Can Autonomous Spacecraft Operate Without Ground Control?
Dec 12, 2025
Shield AI, a defense technology company known for its autonomous aircraft software, is entering the space sector through a new partnership with Sedaro, a startup specializing in cloud-based satellite simulation. Announced in December, the collaboration brings Shield AI’s Hivemind Pilot—previously used on drones and uncrewed maritime vessels—into orbital operations for the first time. Sedaro’s simulation platform, already trusted by the U.S. Space Force, SDA, NASA, and major defense contractors, will become the primary development environment for Shield AI’s space applications. The goal is demonstrating autonomous spacecraft operations in contested environments without ground control.
Shield AI Brand Logo. Credit: Shield AI
According to the agreement, Shield AI will apply the digital engineering tools of Sedaro in the development, testing, and validation of autonomous behaviors for use in space missions. In turn, Hivemind will become Sedaro’s autonomy software of choice in the future on-orbit demonstrations. According to Christian Gutierrez, the vice president of Hivemind Solutions, the collaboration allows at-the-edge, in-orbit autonomy through a combination of Hivemind’s capability for cognitive teaming and Sedaro’s high-fidelity simulation. Their collaborative efforts will cut across both conventional ground-based operations and onboard decision-making, which will form the basis of scalable autonomous spacecraft in communications-restricted conditions.
The Hivemind technology developed by Shield AI enables platforms to reason, make decisions, and take action in a collaborative manner even in GPS-denied or jammed environments. Gutierrez opined that orbital autonomy is a logical extension of the air domain, because most of the underlying issues, such as planning, decision-making, and multi-agent coordination, translate directly. Shield AI is also considering the possibilities of testing Hivemind on a real spacecraft as early as 2026, moving it out of simulation and into the real world. Meanwhile, the collaboration comes as defense and commercial space operators are progressively aiming to gain AI-based autonomy enabling satellites to control, organize, and react to threats without needing ground control instructions. In the modern world, the majority of spacecraft are still relying on human operators to make adjustments in their orbits, collision avoidance and tasking their mission, which can prove critical when dealing with rapidly developing events. These features are considered to be a necessity for large constellations that should be used in a contested environment where the links of communication can be degraded or denied. Sedaro co-founder and CEO Robbie Robertson indicated that the Hivemind integration will accelerate the concept-to-proven-capability timeline, and simplify and reduce risks in designing and running missions at scale.
Sedaro’s platform enables risk-free testing of autonomous satellite behaviors at scale. Under this system, Shield AI will test such capabilities as proximity operations, swarm coordination, defensive counter-space behaviors, and cognitive battle management. The businesses will move to more advanced onboard decision-making as opposed to the conventional ground-controlled ideas. It has been proposed that potential uses of the system could be to enable Earth-observation constellations to reprioritize on-the-fly depending on the health of satellites, weather conditions, or changed mission requirements, without requiring ground inputs. Shield AI’s entry into space mirrors a broader trend of adapting drone autonomy for satellites.
The company joins firms such as Anduril and Redwire, which are deploying autonomy software across multiple domains. Redwire’s $925 million acquisition of UAV developer Edge Autonomy earlier this year was driven by the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control strategy, which seeks to link sensors and shooters across military services. Anduril likewise announced plans to run its Lattice autonomy software on spacecraft built by manufacturers including Impulse Space, Apex, and Argo Space, demonstrating the convergence of aerial and space autonomy technologies.
