Italian company D-Orbit has been launching customer payloads aboard its Orbital Transfer Vehicles (OTVs) for the past five years. In that time, the company has positioned itself as a reliable space transportation provider and hosting platform.
The company now plans to extend into on-orbit servicing and refueling missions, end-of-mission disposal, and cross-orbit transportation, including to lunar orbits. NSF spoke with the company’s VP of Business Development, Stefano Antonetti, about D-Orbit’s plans to expand from movers to maintainers as it continues to build Europe’s future in space.
“People are starting to see space as an extension of their reach, something they can actually access,” says Antonetti, “and, as a space enthusiast, this is something that I’m really proud to contribute to.”
The team has flown 17 missions since its inaugural launch in September 2020, delivering more than 180 payloads for customers. D-Orbit missions have flown aboard each of SpaceX’s Transporter missions to date. Two separate D-Orbit missions, Ascend and Endless Sky were lofted together on the Transporter 12 mission, while January 2023’s Starfield mission hitched a ride on the Starlink Group 2-6 launch.
Vega launches D-Orbit’s first ‘Origin’ mission in September 2020 (Credit: ESA)
The company has predominantly flown aboard Falcon 9 vehicles, starting with its second mission, Pulse, in January 2021 aboard Transporter 1. D-Orbit made its 2020 debut atop a Vega, launching from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou — this was the rocket’s successful return to flight after a failure the previous summer.
Founded in 2011, the company is 14 years old and has offices in Italy, Portugal, and the UK, while a new US team will focus on bus design and manufacturing. A champion of conducting environment-friendly business, D-Orbit also has the accolade of being the first space company in the world to be certified B-Corp.
D-Orbit describes itself as a space logistics company, and the initial business model was one of debris mitigation, hence the company name. The initial product was dubbed the Deorbit Kit and included a propulsive module with its own control unit that could be added to a customer’s satellite or spacecraft. This independent device would monitor the host craft’s orbit and then activate when the craft either reached its planned end of life or in the event of a failure, such as it becoming unresponsive. Performing a propulsive decommissioning maneuver, the kit would safely deorbit the craft, thus mitigating orbital debris.
D-Orbit led a consortium including ArianeGroup, Airbus, and others to develop a solution with funding from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Safety Programme. A validation mission was launched aboard a Vega rocket’s Vega Secondary Payload Adapter (VESPA), which would usually remain in orbit. The kit successfully performed a controlled propulsive re-entry maneuver following payload deployment.
The market, however, was not as reactive to the product as D-Orbit had expected. “Although it’s an urgency, it’s still not a big market,” Antonetti explains. The company pivoted, looking to the wider field of space transportation and logistics — such as last-mile transportation in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and in-orbit servicing. “Anything that can help anyone to succeed in space,” he continues. “There will be many businesses starting to happen in space, and the best way to leverage this expansion of the space economy is to provide them [with] services.”
Ion spacecraft
Key to delivering these services is the company’s Ion spacecraft – a form of OTV also known as a space tug. Three of these craft have already de-orbited, leaving 14 still currently in space. “We have a lot of fuel and we carefully plan our re-entry,” Antonetti notes. “We don’t want to generate additional waste in space.”
Rendering of the Ion spacecraft deploying a payload (Credit: D-Orbit)
The company identified a niche in the last-mile aspect of the emerging space transportation market. “SpaceX was coming and there were starting to be a lot of rideshare launches, so we knew there would be a lot of low-cost launches but in very specific places in outer space,” says Antonetti.
“Those satellites, especially CubeSats, would have needed a lot of propulsion to go where they needed to go. For instance, SpaceX launches go [to] SSO around 500 kilometers but some customers need to go a little bit below or a little bit higher. We can put them on different altitudes, usually plus or minus 150 kilometers — it’s not much but we can go much farther. We can go up to 1,200 kilometers.” The two key maneuvers that operators frequently request are a change of altitude, or the true anomaly — an angular parameter describing where an object is along its orbital path.
The Ion carrier is already on its second generation and the company is developing the third, which will be capable of a wider range of orbits and will be almost twice the size of the current model. The carrier is powered by chemical, rather than electric ion propulsion, despite the name, which is an acronym for “In Orbit Now.” It will, however, carry two of Magdrive’s Rogue electric propulsion systems for an in-orbit demonstration mission this June. The thruster employs a solid metal propellant, which is ionized into plasma using internally stored energy, delivering high thrust and specific impulse.
