Vyoma: Europe’s debris tracking and space intelligence network

Vyoma, a German company specializing in space-based debris tracking and space situational awareness, recently launched their first satellite, Flamingo-1, which represents a critical milestone both for them as a company and for the European space sector as a whole, marking another step towards European independence and a safe future in orbit. 

To understand more about Vyoma and the Flamingo-1 mission, we talked with Dr. Luisa Buinhas, CPO (Chief Program Officer) of the company, gaining incredible and useful insights and information. 

TWS: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me. It’s really appreciated by me and the team at The Weekly Spaceman, and I’m eager to hear more about you and the company. 

Getting into it, can we start with what types of data Vyoma produces? 

Luisa Buinhas: As a space-based space situational awareness (SSA) company, we map the space environment and space traffic, conducting surveillance not only of space debris but also other satellites. 

And this means that we can not only make predictions of close approaches, which we call conjunctions, and hence of collision risks, but more importantly, we can also gather insights into the behavior of other satellites. For example, understanding if there are adversary satellites coming close to NATO assets or satellites conducting maneuvers that have not been detected yet, along with predicting anomalous behaviors. We can also attribute the launch of certain objects in space. 

So it’s this space intelligence that is part of the core of our business, together with space operations.

TWS: So, are your customers mainly intelligence-based, for services such as threat or maneuver detection, rather than space debris management and awareness for other satellites? 

Luisa Buinhas: It’s both. We commercialize data to both commercial and institutional customers. Other than the data, we provide satellite operations services as well. 

This means we support customers with the planning of maneuvers or provide them access to our mission planning software, which optimally schedules the activities that satellites conduct on board. For example, finding the best way to execute an imaging session when missions have certain constraints, like the ground station contacts, power availability (attitude with respect to the Sun), or memory on board a spacecraft. By taking all of these constraints, we actually create very optimized schedules for the activities of our customers, and this is what our Mission Planning System can do. 

TWS: How would you, as a company, manage scheduling conflicts, if present, between on-demand requests for tracking or observation campaigns of adversary satellites for intelligence purposes and the commercial sector of space debris tracking and conjunction awareness? 

Luisa Buinhas: We’re building a constellation, and one of the advantages of having a constellation rather than a single satellite is that we have redundancy that covers such scheduling conflicts. Our goal is to launch 12 satellites so that whenever we need one satellite to track an object, we do so, reserving the other satellites for other activities, including the detection of close approaches. 

In the case that you mentioned, of a single satellite in space, like we have now with Flamingo-1(the next satellite, Flamingo-2, is scheduled for launch later in 2026), it will depend on whether you are talking about a high-risk conjunction, which is a high-risk close approach, or a low-risk one, and whether the priority level of the tracking campaign is high or low. So what this means is that if we have a low-risk conjunction, which has a longer time frame until the collision or closest approach, it allows us to act within a longer time window, and this is very different from high-risk conjunctions.

So if we have a conjunction that is coming up in the next few hours, this takes precedence, because we take safety in orbit quite seriously, and we would never risk adding more debris or congestion to our space environment.

TWS: So, your Flamingo satellites can detect objects as small as 1-2 cm in diameter, so that’s quite small and comprises a wide majority of the debris that are in orbit. How does this compare to the accuracy of other space-based or ground-based observation assets? 

Luisa Buinhas: The added value of being space-based is less the accuracy but more the number of detections that we can do. For example, from the ground, we (as the space industry) can actually only observe about 3% of objects that are larger than a paper clip. And this means that 97% of objects flying around in space are too small, faint, and dark to be observed from the ground. So what we’re doing from space is actually capturing the remaining 97%.

Sensors on the ground, like optical telescopes, are subject to weather, clouds and dust, and only operate at nighttime, which means that there is only a limited amount of time that they can be used. 

Space-based telescopes, on the other hand, are above the atmosphere (hence are not impacted by weather) and can operate  24/7, giving us access to a lot more observation time. That’s one thing.

Ground radars, conversely, are very power-hungry, and they degrade as the distance increases. Radars are very good at very low altitudes, but above 600 km of altitude, you have a big data gap because radars do not reach these altitudes without extremely high costs and power. So space-based telescopes are, again, filling in a data gap by observing these altitudes. 

Additionally, ground sensors are static and have to wait for an object to pass overhead to make a measurement, while from space we take advantage of the relative motion to make observations of space objects as frequently as possible. And last, but not least, the most congested regions of space are the regions above the poles (the orbital polar regions). Right now, there are no sensors on the ground that observe this polar region, while from space we can actually directly observe these very congested regions, closing this data gap with our constellation. 

Overall, this directly translates to more information - we are able to see more objects, from small to large ones; we are able to keep a very comprehensive catalog of space objects and keep custody of objects in space, particularly the very threatening objects. 

And one last aspect of this is that with more accurate data, we can build safer satellite operations tools. At the end of the day, your operations algorithms are only as good as the data that you feed them. Therefore, if we have better, more accurate data, one can automate in the background a lot of the routine operations that right now are very human resource-intensive. 

TWS: So I assume that the Flamingo satellites scan the sky, looking for streaks, and then use processing capabilities to leave the trails (streaks) by eliminating the fixed stars. Can you explain how it works?  

Luisa Buinhas: It’s exactly as you describe it, and we have two observation modes: we have surveillance mode, which is a patented, passive mode in which we basically fix the telescopes in an optimized direction, maximizing the number of detections within a time frame as possible. 

