Starfish Space

Otter Pup weighs under 40 kilograms, roughly two orders of magnitude less than the servicing spacecraft that came before it. Most of what it does is software. CETACEAN works out where a target is and how it is oriented using ordinary cameras, CEPHALOPOD plans and flies the approach without a ground operator, and Nautilus, the capture mechanism, adheres electrostatically with an electromagnet as backup. None of that asks the client satellite to have been built with a docking fixture, which matters because almost none of the thousands already in orbit were.

Trevor Bennett wrote his doctorate on spacecraft relative motion and electrostatic actuation, which is close to a description of Nautilus, and he and Austin Link founded the company out of Blue Origin's flight sciences group. Their bet is that satellite servicing never became a business because everyone built it as a large chemically propelled spacecraft, and that if the hard part is really the navigation and the grip, the vehicle can shrink until the economics work. Otter Pup 2 pushes that further by flying its approach on electric propulsion, which almost nobody has attempted for terminal rendezvous.

Starfish has not docked with anything yet. Otter Pup 1 was thrown off a failing transfer tug in 2023, spinning at over 330 degrees per second, and after recovering attitude control it lost its chemical thruster, so the docking objective was gone before it started. That mission ended instead with a rendezvous flown on electric propulsion that closed to about a kilometre of a D-Orbit vehicle and photographed it, a genuine and underrated result which is still not a capture. Otter Pup 2 launched in June 2025 to attempt the first commercial docking, then lost its target when D-Orbit ended the collaboration for reasons neither company has explained, and spent months phasing toward a replacement. The contract book has meanwhile run ahead of the flight record: roughly $160 million from the Space Force, the Space Development Agency and NASA, plus life-extension deals with Intelsat and SES, all resting on a mechanism that has yet to touch another spacecraft.