GITAI

GITAI builds arms and the spacecraft to put them on. S2, a 1.5 metre dual-arm system, spent 2024 working outside the International Space Station and completed every task on its list. The Inchworm is a two-metre modular arm with a grapple at each end, so it can walk along a structure hand over hand and be repaired a segment at a time. Since 2024 the company has also sold satellite buses outright, at $1.5 million for a ten kilogram payload and $3 million for two hundred.

Everything is made in-house: actuators, star trackers, reaction wheels, magnetorquers, propulsion. The reasoning is that a spacewalk is the most expensive labour ever invented, and that replacing it does not call for a better arm so much as a cheap complete spacecraft with an arm on it, which means owning every part rather than integrating other people's.

No GITAI arm has ever operated on a free-flying spacecraft. Every robotic demonstration so far has been hosted on the ISS or run in a vacuum chamber. The mission that would prove the actual product is S3, which would rendezvous with an uncooperative satellite, dock with it, service it and take it down; the flight model was finished in June 2026 and is now sitting on the ground, because GITAI deferred the launch past 2028 to concentrate on a US Space Force interceptor programme. That is a two-year slip on its own commercial thesis, disclosed by the company itself, and it leaves the robotics roadmap downstream of defence work. Commercial servicing revenue was meant to begin in 2026 and has not.