by the Space Force’s Space Systems Command and SpaceWERX, the Space Force’s venture arm, as part of its strategic financing program. This program was designed to accelerate the development of commercial solutions that could assist the U.S. Space Force.
This contract, which comes on the heels of a $25 million Series A extension announced earlier this month, will facilitate the development of two Slingshot Aerospace products.
The first, Slingshot Laboratory, is an immersive space simulation platform that teaches users about astrodynamics. Slingshot will deploy the pilot programs to four different U.S. Space Force education organizations.
The second product, the industry’s first-ever Digital Space Twin, is a virtual space environment that reflects the current state of space at any given moment. Through the Digital Space Twin, users can simulate various scenarios and identify the best approach to accomplish missions.
Slingshot Aerospace has spent the last two years developing the Digital Space Twin as a commercial contract. With the award of the Space Force contract, Slingshot will create a version for the Space Force that could be used to visualize potential threats, determine the best course of action when an unknown object approaches a satellite and identify the safest, most effective way to launch satellite constellations.
“Our Digital Space Twin is an unprecedented leap forward that provides a high-fidelity, physics-driven simulation of the actual, live space environment,” Slingshot Aerospace co-founder and CEO Melanie Stricklan said in a statement. “This, combined with the deployment of Slingshot Laboratory, creates an extraordinarily powerful product suite that simply didn’t exist before.”
“I couldn’t be more excited to know that our team and technology has the opportunity to vastly improve and optimize operational decision-making, increase overall readiness and ultimately empower our guardians and airmen to out-innovate a determined adversary,” she added.
