Aldoria

Aldoria is a Toulouse-based French Space Domain Awareness (SDA) startup founded in 2022, developing ground-based radar systems for detecting and tracking resident space objects (satellites, debris, rocket bodies) in low Earth orbit — positioned to provide European sovereign space surveillance data independent of both U.S. Space Force official catalog data and existing commercial radar providers.

The company's location in Toulouse is strategically deliberate: the city hosts CNES (Centre National d'Études Spatiales, the French national space agency), Airbus Defence and Space's primary satellite manufacturing facility, Thales Alenia Space's French operations, and a dense concentration of space engineering talent — providing Aldoria with access to experienced radar and satellite systems engineers and to the procurement relationships needed to win French and European government SSA contracts.

France's existing ground-based military SSA radar is GRAVES (Grand Réseau Adapté à la VEille Spatiale) — a bistatic radar operated by the French Air and Space Force from Dijon since 2005 that detects objects in LEO through forward scattering when they cross its fan-shaped transmitted beam. GRAVES has demonstrated detection capability for objects as small as 15-20 cm diameter but is a military asset with no commercial data sharing mandate. Aldoria's commercial phased-array radar systems would complement GRAVES by providing commercially accessible SSA data — essential as commercial satellite operators require collision avoidance information that classified military systems cannot share directly.

Strategic drivers are clear: the European Union's SST (Space Surveillance and Tracking) consortium — pooling SSA capabilities from France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Romania, and other member states — explicitly aims to develop European-sovereign alternatives to U.S. Space Force catalog dependence. CNES's STELLA program contracts for SSA data from commercial providers to augment the EU SST catalog. Aldoria, as a French company founded in the CNES ecosystem, is positioned to win these contracts as its radar systems mature from development to operational status. Competitors include LeoLabs (US ground radar, dominant commercially), Share My Space (French, optical SSA), and Look Up Space (Toulouse, optical network). Aldoria's phased-array radar approach directly competes with LeoLabs' architecture for sovereign EU equivalency.