WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency (SDA) has awarded Starfish Space a first-of-its-kind contract worth $52.5 million to provide a disposal service for the agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) satellites at the end of their life, the company announced today.
“This is a contract to go and provide multiple disposals with an Otter vehicle,” Trevor Bennett, cofounder of the Seattle-based startup, told Breaking Defense. “And then there are options to continue to expand based off of the health and performance of the Otter on orbit. … [I]t’s truly a first of its kind, in the way that this is not just a R&D contract; this is a true … big boy contract here.”
Otter, which has a mass of about 300 kilograms — “about the size of an oven,” according to Bennett — is designed to capture and deorbit satellites without requiring any prior modifications, or extend the lifetime of a satellite by serving as an external engine.
According to Starfish’s announcement, the plan is to launch the Otter for the SDA service in 2027 — although Bennett said a launch provider has yet to be manifested.
Bennett explained that the ability to dock with “unprepared” satellites allows it to work with those being acquired from different providers by SDA to fill out the various PWSA constellations.
It also allows Starfish to provide services for commercial companies, he said — with “commercial viability” one of SDA’s requirements in choosing a provider.
The company’s announcement notes that the new contract “builds on a previously awarded competitive mission study contract, which Starfish successfully executed for SDA throughout 2024–2025.”
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Bennett added that Starfish has been maturing the Otter vehicle through a series of demonstration contracts. In May 2024, the company won a $37 million Strategic Funding Increase contract to build, launch and operate an Otter for a first-of-its-kind docking mission designed to provide two years of “augmented maneuver” for a national security satellite in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO).
Then in June 2024, the company signed an agreement with Intelsat (now SES) for life-extension of a GEO bird; and in September 2024 NASA awarded Starfish a $15 million, three-year contract to inspect a defunct satellites in LEO.
Bennett said due to the large amount of delta-V the Otter can provide with its on-board propulsion system, it is a “multi-orbit, multi-domain” platform.