Commercial Space Logistics Market Analysis 2026

Key Takeaways

• Commercial space logistics now spans three distinct segments: low Earth orbit cargo resupply and orbital transfer, lunar payload delivery, and satellite life extension and in-space servicing – each operating on different business models, timelines, and risk profiles
• The ISS cargo resupply segment is mature but consolidating as the station’s 2030 deorbit approaches, creating pressure on providers to develop post-ISS revenue streams
• NASA’s CLPS lunar delivery program has demonstrated a mixed record since 2024, with Firefly Aerospace achieving the first fully successful commercial Moon landing in March 2025 and Intuitive Machines landing twice – both times in suboptimal orientations – raising questions about the program’s reliability model
• Orbital transfer vehicles are transitioning from demonstration-phase to early commercial operations, with government defense contracts providing near-term revenue while the broader commercial market develops more slowly than early projections suggested
• Consolidation is already underway – Firefly’s June 2023 acquisition of Spaceflight Inc. established the template – and more deals are expected as capital markets have tightened since the 2021 peak

Introduction: Defining Commercial Space Logistics

The phrase “space logistics” entered mainstream aerospace vocabulary gradually, borrowed from terrestrial supply chain management and applied to the increasingly complex challenge of moving people, equipment, and cargo between different points in cislunar space. In 2026, commercial space logistics encompasses a wide range of activities that didn’t exist as a commercial market a decade ago: routine cargo runs to the International Space Station, competitive lunar surface deliveries for NASA, and a growing ecosystem of vehicles designed to ferry satellites between orbital regimes or extend their operational lives.

What unites these activities is the application of commercial business models – fixed-price contracts, market competition, privately funded vehicle development – to tasks that NASA and other space agencies previously handled entirely through traditional government contracting. The premise of commercial space logistics is that competition drives down costs, accelerates development timelines, and ultimately creates a self-sustaining industry that doesn’t depend entirely on government spending.

The evidence for that premise is mixed in 2026. In some segments, particularly ISS cargo delivery, commercial providers have become genuinely indispensable and the model has demonstrated cost advantages over traditional approaches. In others, particularly orbital transfer vehicles and lunar delivery services, the commercial logic is still being stress-tested by mission failures, market development slower than projected, and the persistent challenge of sustaining investment-grade returns on capital-intensive spacecraft programs.

This analysis examines all three major segments of commercial space logistics as of February 2026, covering the companies, vehicles, contracts, financial positions, and market dynamics that define each one.

Part One: ISS Cargo Resupply

The Foundation of Commercial Space Logistics

The International Space Station’s Commercial Resupply Services program is the oldest and most commercially mature segment of the space logistics industry. It is also, arguably, the clearest proof that the commercial model works when NASA gives industry enough time and contractual latitude to develop the necessary capabilities.

The program’s origins trace to NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, launched in 2006, which provided seed funding through Space Act Agreements – not traditional cost-plus contracts – to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation to develop cargo delivery systems. Under COTS, NASA covered roughly half the development cost of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon capsule, and a similar proportion of the Antares rocket and Cygnus cargo spacecraft. Both companies contributed private capital, creating genuine financial skin-in-the-game that the traditional contracting model didn’t require.

The first phase of operational contracts, CRS-1, ran from 2012 through approximately 2019. The second phase, CRS-2, awarded in January 2016, brought in three providers – SpaceX, Orbital ATK (now Northrop Grumman), and Sierra Nevada Corporation (now Sierra Space) – with a combined maximum potential value of $14 billion through 2024, later extended through 2030.

As of February 2026, two of those three providers are actively and routinely delivering cargo to the ISS. The third remains in pre-flight testing.

SpaceX Cargo Dragon

SpaceX is the dominant ISS cargo provider by mission count, reliability, and cargo volume. The company’s Cargo Dragon 2 – an uncrewed, cargo-optimized derivative of the Crew Dragon capsule – has flown more than 30 missions under the CRS programs, with CRS-33 docking at the Harmony module’s forward port on August 25, 2025, while the spacecraft flew 261 miles above the Atlantic Ocean. Dragon is the only U.S. cargo vehicle that returns significant amounts of cargo to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean where it is recovered by SpaceX vessels. This downmass capability – roughly 1,900 kilograms per flight – makes Dragon uniquely valuable for returning scientific samples and experiments, a capability NASA has used extensively.

