Victus Haze goes a step further and is “interesting because [the two firms will] be taking turns for various roles throughout the mission [to] practice tactics and operational concepts for dealing with on-orbit threats,” Even Rogers, founder and CEO of True Anomaly, told Breaking Defense. “And so, we change, we switch roles, but we don’t have a designated role, it just depends on the mission we’re doing.”

While the Space Force has given the two players a set of objectives to fulfill and set mission boundaries, he explained, the on-orbit game play is not scripted and neither company knows exactly how the other’s spacecraft will act.

Brian Rogers (no relation), Rocket Lab’s vice president of global launch services, said that the design of Victus Haze thus is very different than most RPO demonstrations up to now, which instead have involved highly scripted maneuvers using “cooperative” satellites as the target.

Still, citing Space Force sensitivities, both executives were coy about the precise activities, beyond imaging each other’s spacecraft, involved in the future Victus Haze mission sets. But public releases have described some early successes in the friendly cat-and-mouse game.

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While the exercise isn’t hostile, the TacRS program and its Victus demonstrations are being managed by the Space Force’s new Combat Power Program Acquisition Executive office, headed by Col. Bryon McClain, responsible for space warfare. According to the service’s fiscal 2027 budget documents, TacRS falls under “the Combat Power mission area[,] which provides the systems required to protect and defend space-based capabilities and ensure space superiority by enabling and executing combat operations in space.”