Company Profile · October 6, 2026 · Mission Operations Advanced Space occupies a less visible but consequential part of the lunar supply chain: helping spacecraft know where they are, decide where to go, and operate when Earth cannot supervise every maneuver. The Westminster, Colorado company owns and operates CAPSTONE, the small spacecraft that tested a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon. Its next test is larger in both hardware and responsibility: CAPSTONE 02, a two-spacecraft mission intended to demonstrate autonomous navigation and rendezvous in cislunar space. That makes this a company profile about operational capability, not a promise that a lunar economy has already arrived. Advanced Space has real flight experience from the original mission. The follow-on remains in development. A successful design review is evidence of engineering progress, not evidence that two vehicles have safely met near the Moon. AI-generated editorial illustration, not actual CAPSTONE 02 hardware or mission imagery. Credit: Cislunar News. The company behind the orbit Advanced Space describes its work in terms of mission design, navigation, and operations beyond Earth orbit. Bradley Cheetham is its president and CEO. Its position in the CAPSTONE programs is unusually useful for understanding that business: it is not merely selling an isolated navigation component, and it is not manufacturing every spacecraft subsystem itself. It brings mission-level expertise together with specialist hardware partners and operates the resulting system. For the original CAPSTONE, Terran Orbital designed and built the spacecraft, while Advanced Space owned and operated it. The same division between mission responsibility and hardware supply remains visible in the new program. Advanced Space is CAPSTONE 02's prime contractor, owner, and operator; Terran Orbital, now a Lockheed Martin company, supplies the spacecraft buses. This distinction matters. Operational knowledge can be a valuable product even when the company holding it does not own a large satellite factory. For customers, the purchase is ultimately reduced mission risk and usable data. Trajectory design, flight dynamics, ground operations, and onboard autonomy must work together. A technically elegant algorithm has limited commercial value if it cannot be integrated, tested, and trusted under the conditions a mission will actually encounter. What CAPSTONE has actually demonstrated CAPSTONE launched in June 2022 and began operating around the Moon that November. NASA describes it as the first U.S. commercial mission at the Moon and the first spacecraft to fly and characterize its particular three-body orbit. The gravitational influence of both Earth and the Moon is central to that environment. It is not simply a scaled-up version of a low Earth orbit. NASA's account of the completed extended mission provides stronger evidence than a company sales pitch. Existing flight hardware became a platform for additional software experiments, including autonomous Navigation, Guidance, and Control, or autoNGC, and delay/disruption tolerant networking. NASA says the extended program tested autonomous navigation at the Moon and demonstrated communications techniques designed to cope with interrupted links. One particularly instructive test came when Deep Space Network availability for CAPSTONE fell to a few passes per week while antennas supported Artemis II. According to NASA, autoNGC used an onboard star tracker camera to image celestial bodies and estimate the spacecraft's location without fresh Earth data. NASA reports that optical navigation at times outperformed ground-based methods for real-time onboard navigation. That is a bounded experimental result, not a claim that ground tracking has become unnecessary. The networking demonstration addressed a different problem. Data that could not finish transmitting before a connection ended was stored and sent when contact resumed. NASA reports that every piece of data in that demonstration reached Earth. Navigation and resilient communications are distinct capabilities, but they reinforce one another: a spacecraft that can keep operating during gaps also needs a reliable way to deliver the resulting information later. NASA's activities on CAPSTONE concluded in June 2026. The agency says Advanced Space will continue using the spacecraft as a technology development testbed. That separation is important when describing mission status. Completion of NASA's program does not mean the spacecraft was necessarily switched off, nor does continued operation mean an unlimited new NASA contract exists. CAPSTONE 02 changes the scale of the test Advanced Space announced CAPSTONE 02 on July 24, 2026, with two approximately 400-kilogram spacecraft and a planned 2027 launch-readiness target. On August 25, it announced completion of the mission's Critical Design Review. The company characterized that milestone as readiness to move into further development, integration, and testing. Its later announcement describes launch as targeted for 2027; neither wording should be read as a guaranteed launch date. The central change is moving from navigating one spacecraft to managing the relationship between two. Each vehicle is intended to alternate between chaser and target roles, allowing the team to test relative navigation and rendezvous and proximity operations. Ground tracking, optical sensors, celestial observations, and spacecraft communications all contribute to determining where one vehicle is relative to the other. These are enabling capabilities for future inspection, servicing, logistics, and crewed mission operations. They do not mean CAPSTONE 02 is itself a crewed docking mission, an operational refueling service, or a commercial lunar transportation network. Its purpose is to test technologies and procedures that those later systems may need. Aerospace America's reporting adds an important architectural qualification: NASA views lessons from the planned near-rectilinear halo orbit demonstration as transferable to other cislunar orbits. Advanced Space's relevance therefore should not be reduced to the fate of one station concept. The broader technical problem is how to conduct safe relative motion in an environment where Earth and lunar gravity both matter. A partner network, not a vertically integrated stack The announced supplier map makes the business model concrete. Terran Orbital is responsible for spacecraft design and manufacturing and also provides mission-operation and launch-integration services. Stellar Exploration supplies chemical propulsion for lunar insertion and maneuvering. Utah State University's Space Dynamics Laboratory provides direct-to-Earth and crosslink communications systems. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory contributes optical payloads. The mission also includes NASA-developed navigation software and the Compact Electron Proton Spectrometer for radiation measurements. Advanced Space's job as prime contractor is to make these contributions function as a coherent mission. The difficult integration work lies between components as much as within them: timing, estimation errors, communications availability, maneuver execution, and fault responses must agree. This supplier structure offers a practical route to growth without requiring Advanced Space to build every piece of hardware. It also creates dependencies. Bus delivery, propulsion qualification, software integration, and testing can each affect schedule. A company profile should therefore distinguish Advanced Space's own capabilities from those delivered by its partners, rather than treating every subsystem as proprietary company technology. The customer and economics test NASA is the clearly identified anchor customer for CAPSTONE 02. In a statement reported by Aerospace America, the agency said it had funded Advanced Space's work at $45 million and expected the total contract value for the two-spacecraft mission