In May, more than 100 employees of Varda Space Industries gathered at the aerospace start-up’s Southern California headquarters to watch a real-time feed of a capsule hurtling toward Earth at more than 18,000 miles per hour.

Every few minutes, a voice crackled through the speakers with coordinates from Varda’s partners in Australia, where the capsule was projected to fall. The updates were met with cheers, as Varda’s calculations of the journey proved right. The capsule landed “on target,” or where the company had predicted.

The exercise was intended to show that Varda and its partners could successfully track a hypersonic missile, rocket or drone and calculate its trajectory from space within minutes, so that the object could theoretically be intercepted. The technologies to pinpoint such fast-moving objects are highly coveted, and no military currently has them, defense officials said.

“The benchmark for success is daunting,” said Will Bruey, the chief executive of Varda, which worked on the test with the artificial intelligence weapons company Anduril and the aerospace company LeoLabs. “Pulling this off requires not just technical precision to move the vehicle in orbit, but also tracking it and reporting it.”

Many tech companies and defense tech start-ups have recently conducted similar drills to show off their technological prowess as they aim for the same goal: getting a piece of President Trump’s “Golden Dome” project, a hypothetical defense system that can intercept rockets and missiles.