Starfish Loses Contact with Otter, Cutting SSPICY Short

Starfish’s Otter spacecraft has joined the graveyard it was sent to inspect.

Yesterday, Starfish Space announced that it lost contact with Otter 24C, putting an end to a $15M NASA in-space inspection mission one month after launch. While NASA and Starfish are exploring whether they can complete the remaining objectives with other Starfish missions—this Otter is a goner.

Cause of death: Otter 24C launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission on Oct. 1, and established contact with the ground shortly after deployment.

Otter’s mission—dubbed SSPICY, or the Small Spacecraft Propulsion and Inspection Capability mission—was to approach and inspect multiple defunct US satellites to gather data for future potential deorbit missions.

During the satellite’s commissioning, however, the fault protection on Otter’s bus—provided by Astro Digital—experienced an error that caused the on-board radio to be turned off. The blackout rendered Starfish unable to reestablish communications, ending the mission.

Unlucky twice: The failure is the second on-orbit mishap for Starfish—both the product of faulty third-party hardware.

In 2023, Starfish’s first sat was deployed into a tumble after its ride to space—provided by OTV provider Launcher, acquired by Vast Space—suffered an anomaly which led to Otter Pup 1 spinning at 330 degrees per second upon release. Starfish engineers found a way to reverse course after the spacecraft spent six weeks stuck in death spiral, but the company was not so lucky this time around.

SSPICY’s premature end cuts short NASA’s first foray into funding commercial debris inspection missions. And after the agency’s mission with Katalyst Space failed to boost the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which is set to burn up in the atmosphere today—its back-to-back bad beats for ISAM.

Just keep swimming: Starfish, on the other hand, is going to keep trying, and could complete some SSPICY objectives for NASA on other missions.

The company’s Otter Pup 2 spacecraft, which launched in 2025, has demonstrated it can get close to other satellites. Starfish shared imagery last week from an Otter Pup 2 maneuver that brought the spacecraft 33 m away from Gilmour Space’s ElaraSat.

For future missions, Starfish said in a statement it is implementing fixes to the Astro Digital bus to avoid similar failure modes going forward. Good news for the US government, which awarded Starfish a $52.5M SDA contract in January to deorbit satellites as part of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.