BQP Awarded First Federal Contract to Advance Quantum-Assisted AI for Space Domain Awareness
BosonQ Psi Federal LLC (BQP) has landed its first federal contract through the SpaceWERX Open Topic Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, a milestone that brings the New York company into the U.S. government market and gives fresh momentum to its work at the intersection of AI, physics modeling, and quantum-inspired computing.
The award centers on a growing problem in orbit: identifying unknown objects quickly and accurately in an increasingly crowded space environment. Under the contract, BQP will develop and validate a new software application based on what it calls Physics-Constrained Quantum-Assisted Machine Learning, or PC-QAML, to support Space Domain Awareness missions.
That challenge is becoming more urgent. The U.S. Space Surveillance Network gathers roughly 18,000 to 25,000 orbital observations every day. Many of those detections cannot be immediately matched to known satellites or debris and are labeled Uncorrelated Tracks, or UCTs. Some may be harmless fragments or newly launched spacecraft, while others could point to maneuvers or systems that deserve closer scrutiny. Delays in classifying them can slow operational decision-making and weaken overall visibility into activity in orbit.
BQP says its approach combines physics-based modeling with quantum-inspired computation to make AI inference faster and far more efficient. Rather than depending on cloud infrastructure, GPU-heavy deployments, or future quantum hardware, the company is designing the software to run on space-qualified processors and other edge devices with limited power and compute resources.
That edge-first design is one of the more notable aspects of the contract. In space operations, connectivity is not always reliable, and sending data back to centralized systems for analysis can introduce delays. AI tools that can operate directly on satellites or forward-deployed systems could help detect unusual behaviors in near real time, including satellite maneuvers, separation events, rendezvous and proximity operations, or even possible electronic interference.
“Our goal is to make advanced AI practical where it matters most: on satellites and forward-deployed systems operating with limited computing power and intermittent communications,” said Rut Lineswala, founder and CTO of BQP. “This award represents an important validation of our technology and gives us the opportunity to demonstrate how quantum-inspired computing can solve real operational challenges for national security today.”
According to the company, the performance gains are substantial. BQP says PC-QAML can shrink AI models from about 14 million parameters to roughly 2,000, a reduction of 99%, while still maintaining more than 99% classification accuracy. The company also claims the architecture can deliver up to 10 times lower inference latency, around 90% lower power consumption, and much faster retraining than conventional machine learning methods.
Those efficiency gains are especially relevant for tactical and orbital systems, where every watt and every millisecond matters. BQP noted that the technology has already been deployed on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano edge device at the BMC3I TAP LAB, previously known as the SDA TAP Lab, demonstrating that compact, low-power hardware can support practical onboard AI for autonomous space missions.
The new contract also builds on earlier work BQP conducted with the Space Domain Awareness TAP Lab. During the 2025 SDA Mini-Accelerator, the company’s technology reportedly showed promising results in orbital separation detection and was identified as a possible candidate for future UCT classification and Threat Simulation Catalog integration. That provides a clearer pathway from prototype research into mission-relevant applications tied to Space Operations Command’s Mission Delta 2 and the Space Systems Command.
For SpaceWERX, the award fits its broader role as the innovation arm of the U.S. Space Force. The organization works with startups, small businesses, and nontraditional contractors to move commercial space technologies into defense programs more quickly. In fiscal year 2025 alone, SpaceWERX awarded more than 300 contracts totaling $510 million, underscoring the Pentagon’s continued push to tap commercial innovation in areas such as autonomy, sensing, and resilient space operations.
BQP’s win is notable not just because it is the company’s first federal contract, but because it reflects growing interest in AI systems that can do more with less hardware. Defense agencies are increasingly focused on software that can operate in denied, disconnected, intermittent, and bandwidth-constrained environments. In that context, compact AI models with strong accuracy and low power requirements are likely to attract attention well beyond a single pilot effort.
The commercial implications may be just as broad. BQP says the same underlying approach could be used in aerospace, autonomous systems, industrial monitoring, and other edge computing scenarios where high-performance AI needs to run on small, low-power devices. If the company’s claims hold up under federal validation, the technology could have relevance far beyond military space tracking.
For now, the SpaceWERX contract serves as both a technology validation and a market entry point. It gives BQP non-dilutive research funding, access to defense stakeholders, and a chance to prove that quantum-assisted AI can address immediate operational problems in orbit without waiting for full-scale quantum computers to arrive.
About SpaceWERX: SpaceWERX is the innovation arm of the U.S. Space Force and a division of AFWERX. Based in Los Angeles, it connects commercial technology developers with defense users to accelerate the adoption of new space capabilities.
More information is available at bqpsim.com and spacewerx.us.
