Exclusive: Shield AI and Sedaro team up for space autonomy

Driving the news: This marks Shield's entry into the new-age space race. While widely known for its work on drones — like V-BAT and the heavier-duty X-BAT — the company also has experience with unmanned surface vessels and ground robotics.

• "The future of every satellite is to be autonomous. When you think about all these aircraft that we're building, the problem scales the same way," Christian Gutierrez, Shield's vice president of Hivemind solutions, told Axios.
• "Crawl is sim in '26. Walk would be in orbit in '26. And run, to me, is a constellation. It's going to be multiple systems."

Context: Space competition is heating up. A domain once dominated by the U.S. is now contested by China and Russia (including their antisatellite arsenals).

• "Space is increasingly recognized, very directly within the Department of Defense, as really foundational to warfighting," Sedaro CEO Robbie Robertson told Axios.
• "If it's one satellite, if it's 1,000 you're trying to coordinate, you need to be able to virtualize it," he said. "You can't automate without simulating."

What we're watching: How this partnership postures the two companies for the Trump administration's $175 billion Golden Dome.

Go deeper: Shield AI unsheathes X-BAT, a missile-toting autonomous aircraft