Vantor said on October 16 that it had integrated its Raptor visual positioning software with Sightline Intelligence’s onboard vision system, so that drones can place themselves and their targets when GPS is jammed. The companies said that in tested configurations, nine of ten target estimates landed within three meters in flight trials. The company that ran those trials was called Maxar Intelligence until last year, and its chief space systems officer takes the MilSat Symposium stage at Silicon Valley Space Week in October.
Matt Jenkins has been Chief Space Systems Officer at Vantor since September 2024, working across electro-optical, infrared, laser and radio-frequency remote sensing. He led engineering for Amazon’s Leo Government Solutions team before joining. At Pacific Defense he was director of space engineering and the architect of Moonraker, a system operating in the Earth-Moon L1 cislunar regime. He spent more than fifteen years at Raytheon, where he worked on missile warning systems, led the WorldView Legion optical imaging system and held senior technical roles including chief systems engineer. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in optics from the University of Rochester and a master’s in systems engineering from Johns Hopkins, and he is credited with two remote sensing patents.
The program bills the session as commercial geospatial intelligence for the battlefield. Vantor’s year has been mostly about what happens to a picture after it is taken. The company rebranded from Maxar Intelligence last October and launched an artificial intelligence platform called Tensorglobe at the same time. SatNews reported in May that the competitive frontier in Earth observation had moved off the sensor and onto the tasking and integration layer. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency awarded the company a $70 million option year in May to run GEGD Pro, which the agency calls the government’s primary commercial GEOINT platform. In April it won a third Luno contract, worth $2.3 million, to turn high-resolution imagery of space objects into automated near real-time reporting on priority satellites in low Earth orbit. In July it began selling WorldView 3D, a tasking line that returns updated three-dimensional terrain within a day of collection. In June it picked BAE Systems to build its next-generation Vantage satellites, a twenty-centimeter class that will fly alongside a planned forty-centimeter constellation called Pulse, and says the new satellites are intended to deliver intelligence within single-digit minutes of a request. A May agreement had already put part of the Raptor suite inside BAE Systems’s Geospatial eXploitation Products. The Raptor integration announced this month pairs that software with Sightline’s aided target recognition on a single onboard processor, and Vantor puts the resulting target location accuracy at better than three meters on a CE90 basis. The figures come from the two companies.
Jenkins joins “Commercial GEOINT for the Battlefield” on Thursday, October 29, from 10:45 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. James Crawford of Privateer Space moderates, and the panel also seats Eduardo Bendek of NASA Ames and SETI, Robert Cardillo of Planet Federal, Scot Currie of BlackSky and Didi Kuo of the National Reconnaissance Office. It follows the morning break, and at 11:30 the room turns to a technical brief on nuclear power for satellites.
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. Jenkins sits on a forty-five-minute panel on the final morning. Vantor has not said how many Vantage satellites BAE Systems will build.
