LeoLabs won a $20.68 million prototype Other Transaction Agreement from the U.S. Space Force on August 26, to deliver one Scout-S radar modified for national security missions. Scout-S is the company’s transportable three-dimensional search radar, an S-band system housed in a standard 20-foot shipping container and movable by land, sea or air. The agreement pays for a demonstration rather than a fielded system. “We’re honored to partner with the Space Force and bring our proven sensing technology into U.S. national security,” said Tony Frazier, LeoLabs’ chief executive. The company’s co-founder and chief operating officer takes the Satellite Innovation stage at Silicon Valley Space Week in October.
Dr. Dan Ceperley is Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder of LeoLabs, which was founded in 2016 as a venture-funded spinout of SRI International and is based in Menlo Park, California. He began his career designing the Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, researching optical performance for imaging exoplanets. At SRI, the institute LeoLabs later spun out of, he was Program Director for Space Debris Tracking, Deputy Director of the Ocean and Space Systems Center, and supervisor of the Allen Telescope Array radio astronomy facility in northern California. He holds a doctorate and a master of science in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor of science in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia. Both the conference program and SatNews’s own coverage of a technical brief he gave at Silicon Valley Space Week in 2024 give him the chief operating officer title. LeoLabs’ own team page still names him chief executive, a title the company’s August announcement gives to Frazier.
The brief’s subject is the side effects of a fuller orbit. LeoLabs fielded the first Scout-S in the Indo-Pacific in June, and it took part in Valiant Shield 2026, the exercise run by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. The company says the radar picked up Chinese Yaogan reconnaissance satellites between 800 and 1,000 kilometers and objects as low as 230 kilometers. Its object catalog separately feeds the Space Force’s Unified Data Library and Commerce’s Traffic Coordination System for Space, under a joint award made on September 30, 2025 and disclosed in December, and the company says that catalog tracks nearly 25,000 resident space objects. Who pays for space-traffic coordination, and whether it is bought as a service or written into requirements, remains unsettled.
Ceperley gives “License to Operate: The Crowded Highways of LEO” on Tuesday, October 27, from 5:15 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It is a fifteen-minute technical brief on the Satellite Innovation track, with no other speakers, and the program describes it as “The side effects of launching thousands of satellites: A look at tracking catalogs, monitoring traffic, and the advocacy for real space-traffic coordination.” It follows Austin Spiegel, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sift, on the mission software lessons of 2026, at 5:00 p.m., and it closes the Satellite Innovation program for the day.
Silicon Valley Space Week runs Tuesday, October 27 through Thursday, October 29 at the Computer History Museum, with Satellite Innovation across the first two days and the MilSat Symposium across the last two. Ceperley’s brief is the last item on the opening day. The variant the Space Force is paying to see demonstrated modifies a radar that has been in the field since June.
