KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. - The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory has awarded Trusted Space LLC in Leesburg, Va., a potential $14.8 million contract to develop and demonstrate autonomy software for multi-agent autonomous space systems.
The $14.83 million ceiling, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract covers research, development, software maturation, testing, and on-orbit demonstration of autonomy software prototypes intended to build trust, safety, and resilience into multi-agent autonomous space systems, according to the Department of Defense (DoD).
Work will be performed in Leesburg, Va., and at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., and is expected to be completed 19 Aug. 2031. AFRL obligated $516,346 in fiscal 2026 research, development, test, and evaluation funds at the time of award. The contract was competitively acquired, with one offer received.
The award follows previous AFRL work with Trusted Space on distributed satellite autonomy. In September 2022, AFRL awarded the company a $10.4 million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for the Trusted Distributed Autonomy Demonstration Experiment, or TDADE. The effort sought to design, develop, and demonstrate fully autonomous, distributed, trusted, and adaptive onboard autonomy software capable of resiliently managing resources in proliferated space systems. The contract's potential end date was subsequently extended to 30 July 2026.
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Trusted Space and AFRL researchers presented simulation-based results from TDADE at the 2023 Small Satellite Conference. The research focused on developing autonomous, distributed, and adaptive onboard software to enable resilient resource management across proliferated space constellations.
The new contract specifically includes software maturation, testing, and an on-orbit demonstration of autonomy software prototypes. The DoD announcement does not identify the spacecraft, constellation, or flight experiment that will be used for the demonstration, or specify what functions the autonomous software will perform in orbit.
The emphasis on trust, safety, and resilience points to the engineering challenges associated with deploying autonomous decision-making across multiple spacecraft. Those challenges can include coordinating decisions among spacecraft, maintaining operations when communications are degraded or unavailable, responding to spacecraft faults, and establishing methods to test and validate autonomous behavior before deployment in space.
Trusted Space also has prior AFRL work in autonomous satellite fault identification. A 2024 Phase II effort called for the company to develop, integrate, and test software capable of classifying detected satellite faults in near real time, using time-series classification and a dynamic Bayesian network-based fault-diagnostics approach.
