PARIS — June 2026 — France’s national space agency has taken a significant step toward debris-tracking independence, activating the first sovereign commercial radar data contract ever awarded in France for space surveillance.
Under the agreement, Paris-based startup Look Up Space provides CNES — the Centre National d’Études Spatiales — with on-demand access to its SORASYS-1 ground radar. The service went live in late May 2026, transitioning from contract signature to operational status under a deal running through 2028. CNES can now submit tasking requests directly to SORASYS-1, receiving raw, high-fidelity radar measurements on specific debris objects of concern — without routing those requests through U.S. or allied infrastructure.
The Problem with the Public Catalog
National space agencies and satellite operators have long relied on the U.S. Space Surveillance Network’s public Two-Line Element (TLE) catalog, distributed through Space-Track.org, as the baseline for tracking conjunction threats. The limitations of that catalog are well-documented and increasingly consequential.
NASA’s own smallsat guidance states flatly that TLEs “are not accurate enough to be used for conjunction assessment” — they carry no covariance data, the statistical error envelopes needed to compute a meaningful probability of collision. The public catalog is refreshed from a USSPACECOM snapshot approximately every eight hours, meaning the orbital state of a newly fragmented debris cloud or a recently maneuvered object can lag real-time knowledge by hours.
For agencies running collision-avoidance operations, the result is a difficult choice: miss close approaches until too late to maneuver safely, or drown in low-confidence alerts that erode trust in the system entirely. As conjunction rates in LEO have reached record levels, the signal-to-noise problem has only intensified.
What Sovereign Tasking Delivers
Directing SORASYS-1 at a specific debris object lets CNES acquire fresh measurements outside the public pipeline, closing the latency gap. But the sovereign dimension matters equally.
When an agency’s operational decisions — whether to require a collision-avoidance maneuver under France’s Space Operations Act (LOS), or how to update the national space object catalog — rest on a foreign catalog, the agency accepts the data owner’s characterization, filtering, and classification. With SORASYS, CNES receives measurements generated exclusively by Look Up Space’s own radar infrastructure, with no third-party filtering or external sourcing.
The SORASYS data service delivers three tiers under the contract: historical archival radar data for reprocessing past observations and validating orbital solutions; real-time tasking data generating high-fidelity positional measurements on high-priority objects on demand; and Conjunction Data Messages derived from Look Up Space’s own catalog. All three feed into CNES’s CAESAR collision-avoidance service, which provides close-approach screening for more than 400 European satellites across all orbital regimes.
Look Up Space describes the deal as France’s first national data-purchase contract for commercial space-surveillance radar — formalizing commercial sensors as part of CNES’s operational chain rather than treating them as experimental augments.
A Broader Shift in How Nations Track Debris
The agreement reflects a pattern accelerating across spacefaring nations. As contested-orbit incidents raise questions about allied data-sharing assumptions, agencies are investing in independent tracking layers they control end-to-end.
France has been particularly active: the France 2030 program has funded five consortia developing new debris-monitoring systems, including a ground-telescope network led by ArianeGroup and the RAMSES global optical-surveillance array from Aldoria. Look Up Space sits within that ecosystem. What distinguishes the SORASYS contract is that it represents a formal government procurement — a national agency paying for sovereign radar data rather than simply cooperating on research.
For satellite operators sharing orbital shells with the debris CNES now tracks more precisely, the downstream benefit is tangible: better-characterized conjunctions, fewer unnecessary avoidance maneuvers triggered by stale TLE data, and a national collision-avoidance service that doesn’t depend on a catalog that may be hours behind reality.
Look Up Space was founded in 2022 by Michel Friedling, former commander of the French Space Command, and Juan-Carlos Dolado Perez, a former head of space situational awareness at CNES itself — a lineage that helped the company win the trust needed to become a sovereign data supplier to its founders’ former institutions.
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