Most satellites look down. DROID.002 looks sideways. Launched on March 15, 2025, aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-13 rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base, DROID.002 is the second spacecraft built by Turion Space – a four-year-old startup out of Irvine, California, that wants to photograph other objects in orbit, clean up the junk, and eventually mine asteroids. That’s quite a roadmap for a company whose entire founding team came from SpaceX and whose first satellite weighed less than a golden retriever. But DROID.002 represents a genuine step up. At 90 kilograms, it’s nearly three times the mass of its predecessor, DROID.001, and carries considerably more capable hardware. Where DROID.001 was essentially a proof of concept – “get something to orbit quickly, do something useful, and figure out what we need to know going forward,” as CEO Ryan Westerdahl put it – DROID.002 is built to do real work.

Full feature : A 90-kilogram spacecraft with iodine thrusters and two Australian-built cameras that four-year-old space tech startup, Turion Space sent to space is recording space junk.

For more see the OODA Company Profile on Turion Space.