Starfish Space loses contact with Otter, ending NASA inspection mission
Starfish Space · Astro Digital
A satellite bus fault knocked out Otter's radio a month after launch, cutting short a $15 million NASA satellite-inspection demo.
what happened
Starfish Space's Otter 24C spacecraft, launched Oct. 1 on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare, lost two-way contact with ground controllers during its commissioning phase and has not reestablished it, NASA said Nov. 3. NASA and Starfish traced the failure to a fault-protection error on the satellite bus, built by Astro Digital, that shut down the onboard radio and left the spacecraft unrecoverable. Otter 24C was flying NASA's SSPICY mission, a $15 million effort to approach and inspect multiple defunct US satellites for future deorbit planning, per Payload.
why it matters
The loss is Starfish's second on-orbit failure tied to third-party hardware, after a 2023 incident caused by its ride-share provider's separation system, raising reliability questions for a company pitching rendezvous-and-proximity-operations services to NASA and the Space Development Agency, which awarded it a separate $52.5 million deorbit contract in January. NASA said it is weighing whether to complete SSPICY's remaining inspection objectives on a future Starfish mission.
for who
In-space servicing customers, orbital-debris program managers
signal-to-noise
quick facts
- Companies
- Starfish Space, Astro Digital
- Category
- incident
- Impact
- notable
- SNR
- 5 / 5
- Event date
- 2026-11-03
- Published
- 2026-11-04 15:10 UTC