NASA's Robot Will Spend Two Years Inspecting Dead Satellites

A robot spacecraft is now circling Earth with an unusual job: get close to dead satellites and study them. Starfish Space's Otter 24C reached low Earth orbit on October 1, 2026, riding a SpaceX Falcon 9 on the Transporter-18 rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, according to NASASpaceflight's coverage of the launch. The 335 kilogram vehicle is the first full-scale Otter built by the Seattle-area startup, founded in 2019 by former Blue Origin engineers Trevor Bennett and Austin Link.

It will fly NASA's Small Spacecraft Propulsion and Inspection Capability mission, known as SSPICY, and approach as many as four inactive American satellites over the next two years. The inspections of dead satellites themselves are expected to begin in 2027, after a commissioning period in orbit. "This is the moment Otter becomes real," co-founder Austin Link said at an industry event in September, as reported by NASASpaceflight. "It's no longer something we're designing for the future. The first Otter is built, it has a customer and a mission, and it's going to space."

What the mission will actually do

Otter 24C will not clean up anything. It is strictly an inspection mission: the spacecraft will fly within hundreds of meters of each target and collect data on how fast it is spinning, which way its spin axis points, and what condition its surfaces are in, according to a mission summary published this month. That information matters because engineers cannot grab or repair something tumbling through orbit unless they know exactly how it moves. NASA is not buying cleanup here; it is buying evidence about close inspection that can be used to judge whether a stranded spacecraft could later be approached or serviced.

The mission runs for about two years, with close-range inspections starting in 2027 after Starfish finishes commissioning the vehicle and validating its navigation systems. This is the first time NASA has funded a commercial mission to inspect dead satellites, a milestone that turns orbital housekeeping from a government research project into something a startup can sell as a service.

Why dead satellites are worth studying

Dead satellites are a growing headache. Every inactive satellite left in orbit is a collision risk for working spacecraft, and a single crash can spray thousands of fragments across busy orbital lanes. Knowing the spin state and physical condition of the biggest derelicts is the first step toward deciding which ones are worth visiting later. For more on how space science keeps evolving, see our science coverage, including the recent catch of a neutron star merger glowing for nine minutes.

Otter is not the first spacecraft to eyeball orbital junk. Japan's Astroscale showed off images captured by its ADRAS-J vehicle as it inspected a discarded rocket upper stage, according to The Register's reporting on NASA's deal with Starfish. That flight proved close inspection of uncooperative objects is possible. SSPICY follows that template as NASA's first agency-funded commercial debris inspection mission, buying the same capability from an American provider instead of building it as a bespoke government project.

Inspection has its skeptics, though. A spacecraft that only watches dead satellites does not make orbit any less crowded, and critics of the incremental approach argue that real cleanup — capture and deorbit — is what orbit actually needs. Starfish's answer is that you cannot do the hard part first: without knowing a target's spin and condition, any capture attempt is a gamble. The company already holds contracts for more ambitious work, including missions for Intelsat and the United States military, according to NASASpaceflight.

A seven-year road to orbit

Starfish Space was founded in October 2019, and the road here was not smooth. A 2023 demonstration flight of the smaller Otter Pup 1 ended early when the vehicle was ejected prematurely at a high spin rate. The follow-up, Otter Pup 2, has since been flying in close proximity to a target spacecraft in low Earth orbit, closing to within one kilometer, according to pre-launch coverage of the company. The leap from a spinning failure to a steady close approach in three years is the kind of recovery that convinced NASA to trust the team with real targets.

NASA awarded Starfish 15 million dollars in 2024 under a three-year Small Business Innovation Research Phase III contract managed through the agency's Small Spacecraft Technology program, according to NASASpaceflight. The company, which employs around 120 people and has raised about 150 million dollars to date, says five more Otters are already planned for missions focused on docking, deorbit, and life extension, as reported in pre-launch coverage of the company.

What happens next

For now, the team will commission Otter 24C and shake down its systems in orbit before the inspections begin in 2027. Starfish has said the mission could later use the spacecraft's remaining operational life for more complex tasks once the inspection phase is complete, according to StockMark's reporting on the company's plans. If the inspection work goes well, the same basic vehicle could graduate from watching dead satellites to touching them.

The launch itself was a busy one: Transporter-18 carried 130 payloads, including NASA's SPRITE telescope, a green-propulsion test called GPDM, and a Google prototype for space-based AI data centers, according to NASASpaceflight. It was the 110th Falcon 9 flight of 2026. SpaceX has three more Transporter missions on the manifest, but the rideshare line is expected to wind down after 2028 as Starship takes over, the same coverage notes.

Why should anyone who will never visit orbit care? Because the spacecraft Otter is studying share their lanes with the ones that carry weather forecasts, GPS signals, and satellite internet. Collisions in low Earth orbit do not just make debris; they threaten services people use every day. A working market for inspecting, servicing, and eventually removing dead satellites is the difference between orbit staying usable and slowly filling with shrapnel. This mission is the inspection industry's first real job interview with NASA — and it just showed up to work.