Starfish Space loses its first full-scale Otter servicing satellite
From the Space digest for Nov 5, 2026
Sources SatNews
What happened: Starfish Space has declared its first Otter servicing satellite unrecoverable after ground teams permanently lost contact with the spacecraft, which launched October 1 on a commercial rideshare mission. The vehicle was slated to fly NASA's SSPICY demonstration: low-cost inspection, rendezvous and proximity operations in low Earth orbit, with a possible docking with a target object as a secondary goal — technology meant to extend the lives of satellites already in orbit.
What's genuinely new: the investigation's finding: a failure inside the spacecraft bus's fault-protection system shut down the primary radio transceiver and then prevented the spacecraft from ever re-establishing two-way communications, leaving it unable to receive commands or send telemetry. Starfish is working with bus manufacturer Astro Digital to correct the software and hardware protection logic across several additional Otter servicing vehicles now in assembly and integration, so later flight units avoid the same autonomous shutdown.
Watch: whether the corrections hold for the vehicles in production, when the next Otter reaches orbit, and Otter Pup 2's still-pending docking attempt on the smaller sibling spacecraft.