Starfish Space has secured a $52.5 million contract from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency to dispose of military satellites at the end of their operational lives.
The Tukwila, Wash.-based startup says it’s the first commercial deal ever struck to provide “deorbit-as-a-service,” or DaaS, for a satellite constellation in low Earth orbit. In this case, the constellation is the Pentagon’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, which provides global communications access and encrypted connectivity for military missions. The contract calls for Starfish Space to launch the satellite disposal service in 2027.
“This is not research and development. This is an actual service, in a structure that allows that service to scale for this constellation, for an entire industry,” Starfish Space co-founder Trevor Bennett told me. He said the arrangement validates the Space Development Agency’s approach to building and maintaining its constellation, and also validates “the path that we can take with the industry at large.”
Starfish is developing a spacecraft called Otter that would be able to capture other satellites, maneuver them into different orbits, release them and then move on. In a deorbiting scenario, Otter would send the target satellite into a trajectory for atmospheric re-entry that wouldn’t pose a risk to other orbital assets.
