Computer vision plays a key role in measuring the relative posture and position between spacecrafts, especially in various close-range space tasks. As one of the essential steps for computer vision, camera calibration is important for obtaining precise three-dimensional contours of a space target. The focal length of on-orbit zoom cameras constantly changes. Thus, it is practical to calibrate the focal length rather than other intrinsic camera parameters. However, traditional calibration targets, such as checkerboards, cannot be used to calibrate a space camera in orbit. To address this problem, we propose a two-step process for focal length calibration. In the first step, the initial estimate of the camera focal length was generated with vanishing points obtained from the solar panels of satellites. In the second step, the initial solution was optimized by the particle swarm optimization algorithm. The results of the simulations and laboratory experiments confirmed the accuracy, flexibility, and good antinoise interference performance of the proposed method. Thus, the proposed method has practical significance for space tasks, such as space rendezvous-docking and on-orbit maintenance. (C) 2021 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)