Satellites for Missile Defense

Wardstone is a space defense-tech company developing next-generation capabilities to protect the United States and its allies from missiles and other space-based threats. We design, build, and deploy satellites equipped with space-based interceptors to kinetically counter hypersonic and ballistic missiles.

Active Founders

Sebastian Fischer

Founder and CEO

I am the cofounder & CEO of Wardstone, a space defense company building satellites to defend the U.S. and its allies from hypersonic and ballistic missiles. I have 10+ years of engineering and product experience in satellites, drones, and self-driving cars. I held leadership roles at Amazon Prime Air and Cruise Self-Driving and previously worked at Lockheed Martin and NASA on Planetary Spacecraft. I studied Aerospace Engineering at MIT and did a dual MS/MBA degree at Harvard.

Sebastian Fischer

Founder and CEO

I am the cofounder & CEO of Wardstone, a space defense company building satellites to defend the U.S. and its allies from hypersonic and ballistic missiles. I have 10+ years of engineering and product experience in satellites, drones, and self-driving cars. I held leadership roles at Amazon Prime Air and Cruise Self-Driving and previously worked at Lockheed Martin and NASA on Planetary Spacecraft. I studied Aerospace Engineering at MIT and did a dual MS/MBA degree at Harvard.

Tobias Fischer

Founder

I am the cofounder of Wardstone, where I lead the technical development of next-generation defense spacecraft. Previously I worked at Astranis, building, launching, and operating geostationary communication satellites. I hold a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from Cornell University. At Cornell, I was the Chief Spacecraft Engineer for a lunar CubeSat mission that demonstrated novel electric propulsion and navigation systems.

Tobias Fischer

Founder

I am the cofounder of Wardstone, where I lead the technical development of next-generation defense spacecraft. Previously I worked at Astranis, building, launching, and operating geostationary communication satellites. I hold a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from Cornell University. At Cornell, I was the Chief Spacecraft Engineer for a lunar CubeSat mission that demonstrated novel electric propulsion and navigation systems.

Company Launches

Wardstone: Satellites for Missile Defense

See original launch post

Introduction

Hi YC,

We are Tobias and Sebastian. Cofounders (and brothers!) of Wardstone.

TL;DR: Wardstone builds satellites for missile defense. We are pursuing an emerging ~$40B/year space defense market as part of America’s Golden Dome initiative. Tobias studied Mechanical Engineering at Cornell and worked at Astranis. Sebastian studied Aerospace Engineering at MIT and worked at NASA, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, and Cruise. We built and demoed a live ground-based missile intercept during YC.

Launch Video

Checkout the automated missile defense system we built during YC:

https://youtu.be/jXABTM9GZ6s

About Wardstone

Wardstone builds space-based interceptors: satellites with interceptors designed to kinetically destroy missiles. New space threats, specifically hypersonic missiles, are emerging as existential threats to the United States. Our current missile defense systems were not designed for this new offensive technology. The United States’ Congress has allocated ~$25B towards developing new on-orbit hypersonic missile defensive missile capabilities over the next 3 years. Follow on build out of this on-orbit defensive layer coined the Golden Dome has been estimated by congress to cost up to $831B over the next 20 years.

At Wardstone, we believe that we can build defensive missile capabilities for a fraction of the cost of the offensive hypersonic weapons themselves, and orders of magnitude cheaper than the defensive concepts being proposed/explored by the major defense primes. We will do this with our first product, Hailstorm, that deploys high speed clouds of buckshot to kinetically destroy hypersonic missiles.

Our integrated interceptor-satellite constellation provides global intercept capabilities from space for various missile types beyond hypersonics.

The success of Wardstone and the full deployment of the Golden Dome will place the United States in an incredibly strong geopolitical position.

The full Wardstone constellation with the space based intercept capability in action will look like this:

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Our Progress During YC

During YC we had 2 main objectives: 1) build our first missile intercept demo and 2) establish relationships with our main customer: the US Space Force.

The Intercept Demo
We built a fully automated missile tracking and intercept system that uses infrared computer vision for predicting the future missile position and a high pressure air cannon to deploy an interceptor to destroy a 150+ mph missile. Our system provided repeatable behavior, could adapt to different missile speeds, and destroyed a total of 3 missiles. Checkout he video above for the entire story and insights into our system. Highlights below:

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Space Force and Other Department of War Relationships
We built relationships and engaged with multiple agencies inside the military including: Air Force Research Labs, AFWERX, Space Systems Command Commercialization Office, Space Safari, and the Navy’s Joint Special Operations Command. We are receiving letters of support for an Air Force $3MM Space Based Interceptor SBIR grant and are receiving inbound requests for additional use cases of our technology (Ground to Air, Space to Ground).

We have also engaged with five satellite bus and sounding rocket providers to integrate our Space Based Interceptors for our Series A demo milestone.

If Space Defense Technology resonates with you, please reach out: founders@wardstone.space.

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