NASA has obligated approximately $3.37 billion to SpaceX under CRS-2 through late 2025. In December 2020 and again in 2022, NASA expanded the Dragon mission manifest, extending the contract through 2030 to cover up to CRS-35 as the ISS approaches its planned deorbit.

The integration of Dragon into SpaceX’s broader operations has created efficiencies that purely dedicated cargo providers cannot match. Dragon launches on Falcon 9 vehicles that are part of a high-cadence production system. SpaceX’s in-house propellant systems, fairing processing, and launch infrastructure are shared across commercial, government, and ISS mission profiles. The result is cost-per-kilogram figures that competing providers have found difficult to match even with government development subsidies.

Northrop Grumman Cygnus

Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft has served as the second American ISS cargo provider under both CRS-1 and CRS-2. Unlike Dragon, Cygnus is expendable – it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere after departure from the station – and cannot return significant cargo to Earth. Its primary advantage is pressurized upmass capacity and its role as a supplemental capability that ensures NASA is never entirely dependent on a single provider.

Cygnus was originally launched on Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, but Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine severed the supply chain for Antares’s Russian-made RD-181 first-stage engines, stranding Northrop Grumman without a domestic launch vehicle. The company pivoted by contracting SpaceX Falcon 9 missions for its Cygnus flights while developing the Antares 330 (later renamed Eclipse first stage in partnership with Firefly Aerospace) as a long-term domestic replacement.

The NG-23 mission, which launched September 14, 2025, was the debut flight of the Cygnus XL – a stretched version of the spacecraft approximately 1.6 meters longer than previous variants and capable of carrying roughly 2,600 additional pounds of cargo. The increased capacity was designed in part to compensate for a period of reduced cargo availability: the NG-22 vehicle was damaged during transport from Northrop Grumman’s Virginia facility to Kennedy Space Center, forcing NASA to increase cargo loads on SpaceX CRS-32 and reshuffle the ISS supply schedule. The Cygnus XL’s debut was further complicated when two orbit-raising burns of the spacecraft’s main engine terminated earlier than planned following launch, delaying its rendezvous with the station.

NASA has obligated approximately $3.21 billion to Northrop Grumman under CRS-2 through late 2025. Six additional Cygnus missions covering up to NG-35 were awarded in 2022, providing resupply services planned through 2026.

Sierra Space Dream Chaser

Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser is the most consequential unflown spacecraft in commercial spaceflight. Originally conceived as a crewed vehicle competing for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program – a competition won by SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner – Dream Chaser was pivoted to a cargo role when it didn’t advance to the final crew program selection. Sierra Nevada Corporation (the parent company, which spun off Sierra Space as an independent entity in April 2021) won a CRS-2 contract in January 2016 for a minimum of seven uncrewed cargo missions to the ISS.

Dream Chaser’s design is distinctive: it’s a lifting body spaceplane that looks like a miniature space shuttle, designed to return to Earth with a runway landing at the former Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center. The vehicle can return approximately 1,750 kilograms of pressurized cargo to Earth at a maximum reentry deceleration of 1.5g, making it uniquely gentle on fragile scientific samples compared to capsule reentries. This design heritage traces directly to NASA’s HL-20 Personnel Launch System concept from the 1990s, itself descended from over six decades of experimental lifting body programs.

The development timeline has been one of the most protracted in commercial spaceflight. Dream Chaser’s first ISS mission was originally planned for 2021, then 2022, then successive years until circumstances forced a fundamental restructuring. In September 2025, NASA and Sierra Space mutually agreed to modify the CRS-2 contract: Dream Chaser’s first flight, named SSC Demo-1 using the vehicle Tenacity, will no longer dock with the ISS. Instead, it will be a free-flying orbital demonstration, with NASA reducing its oversight support and committing only to potentially ordering future ISS resupply missions if the demo flight succeeds. The first flight is now targeted for no earlier than late 2026, delayed in part by the unavailability of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, which passed over Sierra Space’s launch slot for national security mission certification flights.

As of February 2026, Dream Chaser is at Kennedy Space Center’s Space Systems Processing Facility undergoing Electromagnetic Interference testing and final pre-launch verification. NASA has obligated approximately $1.43 billion to Sierra Space under CRS-2 to date. With the ISS scheduled for deorbit in approximately 2031, the window for completing Dream Chaser’s original seven-mission manifest has narrowed considerably, and the contractual restructuring reflects both NASA’s cautious confidence in the vehicle’s eventual capabilities and the practical reality that the station won’t be available indefinitely.

