On March 11, 2026, Anduril Industries announced it had signed an agreement to acquire ExoAnalytic Solutions, a California-based company that operates the world's largest commercial network of ground-based optical telescopes. By early May, ExoAnalytic's own homepage had switched to "now part of Anduril," and the story had moved from a pending acquisition to an operating surveillance stack with new Pentagon money behind it. The acquisition lands at a critical moment. As Artemis II heads to the launch pad and China accelerates its own lunar program, the volume of spacecraft operating in cislunar space, the 384,000-kilometer expanse between Earth and the Moon, is growing faster than current sensing infrastructure can track. ExoAnalytic's 400-plus telescopes have been quietly watching that volume for years. Now they'll be watching for Anduril. ExoAnalytic's global telescope network generates billions of observations annually. Credit: ExoAnalytic Solutions May 2026 Update: The ExoAnalytic Deal Closed, and SDANet Just Doubled in Size ExoAnalytic now describes itself as part of Anduril, which means the telescope network is no longer just a proposed addition to Lattice. Then on May 5, the U.S. Space Force awarded Anduril a $100.3 million contract modification for SDANet, lifting the ceiling of that Space Surveillance Network effort to $200 million. The combined message is straightforward: Anduril is not only buying sensors, it is being paid to connect them into the military's next surveillance backbone. The Company That Caught China's Satellite Tow Truck ExoAnalytic Solutions isn't a household name, but the U.S. military knows exactly what it does. Founded in Orange County, California, the company built a global network of automated optical telescopes, with more than 400 units deployed across sites in the United States, Australia, Europe, and elsewhere. Each telescope feeds a central data pipeline that generates billions of observations per year, tracking satellites, debris clouds, and unusual spacecraft behavior in Earth orbit. The company earned international attention in late 2021 when its network captured something no one had publicly confirmed: China's Shijian-21 satellite had rendezvoused with Compass G2, a defunct Chinese navigation satellite in geostationary orbit, and then towed the dead spacecraft into a graveyard orbit several hundred kilometers above the GEO belt. Beijing had said nothing about the maneuver. ExoAnalytic's telescopes documented it frame by frame. AI-generated image ExoAnalytic's telescopes tracked China's Shijian-21 satellite as it towed a defunct spacecraft in geostationary orbit in late 2021. That incident crystallized what space domain awareness (SDA) advocates had been arguing for years: the ability to watch what satellites actually do in orbit, not just where they are, is a national security capability. ExoAnalytic had been providing exactly that to U.S. government customers through classified and commercial contracts for over a decade. Its data feeds into the Space Force's existing surveillance architecture alongside government radar systems and commercial providers like LeoLabs and Slingshot Aerospace. ExoAnalytic Solutions at a Glance • Founded: Newport Beach, California; offices also in Colorado and Alabama • Employees: Approximately 130 at time of acquisition agreement • Telescope network: 400+ ground-based optical systems deployed globally • Data volume: Billions of observations generated annually • Primary customers: U.S. Space Force, Commerce Department, government intelligence community • Notable mission: Tracked China's Shijian-21 satellite towing Compass G2 into graveyard orbit (2021) Anduril's Space Bet Anduril Industries launched its space division around 2024, building on the company's broader identity as a defense technology firm that designs autonomous systems and software rather than traditional hardware platforms. With roughly $1 billion in annual revenue and about 7,000 employees across multiple divisions, Anduril is not a startup. It is a scaled company with significant government relationships in air defense, border security, and autonomous undersea systems. The space division, led by Senior Vice President Gokul Subramanian, had about 120 employees before the ExoAnalytic deal was signed. Its flagship product is Lattice, a software platform that ingests data from radars, drones, ground sensors, and satellites and fuses it into a single operational picture for military commanders. Lattice has been adopted by the Space Force to integrate space surveillance sensors from disparate sources. Adding ExoAnalytic's telescope data and analytics directly into that pipeline is a logical extension. $1B+ Anduril Annual Revenue 7,000 Anduril Employees $200M SDANet Contract Ceiling 400+ Telescopes Acquired $100.3M May 5 Contract Modification 3 Self-Funded Space Missions Planned 2026 Anduril has been working with ExoAnalytic on projects for about two years, according to Subramanian. The acquisition formalizes a relationship that already existed at the operational level. "The acquisition would accelerate Anduril's work supporting national security space customers," Subramanian said in the announcement. AI-generated image Anduril's Lattice platform fuses sensor data into a unified operational picture for military commanders. Why Cislunar Space Needs Its Own Watch Space domain awareness has historically focused on Earth's orbital shells, particularly low Earth orbit (LEO) at a few hundred kilometers and geostationary orbit (GEO) at roughly 36,000 kilometers. Those regions are dense with satellites and debris, and decades of investment from ground radar networks and optical systems have produced reasonable, if incomplete, coverage. Cislunar space is a different problem. The region between GEO and the Moon spans more than 340,000 kilometers of volume, with complex gravitational dynamics that allow spacecraft to follow trajectories that no radar network can cover continuously. A spacecraft on a lunar transfer orbit or loitering near a Lagrange point can maneuver with very little warning, and current sensors struggle to track them reliably. AI-generated image Cislunar space spans 384,400 km of largely unmonitored volume between Earth and the Moon. That gap is becoming a concern for both NASA and the Pentagon. As Artemis missions bring commercial and government spacecraft deeper into cislunar space on a regular basis, and as China's Chang'e program targets the lunar south pole with its own landers and orbiters, the ability to track what is happening beyond GEO has moved from academic interest to operational requirement. The U.S. Space Force has been explicit about this. On March 17, just six days after the Anduril-ExoAnalytic announcement, acting Assistant Secretary Thomas Ainsworth detailed plans for new Portfolio Acquisition Executives with explicit responsibility for capabilities beyond GEO, including sensors and propulsion for cislunar operations. The Air Force Research Laboratory's Oracle-M satellite, a small spacecraft designed to demonstrate tracking in cislunar space, is on track for launch as a secondary payload on USSF-112, though no firm date has been set. The Cislunar Tracking Gap Ground-based radar systems designed for low Earth orbit lose fidelity rapidly beyond GEO. Optical telescopes, operating from multiple sites globally, can detect and track objects at much greater distances, including those on trans-lunar trajectories. ExoAnalytic's network was already the largest commercial optical tracking capability on Earth. Integrating it into a defense platform designed for fusion and command-and-control extends that reach in a meaningful way. The Golden Dome Connection The Anduril-ExoAnalytic deal has a second strategic thread that runs alongside the cislunar SDA story: missile defense. The Trump administration's proposed "Golden Dome" architecture envisions a layered sensor and interceptor network designed to track bal