True Anomaly says its Jackal-0004 spacecraft chased down and imaged an evading target in orbit as part of Victus Haze, a U.S. Space Force demonstration of tactically responsive space. The company announced on July 29 that it is the first to execute a space-to-space pursuit of an evading target within a tactically responsive space mission, after the target maneuvered away mid-approach and the pursuit had to be replanned on the fly.
Space Systems Command, the Space Force acquisition field command running the exercise through its Space Safari program office, tasked the company on July 14. True Anomaly reports that its crew produced a validated mission plan in under 30 minutes, and that Jackal then executed an approach and a burn sequence over 23 minutes to close on the target, a Rocket Lab spacecraft called Puma. When Puma fired its thrusters and moved out of view during the approach, Jackal downlinked what it observed, and the ground team replanned, revalidated and uplinked a new trajectory. Jackal then performed fresh burns, re-engaged and completed the imaging and characterization objectives.
The company describes the engagement as uncooperative rendezvous and proximity operations, in which the target actively tried to evade rather than cooperate. It says there was no scripted target behavior and no coordination between the two companies’ spacecraft. True Anomaly says Puma maneuvered to lose its pursuer and that the response could not have been anticipated. Ars Technica reported that the maneuvers were demonstrated for the first time in an unclassified setting, and that Space Systems Command withheld sensor, payload and closest-approach details citing operational security. No imagery from the pursuit phase was released.
Jackal-0004 launched in May on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare. Puma is built on Rocket Lab’s Pioneer spacecraft bus. Rocket Lab launched it from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand on June 19, 16 hours 42 minutes after receiving the Space Force’s Notice to Launch, a turnaround the company says beat the previous record by more than 10 hours. Rocket Lab also reports that its spacecraft was activated and ready for its first orbital maneuver 37 hours 36 minutes after launch, more than 34 hours ahead of the mission’s 72-hour deadline, and that Puma completed its rendezvous and proximity operations in about 59 hours, more than 25 hours ahead of the 84-hour success criterion. That first round of maneuvers included mutual inspection and photography of both spacecraft.
The second round, announced this week, is what True Anomaly calls the hunt: an unscripted pursuit in which Puma behaved like an adversary. The company says the engagement demonstrated its Mosaic ground system and a multi-object detection and tracking algorithm that generated target orbit estimates from onboard measurements, and that Jackal shifted between open- and closed-loop tracking during the mission. It also notes that the pace of the loop mattered: decisions had to be made in minutes, with software accelerating the human operators, or the target would be gone.
Victus Haze is the latest in the Space Force’s tactically responsive space series, which aims to compress the timeline from a call-up to an on-orbit response from months to days or hours. Its predecessor, Victus Nox in 2023, set the previous record for a rapid call-up at 27 hours. The two-company setup adds a second spacecraft to complicate the exercise. True Anomaly says future sorties in the mission are planned, each designed to be harder than the last, and describes the ability to hold an uncooperative object as a precondition for defending or servicing anything in orbit.
The companies’ accounts are self-reported and have not been independently verified. Space Systems Command has not published its own mission summary beyond the program’s prior announcements.
Sources
- True Anomaly, “VICTUS HAZE Mission Update: Jackal Hunts Puma”, https://www.trueanomaly.space/newsroom/victus-haze-mission-update-jackal-hunts-puma
- Ars Technica, “Space Force-backed mission does its best impression of Top Gun in orbit”, https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/space-force-backed-mission-does-its-best-impression-of-top-gun-in-orbit/
- Rocket Lab, “VICTUS HAZE”, https://rocketlabcorp.com/missions/launches/victus-haze