Starfish Space’s ‘Otter’ satellite will attempt 1st-ever commercial docking in low Earth orbit this year

Starfish Space plans to make history on its second-ever mission, which is set to lift off next month.

On Tuesday (May 20), the Seattle-based startup unveiled the outline of the groundbreaking flight, which is called Otter Pup 2. It will send one of Starfish’s small Otter satellite-servicing vehicles to low Earth orbit (LEO) on SpaceX‘s Transporter 14 mission, which is scheduled to lift off in June.

If all goes to plan, the Otter will link up with a second private spacecraft later this year, performing the first-ever commercial satellite docking in LEO. (Commercial satellites have docked while circling Earth before, but much higher up — in geostationary orbit.)

“If successful, this mission will further validate our unique approach to satellite servicing: taking complex problems that were traditionally solved with hardware and instead solving them with software,” Starfish co-founder Trevor Bennett said in a statement on Tuesday.

“This allows us to make Otters an order of magnitude smaller than other servicing vehicles — making them faster to build, faster to launch, and finally closing the business case for satellite servicing to scale across the space industry,” he added.

The target satellite for Otter Pup 2 is an ION spacecraft, operated by the Italian company D-Orbit. The ION vehicle — which will also launch on Transporter 14, according to SpaceNews — has not been prepped for docking.

It shares that trait with virtually all other satellites circling Earth today. So Otter Pup 2 will be an instructive test for Starfish Space, which aims to provide a variety of services with Otters — for example, refueling some satellites to extend their operational lives and de-orbiting others to reduce the space junk population.

And that will be just the beginning, according to the company.

“We envision our technology having far-reaching implications and massive impact: performing in-space inspection, orbital relocation, and logistics services, as well as conducting repairs, component upgrades, and in-space assembly and manufacturing,” Starfish Space’s website reads.

Starfish’s first mission, Otter Pup 1, launched on SpaceX’s Transporter 8 rideshare flight in June 2023, on board a space tug operated by the California company Launcher.

That tug experienced an anomaly, however, which resulted in the Otter and other payloads being deployed earlier than planned. That, in turn, scuttled the main objective of the mission — having the Otter rendezvous with the Launcher tug down the road.

But Starfish pivoted, managing to maneuver the Otter to within 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) of a different spacecraft — an D-Orbit ION vehicle — in April 2024.