Scout Space raised up to $18 million in a Series A on May 6, money the company said would accelerate sensor deployment, expand its software and pay for a 2,600 square foot production facility in Northern Virginia. Scout builds optical payloads that watch other satellites from orbit. The chief product officer who decides what those payloads do takes the MilSat Symposium stage at Silicon Valley Space Week in October.
Courtney Sayles is Chief Product Officer of Scout Space, the Virginia space domain awareness company she joined in February 2024, where she drives the strategic vision for product development. She brings more than 15 years across the Defense Department, the intelligence community and commercial industry. She was a lead systems engineer at Stratos Solutions, managing cloud-based machine learning and artificial intelligence acquisitions for the National Reconnaissance Office. Before that she held systems engineering roles at Boeing, developing software for the intelligence community, and worked as a spacecraft and data analyst at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center. She holds a Master of Engineering in Systems Engineering from Pennsylvania State University and a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan, and she is a certified Project Management Professional.
The program states the premise plainly: the military is hiring private companies to watch, refuel and guard satellites. Whether that adds up to a market is the part still open. Scout has the demonstrations. Space Systems Command’s Space Safari Office awarded it a $3.8 million Tactical Funding Increase in April 2025, half from SpaceWERX and half a private match, to build a geostationary flight unit of the Owl gimbaled optical payload, and Blue Origin said that July that an Owl would fly on the first Blue Ring mission, injected into geostationary transfer orbit and then operating in GEO. The procurement behind the demonstrations is less settled. RG-XX, the Space Force’s next-generation space domain awareness program, is the first written with a refueling requirement, and acquisition leaders have not decided whether to buy the spacecraft or contract for the service. The Space Force did not request fiscal 2027 money for servicing, mobility and logistics, even as U.S. Space Command presses the Pentagon toward sustained on-orbit maneuver. Commercial sensing keeps getting bought regardless: the Space Force gave LeoLabs a $20.7 million prototype agreement in August for a mobile surveillance radar, and SatNews reported in February on how far commercial technology has moved into the Pentagon’s watchtower role.
Sayles joins “Space Control as a Market: RG-XX, RPO, and the Limits of Commercial Combat Support” on Thursday, October 29, from 11:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Dr. Eric Anderson, President of And One Technologies, moderates. The other panelists are Joe Guzman, a retired colonel and the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Space Cowboy ADR; Dr. Richard Nederlander, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Spargo Space; and Col. Owen Stephens, Director of the Space Force’s Space Rapid Capabilities Office. The 45 minutes follow a technical brief on nuclear power for satellites and precede a session on GPS jamming and spoofing, all on the MilSat Symposium track.
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. Sayles’s panel comes late in the morning on the closing day. The Space Force has still not said whether RG-XX will buy the refueling spacecraft or buy the service.