D-Orbit’s hosted payload service accounts for roughly half of its revenue and provides hardware developers with a plug-and-play platform to get their payloads into orbit for testing or verification. Ion handles resources such as power, data uplinking, and downlinking, with standardized data, electrical, and mechanical interfaces. Already launching multiple times per year, the company can offer its customers flexible transportation options into Sun-synchronous orbits (SSO) and geostationary orbits (GEO) as well as to LEO.
Ion SCV-001 Laurentius prepares to launch to space aboard Transporter 1 in January 2021 (Credit: D-Orbit)
“Usually, the deployment of satellites takes three to six months, depending on customer needs,” notes Antonetti. “But during and after, we carry a lot of experiments and in-orbit validations. Reaching the maturity of a product is super important in space, to demonstrate that your product is viable. There’s not many opportunities for developers in the space industry to test in a quick, affordable, and repetitive way — we are one of those platforms that can do that.”
Customers are increasingly showing interest in running the hosted payloads as an operational mission, rather than building their own satellite. “That, of course, is a big advantage for the customer,” he continues. “Yes, you lose a little bit of flexibility, because you don’t have your own spacecraft, but on the other side you don’t have to actually spend a lot of money to build and develop your own, so it’s a trade-off.”
Ion fits comfortably inside the Falcon 9 but is too large for many of the smaller micro-launchers in the market, some of which offer similar services. D-Orbit is, nonetheless, in conversation with these other launch providers, especially as some have larger rockets on their roadmaps. Rides are also booked in the future with fellow European company PLD Space on its MIURA 5, as part of a recently signed agreement covering equatorial launches.
Rendering of Gea deploying a customer payload in GEO (Credit: D-Orbit)
Gea spacecraft
A new tug, named Gea is also in the works which will be ten times larger than Ion. Its name is an abbreviation of “Geostationary Extension Assistant.” The craft will introduce in-orbit services such as life extension or the relocation of assets, while still delivering payloads to GEO or even into lunar orbit. “We are trying, step by step, to develop this family of carriers to cover most of the environment between the Earth and the Moon, and then potentially beyond” adds Antonetti.
Last year D-Orbit signed a €20 million contract with ESA to develop this new carrier platform — the largest of its kind for commercial missions in Europe. Gea will be able to capture and dock with another spacecraft in GEO, and transport payloads from geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) to GEO or lunar orbit. The latter is not yet a big market commercially but the company has identified an institutional demand for it and is positioning itself to be able to deliver that service by the end of 2026.
Similarly, the market for tugs refueling other craft is in its infancy but is certainly an area where the company sees potential, and Gea is designed to be refilled from the outset. Gea will complement Ion with its larger payload capacity, additional capabilities, and higher delta-V. Inevitably D-Orbit’s spacecraft family will grow further but, for now, the pair will give its customers a good cross-orbit coverage. “We are pretty set for the next three to four years,” Antonetti says.
“We are monitoring very carefully the evolution of the launcher market because it’s not easy to predict. We are betting that the launch cost will decrease in the future because it looks like it’s the general trend. To diversify us from the micro-launchers market, we prefer to grow in size and provide additional services. We try to differentiate ourselves through reliability.”
Rendering of Gea docking with another satellite in orbit (Credit: D-Orbit)
Key missions
The Ion spacecraft performed an in-orbit rendezvous in April 2024 during its sixth mission which had launched the year before aboard Transporter 8 in June 2023. The collaboration with Starfish Space was intended to demonstrate autonomous satellite servicing capabilities in which its Otter Pup would approach the Ion craft. However, A software anomaly on Launcher’s OTV, which carried Otter Pup, led to an emergency deployment of Otter Pup which began spinning at 330 degrees per second.
Despite managing to stabilize the craft, a thruster failure then prevented the craft from proceeding with its planned approach. Instead, the Ion craft maneuvered towards it, closing the distance between the pair to approximately one kilometer – all captured by Otter Pup’s onboard cameras. “It was an incredible mission because both companies could test some of their capabilities,” notes Antonetti. “For us, it was basically a rendezvous with a virtual object. We were at the right place at the right moment and [anyone] who knows about space knows that it’s not trivial to do this kind of mission.”
