Odin Space

Space is quickly filling up. There are over eleven thousand active satellites now orbiting Earth, with thousands more launching every year, and the tracking systems that operators rely on were built for a quieter sky. Those systems can reliably follow objects larger than about ten centimeters. Everything smaller is invisible to them, and almost all of the dangerous material is smaller. The European Space Agency estimates that there are more than 140 million fragments larger than a millimeter in orbit, none of which are tracked by anything in service today. The physics is what makes this matter. Debris travels at roughly seven kilometers per second, fast enough that a fragment three tenths of a millimeter across can punch through the one-millimeter aluminum shielding that most spacecraft are built with. This essentially means that an operator can lose a satellite, or watch its performance degrade, and never know whether it was struck, by what, or from where. The data used to plan around this risk is worse than most people assume, much of it rests on a few dozen already in-place measurements collected decades ago, on missions that have long since deorbited. The sky has changed completely but the reference data has not.

Odin Space is trying to solve this by measuring the debris directly rather than tracking it from the ground. The company builds small sensors that are placed on satellites and register impacts as they happen, down to fragments a tenth of a millimeter across. Its core product, the Nano Sensor, is about the size of a credit card and functions as a black box for a spacecraft. I.e. when something hits, it records the event and what can be inferred about the object that caused it. A second product, called Outpost, is a dedicated satellite carrying a deployable sensor, meant to sit near assets worth watching closely and report within minutes if a new debris field appears or an object is deliberately maneuvered into a collision. The data these sensors generate is useful at three points in a mission. Before launch, an operator can map the debris environment in a planned orbit. In flight, it can monitor how that environment changes along its path. And after an impact, it can attribute a failure to a specific cause rather than filing it as an unexplained anomaly. Proof of impact is what turns a silent failure into evidence, and evidence is what an insurer needs to pay an insurance claim.

No one else is collecting in place measurements of sub-centimeter debris at any scale, and companies such as Digantara, Aldoria, LeoLabs, and NorthStar are mostly improving how large objects are tracked from the ground or from orbit, which is a different problem. Odin is measuring the part of the environment that everyone agrees is the most dangerous and that no current system can see. The defence angle follows naturally from the product. A grid of sensors near critical infrastructure is a way to detect and attribute a kinetic attack.

The team is very strong. James New, Co-founder and CEO, holds a PhD in physics and was a research scientist on NASA's DRAGONS program, the debris-sensing instrument Odin's technology descends from. Dan Terrett, Co-founder and operating lead, comes from finance and operations. Odin was founded in London in 2020 and flew its first sensor in 2023 on D-Orbit's ION vehicle. The company raised a $3 million seed in December 2025 led by Steel Atlas, bringing total funding to roughly five million. The first commercial sensors are due in 2026.