Sierra Space’s longer-term strategy positions Dream Chaser as a logistics vehicle for commercial space stations, including Orbital Reef, a commercial station concept being developed by Blue Origin in partnership with Sierra Space and other partners. If commercial stations emerge on anything close to their projected timelines, Dream Chaser could find a new market that doesn’t depend on the ISS.

International Cargo Partners

Japan’s H-II Transfer Vehicle-X (HTV-X), developed by JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries as the successor to the original HTV, is scheduled to fly its first mission to the ISS in 2025-2026. Russia’s Progress cargo spacecraft continues to deliver supplies to the Russian Orbital Segment of the station on a regular basis, operating independently of the American commercial resupply contracts.

ISS Cargo Market Outlook

The ISS cargo resupply market faces an inevitable structural change: the station is scheduled for deorbit in approximately 2030-2031, and NASA has explicitly planned for this transition. The Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations (CLD) program is NASA’s strategy for replacing ISS with commercial stations, with the agency committing to be an anchor tenant rather than an operator. Multiple companies including Axiom Space, Blue Origin (with Orbital Reef), and others are developing station concepts, but none of these are expected to reach the same level of operational capability as the ISS within the ISS’s remaining operational period.

For SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and potentially Sierra Space, the post-ISS cargo market depends on whether commercial stations materialize with sufficient regularity and cargo requirements to sustain resupply operations. This is far from guaranteed.

Part Two: Commercial Lunar Payload Services

The CLPS Model and Its Logic

NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is the most ambitious and controversial experiment in commercial space logistics to date. Established in 2018, CLPS applies the commercial services model pioneered in ISS cargo delivery to lunar surface access – a dramatically more difficult technical challenge that has historically claimed the majority of lunar landing attempts from all spacefaring nations.

The program’s structure reflects both NASA’s ambitions and its budget constraints. Rather than building its own lunar lander for science missions, NASA issues fixed-price task orders to pre-qualified commercial providers for end-to-end service delivery: launch from Earth, transit to the Moon, landing at a specific site, and payload operations support on the surface. The agency accepts that some missions will fail, treating each attempt as a “shot on goal” in a high-cadence campaign rather than a single must-succeed flagship mission.

CLPS contracts are indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity vehicles with a cumulative maximum value of $2.6 billion through 2028. Individual task orders typically range from approximately $70 million to $120 million, though some awards have been larger. Fourteen companies are currently eligible to compete for CLPS task orders, though only a handful have received awards and an even smaller number have reached launch.

The program has received both praise and criticism. Thomas Zurbuchen, who led NASA’s Science Mission Directorate from 2016 to 2022 and originated the CLPS concept, has called it a “wholehearted” success for building a new commercial capability. Critics including the Planetary Society have noted that the program’s reliability record – with multiple partial or complete mission failures – raises questions about whether the commercial model can eventually support the higher reliability that non-NASA customers will require before they’ll trust expensive commercial payloads to CLPS landers.

CLPS Missions: The Record Through February 2026

Astrobotic Technology – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – was one of the original nine CLPS providers selected in November 2018 and launched the program’s first mission on January 8, 2024. Peregrine Mission One carried 21 payloads including five NASA science instruments aboard a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur on its maiden flight. Hours after a successful launch, Peregrine suffered a critical propellant leak that prevented it from reaching the Moon. The spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere approximately ten days after launch without reaching its destination. Astrobotic had developed the Peregrine lander for smaller payload classes and is separately developing the larger Griffin lander, originally contracted to deliver NASA’s VIPER rover to the lunar south pole. NASA cancelled the VIPER development in July 2024 citing cost increases and schedule delays, but Astrobotic remains under contract for the Griffin mission with an alternative payload manifest. Astrobotic has purchased a Falcon Heavy launch for a third lunar mission targeting the Moon’s south pole, currently scheduled for 2025-2026.

Intuitive Machines – Houston, Texas – is the CLPS program’s most active provider and the only company that has successfully placed a spacecraft on the lunar surface, though both landings have been imperfect. The company’s Nova-C lander uses methalox (methane and liquid oxygen) propulsion, a fuel combination chosen in part because the same propellants may eventually be producible from lunar resources.