D-Orbit has taken the opportunity to test new subsystems on board Ion as it reaches the end of its own missions, testing maneuvers or different operational profiles that would perhaps be too risky during its operational life. This knowledge, built over the past four years, is now being transferred directly into the Gea platform.
NOX passes qualification testing and integration at the Centrotecnica facility (Credit: D-Orbit)
NOX is a forthcoming Earth observation program using a spacecraft that is heavily based on Ion. Designed with a five-year lifespan, this mission is Antonetti’s favorite to date. Overseen by ESA and initiated by Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), the project was an opportunity to push the boundaries of Ion’s capability. D-Orbit has partnered with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) specialists MetaSensing for the project. Using its technology, NOX will deliver imaging performance with sub-meter ground resolution, using a 3.2 m deployable RF-TX antenna.
NOX is part of the IRIDE program — a €26-million satellite contract including ground operations infrastructure and the potential for an additional SAR satellite, worth €24 million. The program will use various technologies including microwave and optical imaging, and will launch the first of its constellation in 2026. The European launcher that will loft the mission, potentially one of the Vega family, has yet to be confirmed.
“We developed this 500-kilogram spacecraft and are starting to build the flight model,” says Antonetti. The project has been challenging for the team, with a demanding time constraint — a little over two years to develop and adapt Ion for a new purpose and be ready to launch it in the middle of next year.
Ion’s cylindrical structure makes it more efficient for missions such as this, as it allows integrating or changing modules late into the mission preparation. “We changed some modules that were malfunctioning a few days before launch and, because everything was outside the principal body of the spacecraft, it’s more efficient structurally. It’s not that efficient in terms of space — you don’t occupy all the volume you have, but for a space carrier, we think it’s pretty efficient!”
Rendering of ESA’s RISE in-orbit servicing mission in which D-Orbit and Eutelsat will collaborate in GEO (Credit: ESA)
D-Orbit is, similarly, in conversation with other potential partners who are developing capsules that might one day return a customer payload to Earth, rather than moving into this field itself. Offering return journeys as part of the wider space transportation offer is not yet on the company’s roadmap but the business model is being explored. Complexities include being able to predict and control where the capsule will return with reasonable certainty.
D-Orbit missions follow a sequential numbering nomenclature such as ION-SCV 016, where SCV translates to “Space Carrier Vessel,” taking some inspiration from the naming of naval vessels and classes. Each craft also has a more playful name that honors a member of the D-Orbit team, such as Eclectic Elena and Marvelous Mathias. The names of employees are drawn from a box and Antonetti is looking forward to his turn in about six flights’ time. “It’s nice to have your name in space,” he adds, “and I think it’s everyone’s dream to have your own spacecraft. It was a very good idea, we are pretty proud of it.”
Each mission also has its own name, such as Wish upon a Star and Endless Sky which are the two most recent. These missions become your baby, he explains, and each has a story of its own that develops over the months between conception to launch, so it feels appropriate to give each of them a name. “We are very proud of our babies, and their path to the stars,” he adds.
Falcon upper stage deploys Ion on its 17th orbital transportation mission on March 14, 2025 (center, top) (Credit: SpaceX)
The future
Demand has steadily increased since D-Orbit’s first mission five years ago. The rising number of companies looking to test their technology in orbit will eventually lead to a better supply chain, from which everyone will benefit, Antonetti observes. “If you work in space, it’s because you are a space enthusiast or passionate [about] space, so you want to see everyone succeed,” he says. “The reason we are developing our spacecraft almost vertically is because the supply chain isn’t that ready in Europe — we are [still] getting to that point.”
Acutely aware of the need to operate profitably, D-Orbit is also mindful of the need to do so ethically and sustainably. “We are in a very privileged position,” Antonetti points out, noting that our generation will be forever remembered in history as the one that made it possible to live, and work, beyond Earth. “We have a responsibility to use this natural resource, which is space, in a sustainable way that us [sic], as the first generation of people learning how to live in space, will pass this message to the following generation. This is something that motivates my colleagues every day to do their job well.”
(Lead image: Rendering of the Gea spacecraft repositioning an asset in orbit. Credit: D-Orbit)
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