The University of Texas at Austin is becoming the first academic institution to work directly with the U.S. Space Force to keep an eye on threats from space.
UT’s new Space Domain Awareness Lab, launched late last year with the help of a $9.3 million grant from the Texas Space Commission, is partnering with the space service to monitor objects such as satellites and space junk orbiting Earth — and watch for potential attacks.
“This partnership provides a path to solve real problems, collaborate across industry and government, provide expert mentorship, interact with operators, and deliver operational capability to Space Battle Managers,” Space Force Lt. Col. Collin Greiser said in a statement.
The new lab is part of a Space Force program to help the service incorporate “emerging technologies” and create a place where service members can work with their counterparts in “industry, academia, and national labs.”
The facility “anchors Texas within the national space security defense research ecosystem,” Moriba Jah, a professor and lead researcher on the grant, told UT News. “This effort allows us to develop and rigorously test scalable analytic methods to detect and track objects in orbit, then provide those capabilities to operational partners.”
According to the Space Force, the state’s two-year grant will go toward building out the lab, training operators and creating a secure computer infrastructure for the work.
The service said the lab will be operational “as early as December.”
The Space Commission approved the grant during its last meeting of 2025. The grant came from a $150 million Space Exploration and Aeronautics Research fund the Legislature approved in 2023. The last chunk of the fund was awarded earlier this month for a $14.1 million project led by Rice University. It is creating a center for space technologies within its space institute.
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