And we have a second operations mode, which is the tracking: whenever we have a request from a customer to observe an object or event of interest, like a close approach, we can actively follow this event/object by steering the telescope. 

TWS: Yeah, it’s really important to track these objects. Of course, there’s the commercial part, and then there’s the defense/intelligence part, and it’s really interesting how you can have multiple, separate use cases for a single satellite. 

Based on this, what orbital architecture are you targeting for your Flamingo constellation? Are you planning to launch your satellites on different orbital planes or stick to the dusk-dawn Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO) where you launched Flamingo-1?

Luisa Buinhas: Our future missions will go into a hybrid of different orbits in order to maximize the accuracy of the measurements. Observing the same object through different geometries allows uncertainties about the objects’ orbits to be reduced as well. 

TWS: You just launched your Flamingo-1 satellite a couple of weeks ago. First of all, I wanted to ask, how is the satellite doing? 

Luisa Buinhas: So far, so good. We established the first contact within 1.5 hours after deployment, and we have been in contact with the satellite ever since. 

The commissioning is ongoing, and we are on schedule, which is a good reference. Nonetheless, we still have some weeks ahead of us to finalize the commissioning of the satellite bus and the telescope itself. Only then will we be in a position to be able to nominally operate the satellite and start commercializing data. Right now, we are on a good track.

TWS: Being that this is your first satellite, I would imagine there’s a lot going on, and that brings me to my next question: what lessons did you learn from the Flamingo-1 design, development, or launch that you have managed to apply to your upcoming satellites? 

Luisa Buinhas: At the start of the company, there was a lot of design work done internally before we started working with the manufacturers. So we built know-how in the company on the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of telescope and satellite performance. And this helped us guide technical decisions when discussing with manufacturers both of the first and second generation Flamingo satellites. 

Another lesson we learned was related to space components: during COVID, there were a lot of supply chain bottlenecks, which were problematic for us, as certain components became quite scarce. We instituted in the company the diversification of our supply chain, especially for long-lead items and for certain components. So, always having an alternative supplier was one of the lessons learned to prevent dependencies on a single chain. 

We wanted to be fast as well. We did not want to fully reinvent the wheel with each mission, so we tried to make use of commercial off-the-shelf components, but to lower the technical risk, we chose to work with suppliers that had heritage. This allowed us to be fast and reduce risk and was certainly one of the bigger learnings from early on.

Going forward, we plan to maximize the use of all the technology and IP that we built in-house to save costs, keep our agile schedules, and keep our performance.  

TWS: Could you clarify what you mean by “first” and “second” generation? 

Luisa Buinhas: Currently, we have our first satellite, Flamingo-1, in orbit. We started working about a year and a half ago on the second-generation satellite, called Flamingo-2, which is an improved version in terms of telescope performance with respect to Flamingo-1. The design of the spacecraft is slightly different because we are using two different suppliers. And this goes back to the diversification that I mentioned before. So, the idea is to really try to make use of these first- and second-generation technologies and learnings and continue launching our constellation until we have these 12 satellites in orbit by 2028-29. 

The idea going forward is to launch our next satellite, Flamingo-2, later this year, followed by a batch of a few satellites in 2027 and another batch in 2028-29. 

TWS: How long is the expected service life?

Luisa Buinhas: It’s five years for each satellite.

TWS: Do you plan to extend that in the future or launch new satellites to replenish the constellation? 

Luisa Buinhas: If the satellite is working after five years, we will keep operating them until they break, as there’s nothing preventing us from using the satellites longer. Whenever they stop operating, the plan is to transfer them from the nominal orbit into a lower, disposable orbit and then replenish the constellation with new, fresh satellites. Obviously, there might be incremental changes and improvements in the different generations (e.g., a more powerful sensor), but we don’t plan big redesigns. 

TWS: Going on to the next question, debris tracking and SSA are really two different topics. I was wondering, how do you monetize these two very different services? Do the customers pay for data, observation time, or something else? 

Luisa Buinhas: For data, for example, customers can have access to raw data and to processed data (e.g., space intelligence) on a subscription basis. We also provide operations services built on top of this data, also through a subscription model that scales with the number of satellites of the customer. Users can access our data and services on our cloud platform.

Another product is our space domain awareness service, whereby intelligence officers can access our data processing software for processing tracking data.  

TWS: Yeah, and I think another monetization opportunity could be the smart mission planner described on your website, which you also talked about earlier, right? Have you already received requests for it? 

Luisa Buinhas: We already have customers for whom we operate satellites. Our Mission Planning System is indeed a very powerful tool that allows customers to maximize their revenue by planning their payload duty cycles in an optimal way based on ground passes or power availability.

TWS: Before we end, I wanted to ask you something else: is there anything you would like to tell the readers about your company that I missed during the interview? 

Luisa Buinhas: One of the aspects that is worth mentioning is the strategic importance of the mission for Europe, actually. We are completely dependent on foreign SSA data, right now. When I say “we,” I mean that we Europeans are completely dependent on US organizations, not just for components or launchers but also for data on space objects and space debris. For Europe to remain competitive in the future, we must foster our own capabilities for independent access to space and also our own ability to gather our own space intelligence. This means, therefore, that Vyoma can actually contribute to independent and efficient use of space. 

Vyoma’s solution ensures the protection of European space assets from collisions or bad intentions. And this also removes the dependence of information from the extra-continental data sources and makes Europe autonomous in space intelligence and decision-making. 

We thank Dr. Luisa Buinhas for her time and expertise.