EraDrive wins $13 million DoD award for satellite autonomy module
EraDrive
The Space Force will buy EraDrive's vision-based Era-Node autonomy modules under a $13 million APFIT award.
what happened
EraDrive, a Palo Alto satellite-autonomy startup, won a $13 million Department of Defense award under which the Space Force will buy an undisclosed number of its Era-Node vision-based autonomy modules, per Payload. The award came through the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) program, which funds direct procurement rather than R&D like SBIR or STTR; Air Force space-experiments lead Lawrence Robertson told Payload the company was selected and placed on contract within the same fiscal year with help from the APFIT office and NASA Ames. Era-Nodes combine onboard cameras, data processing, synchronization, communications and flight software; EraDrive CEO Sumant Sharma told Payload the vision-based, AI-driven modules support collision avoidance, cooperative and non-cooperative rendezvous and proximity operations, space domain awareness, and navigation in GPS-denied environments.
why it matters
An APFIT award gives EraDrive an accelerated government procurement pathway rather than another study contract, and signals the Space Force wants to field autonomous satellite capabilities now rather than keep funding their development. For other autonomy and space-domain-awareness vendors, it is a data point on the DoD buying mature small-company technology directly, bypassing the slower SBIR-to-program-of-record pipeline.
for who
Satellite autonomy and SDA vendors, Space Force program offices
signal-to-noise
quick facts
- Companies
- EraDrive
- Category
- contract
- Impact
- notable
- SNR
- 3 / 5
- Event date
- 2026-10-19
- Published
- 2026-10-19 14:14 UTC