Turion Space's DROID-002 Makes History at Exercise SALITRE 2026

When Exercise SALITRE 2026 opened its execution week at Cerro Moreno Air Base on July 6, the largest multinational air exercise in South America featured something no combined exercise has attempted before: a commercial satellite performing a real, on-orbit evasive maneuver in response to a simulated adversary — flown live, watched by coalition space operators on three continents. Turion Space, a Veteran Ventures Capital Fund II portfolio company, served as the commercial partner at the center of this historic milestone.

U.S. Space Forces – Southern (SPACEFOR-SOUTH) leads the Joint Commercial Operations (JCO) space cell supporting the Chilean Air Force-hosted exercise, part of the U.S. Southern Command Resolute Sentinel series. Alongside host-nation Chile, space operators and planners from Brazil, Colombia, the United States, NATO's space community, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand are integrated into a single around-the-clock coalition watch — passing the space picture across time zones in a continuous follow-the-sun rotation for the first time in a SPACEFOR-SOUTH exercise.

The week's centerpiece is a "sim-over-live" event conducted with Turion Space. As part of the fictional exercise scenario, an aggressor spacecraft — role-played by Brazilian and Colombian space operations centers — closes on a real Turion satellite, the DROID-002. Turion responded by executing an actual maneuver of its spacecraft in excess of 1 m/s. This provided coalition operators the rare opportunity to detect, characterize, and report a genuine on-orbit event in real time using commercial space domain awareness data.

"This milestone demonstrates that security in the space domain is a team sport," said U.S. Space Force Col. Brandon P. Alford, commander of Space Forces Southern. "By executing a live, on-orbit maneuver with a commercial partner under a simulated threat, we aren't just validating theoretical concepts—we are proving our collective, real-time operational agility. Operating a continuous, multinational watch floor across three continents shows how integrated, resilient, and unified our coalition has become."

The exercise also marks an operational debut for the Chilean air force's newest space professionals: four operators who completed the four-week JCO "Protect and Defend" certification course just weeks before the exercise put their qualifications to work on live watch floors for the first time. SALITRE 2026 ran through July 12, with lessons from the space cell set to inform PANAMAX 2026 later this summer, continuing SPACEFOR-SOUTH's campaign to build enduring, interoperable space partnerships across the Americas and beyond.