Varda Space Industries, Inc., a microgravity-enabled life sciences company building hypersonic reentry vehicles and infrastructure for the orbital economy, together with LeoLabs, the world's leading mission partner for persistent Orbital Intelligence, and Anduril, a defense technology company, announced a successful joint demonstration to track, monitor, and report orbital maneuvers in advance of a hypersonic reentry.

Varda's W-3 vehicle, which returned to Earth on May 13, 2025, performed a series of orbital maneuvers ahead of hypersonic reentry. With cues from Varda, LeoLabs' Global Radar Network tracked the vehicles' on-orbit maneuvers. The LeoLabs data was then integrated with Anduril's Lattice, an AI-enabled software platform that provides resilient mesh networking and low-latency communications across a global network of sensors, to provide distributed users with real-time situational awareness of on-orbit maneuvers. 

Tracking orbital maneuvers in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is a critically important component of space domain awareness, providing early warning and attribution of potentially threatening activity. In a future experiment, the companies are exploring opportunities to expand the demonstration to use LeoLabs' new Scout radar to detect a Varda capsule as it reenters at hypersonic speed. Scout is a containerized S-band Direct Radiating Array (DRA) radar that can be easily transported for rapid deployment to any location worldwide to detect and track launches and reentries, such as Varda's landings in South Australia. The data will again be ingested into Anduril's Lattice, facilitating connectivity with a range of government and defense command and control nodes.  

The companies initiated the joint demonstration as an internal R&D effort, recognizing the potential of their combined technologies to support national security. Orchestrated in under a week, the effort showcases the agility of emerging and scaling space companies to rapidly identify use cases, conduct R&D, and iterate at speed.

"Regular, rigorous component and systems testing for defense modernization is incredibly important," said Varda CEO Will Bruey. "Varda is doing that today as the lowest-cost, highest-cadence platform to fly at speeds higher than Mach 25. This is a leapfrog capability that only America has."

Varda's hypersonic reentry testbed utilizes a recoverable, dual-use orbital processing capsule and is the least expensive method to reproduce the most challenging hypersonic and reentry flight environments at speeds exceeding Mach 25. The hypersonic regime currently lacks a sufficient number of real-world testing environments to support the rapid test cadence required to derisk our most advanced aerospace vehicles and systems. Varda's testbed is a turn-key option to raise TRL and iterate quickly and economically.

"This is an important step in better understanding how we can push LeoLabs technology to adjacent mission sets," said LeoLabs CEO Tony Frazier. "Tracking the on-orbit maneuvers of Varda's W-3 at hypersonic speed and seamlessly integrating our Orbital Intelligence data into Anduril's Lattice represents the critical ability to provide actionable insights to decision-makers at the point of need."

LeoLabs' Global Radar Network supports a range of mission areas, from space domain awareness and space traffic management to emerging applications such as search and detection of foreign launches and maneuvers. By investing in next-gen mobile and modular radar technologies for rapid deployment, the company is setting the standard for how commercial innovation can support space battle management, space safety, and missile defense.

"No solution works in isolation," said Gokul Subramanian, SVP of Space and Engineering at Anduril Industries. "Integrating LeoLabs' sensor data into Lattice in less than a week is the latest example of how our interoperable, resilient, and low-latency networking and communications architecture ensures that end users always have access to the right tools, sensors, and information they need to execute their missions." 

Click here to know more about Varda Space's W-3 Mission