Starfish Space has ended its first on-orbit mission, and the failure came from a mundane cause rather than exotic physics. The Tukwila, Washington startup lost contact with Otter 24C, an oven-sized spacecraft launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on October 1.
The vehicle had worked initially. Two-way contact was established after deployment, and the team commanded the craft and downlinked substantial telemetry during early operations. Contact dropped during commissioning. An investigation traced the loss to fault protection on the satellite bus supplied by Astro Digital, where an error switched off the radio and blocked any re-establishing of communications. Starfish, NASA and Astro Digital concluded the spacecraft was unrecoverable.
The mission, known as SSPICY, was backed by $15M from NASA and built to demonstrate inspecting defunct satellites in low Earth orbit. That capability matters to anyone operating in space long term. Servicing and inspection are the service layer that would make orbital infrastructure worth insuring and maintaining.
Starfish says it is working with Astro Digital to correct the fault protection system and tighten testing for future Otters, and that NASA and the company are exploring ways to meet mission objectives with later flights.
The loss lands in a difficult month for space startups. Hardware demos at this stage are cash-consuming bets, and a software fault in a bus component can end a mission that investors had spent years funding. NASA’s advanced research director nonetheless repeated the agency’s case for commercial partners, describing such demonstrations as the fastest route to learning.
