Starling's FALCON Can Find Its Own Orbit Without GPS. Now the Swarm Will Share It

NASA's Starling mission has notched another milestone in spacecraft autonomy. The spacecraft fixed its own position in orbit by referencing other objects in space rather than a navigation network. The agency announced the result in a blog post on its Small Satellites site dated 17 August 2026.

The FALCON payload, short for Fast Autonomous Lost-in-space Catalog-based Optical Navigation, is a joint flight experiment by NASA and EraDrive, a startup spun out from Stanford University. It pairs EraDrive's Era-Core flight software with Starling's cameras and an onboard catalog of known satellites. The demonstration tested two capabilities.

In position, navigation and timing experiments, FALCON matched objects seen by the spacecraft's star-tracker cameras, including other spacecraft and orbital debris, to a catalog maintained and made publicly available by the U.S. Department of War. FALCON then used those verified objects as reference points to work out Starling's own orbit.

In separate experiments, the team loaded the full catalog of approximately 20,000 space objects and their predicted orbits onto the spacecraft. FALCON correlated that data with camera observations to estimate positions with greater precision than the catalog data alone. Over a three-day period it improved the known orbits of more than 200 objects without any intervention from operators on the ground.

The self-orbit determination is a first for a spacecraft using optical cameras to navigate by relative position to other objects in space, according to NASA. The catalog-update experiments produced better object position predictions onboard Starling than those provided by ground stations.

"FALCON is yet another success for the Starling demonstration mission. The results from FALCON can have far-reaching implications for on-orbit space-traffic monitoring, collision avoidance, and alternative navigation," said Roger Hunter, program manager for NASA's Small Spacecraft and Distributed Systems program at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "The number of 'firsts' from Starling just keeps growing."

GPS works well in low Earth orbit, where Swift and Starling both fly, but mission planners cannot count on it around the Moon or further out. NASA frames FALCON as groundwork for lunar satellite swarms, distributed science missions and human exploration, where each spacecraft needs to know where it is so measurements from multiple points can be aligned.

Starling launched in 2023. Later this year, the mission will extend the FALCON experiment using Era-Core, enabling its four-spacecraft swarm to share tracking data and refine their positions collectively. The agency describes that as the next step: one satellite navigating by catalog is a demonstration, four satellites cross-checking each other is closer to an operational constellation.

The experiment also highlights NASA's role in fostering commercial innovation. What began as a University SmallSat Technology Partnerships project evolved into EraDrive, which is now commercializing its Era-Core software and related hardware for broader applications. Starling gave the company a platform for real-world testing.

NASA's Ames Research Center leads the Starling mission. The Small Spacecraft and Distributed Systems program, based at Ames and within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate, funds and manages it.

Meanwhile, a rescue mission for an older satellite has failed

The Starling result lands in a month when NASA also had to write off a very different kind of experiment. NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced on Wednesday 19 August that they are giving up on a robotic mission to rescue the Swift gamma-ray telescope before it falls out of orbit, as Ars Technica and NBC News reported.

The rescue satellite, named Link, launched on 3 July on Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL rocket. It was designed to fly up to NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, capture it with three robotic arms, and boost its orbit high enough to escape reentry. Link is about the size of a refrigerator, with two solar arrays and three xenon-fueled electric thrusters.

The Swift mission launched in 2004 and was designed to last two years, but astronomers still rely on it to detect and study gamma-ray bursts. The observatory has no thrusters to maintain its orbit, so a rescue was the only way to keep it going.

NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract less than a year before launch. The agency said the rescue had to launch by this summer to reach Swift before it fell back into the atmosphere. Ars Technica reported that Katalyst completed the build in nine months, a timeline that forced hard trade-offs. Scientific American reported that Katalyst had just nine months to design, build and launch LINK.

Problems began in late July. NASA said on 28 July that Link's attitude control systems had malfunctioned, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications. NBC News reported the spacecraft was rotating at about 9 degrees per second; mission managers fired thrusters to slow the spin this month. Ars Technica reported that two of the satellite's three reaction wheels stopped working, and that there were also issues with cold gas thrusters used for finer pointing control.

In a LinkedIn post, Katalyst said the company and NASA had agreed that, because of ongoing spacecraft control issues, "the mission will not include the capture and boost of NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory."

"Katalyst designed, developed, and launched an experimental spacecraft to go after an ambitious mission on an aggressive timeline," said company CEO Ghonhee Lee. "We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way. We have already learned a tremendous amount, and now our job is to turn those lessons into something durable, building a repeatable playbook to inform future rendezvous and proximity operations and satellite servicing."

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman acknowledged the outcome is not what was hoped for. "This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting," he said in a statement. "The team moved with extraordinary speed to give Swift a chance to carry out more science while advancing capabilities America will need for satellite servicing in the future."

Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division, said the mission was "a first-of-its kind attempt, developed on an unprecedented timeline driven by the Sun's activity." NBC News reported that Swift's troubles began in 2024, during a period of intense solar activity: all satellites in low Earth orbit lose altitude to atmospheric drag, and when the Sun is active it heats the atmosphere, increasing drag and decaying orbits faster.

Link is still alive. Katalyst said it will try to make the most of the spacecraft's remaining capacity, which may still allow it to get near enough to Swift for a demonstration of its close-in navigation system. The company is one of several U.S. firms working on satellite servicing, a capability that could eventually refuel, repair or upgrade satellites. The rendezvous sensors and robotic arms are the technologies that matter for those future missions.

Without a boost, Swift is expected to reenter the atmosphere later this year. Ars Technica put the observatory's cost at $500 million. Scientific American reported that the observatory had already paused operations in advance of the rescue attempt, leaving a gap in high-energy observations.