IM-1, named Odysseus, launched February 15, 2024, on a Falcon 9, reached lunar orbit on February 21, and landed at Malapert A in the Moon’s south pole region on February 22, 2024 – the first American spacecraft to perform a soft landing on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the first commercial spacecraft to land on the Moon in history. The landing was rougher than planned due to a sensor anomaly: the spacecraft’s laser altimeters were inhibited due to an incorrect switch position identified at the last moment before landing, and Odysseus landed on its side with one leg broken. Despite this, the spacecraft operated for approximately 14 hours on the surface before lunar nightfall, returning scientific data. Intuitive Machines listed publicly on Nasdaq under the ticker LUNR prior to the mission.

IM-2, named Athena, launched February 27, 2025, aboard a Falcon 9. The lander carried NASA’s PRIME-1 payload – a drill and mass spectrometer designed to search for subsurface water ice at the lunar south pole – along with a Micro-Nova hopper called Gracie and a suite of commercial payloads. Athena landed on March 6, 2025, at Mons Mouton near the lunar south pole, approximately 250 meters from its intended target. As on IM-1, the lander’s altimeter malfunctioned during descent, and the spacecraft struck a plateau, tipped over, and came to rest on its side inside a small crater. The suboptimal orientation prevented the solar panels from generating sufficient power, and the mission ended on March 7, 2025, approximately one day after landing. Despite limited operations, Intuitive Machines collected approximately 250 megabytes of scientific data before power was fully depleted.

IM-3, targeting the Reiner Gamma swirl on the lunar nearside, is scheduled for the second half of 2026 and will carry a suite of payloads including the Lunar Vertex instrument package from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to study the region’s unusual magnetic anomaly, autonomous robots, radiation sensors, and Australia’s ALEPH-1 experiment testing plant growth in the lunar environment. IM-4, targeting the lunar south pole, is planned for 2027. Intuitive Machines has also been awarded a Near Space Network (NSN) contract worth up to $4.82 billion over ten years for communications relay services, providing substantial non-CLPS revenue that distinguishes it from single-mission-dependent competitors. As of mid-2025, the company had $345 million in cash and had reduced its year-over-year net losses substantially, with revenue growing 21% year-over-year to $50.3 million in Q2 2025.

Firefly Aerospace – Cedar Park, Texas – achieved the program’s most unambiguous success with Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed in Mare Crisium on March 2, 2025, making Firefly the first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful soft landing on the Moon. The spacecraft carried ten NASA science instruments and operated for approximately 14 days on the surface before the lunar night rendered the solar-powered lander inoperable. NASA described the mission as a “picture-perfect landing.” Blue Ghost Mission 1 launched January 15, 2025, as a secondary payload on a Falcon 9 alongside the failed Hakuto-R Mission 2 lunar lander from Japan.

Blue Ghost Mission 2, scheduled for 2026, will be a substantially more complex mission. It uses Firefly’s two-vehicle Elytra Dark plus Blue Ghost system: the Elytra Dark orbital vehicle will first deploy ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder communications satellite in lunar orbit, then the Blue Ghost lander will descend to the Moon’s far side carrying NASA’s LuSEE-Night radio telescope – an instrument designed to detect faint radio signals from the universe’s “Dark Ages” before the first stars formed, observations only possible from the radio-quiet far side shielded from Earth’s electromagnetic noise. The mission also carries a relay satellite to enable communications from the far side. NASA awarded Firefly an additional $18 million contract for LuSEE-Night services.

Blue Ghost Mission 3, scheduled for approximately 2028, will deliver six NASA science payloads and a Canadian Space Agency rover to the Gruithuisen Domes, a geologically unusual formation on the Moon’s near side. In July 2025, Firefly secured a $176.7 million CLPS contract for a fourth mission, Blue Ghost 4, planning to deliver two rovers including the CMU MoonRanger and a CSA Rover along with three science instruments to the lunar south pole in 2029.

Firefly went public on Nasdaq under the ticker FLY in August 2025, raising $868 million and valuing the company at approximately $10 billion. The IPO reflected strong investor confidence following the Blue Ghost M1 landing success and the company’s diversified position across launch, orbital transfer, and lunar services.

Draper Laboratory / ispace U.S. – In 2022, NASA awarded Draper Laboratory a CLPS task order for a landing in Schrödinger Basin, an ancient impact crater on the lunar far side. Draper is using a lander called APEX 1.0, developed by the U.S. subsidiary of Japanese company ispace. The APEX 1.0 is a successor to ispace’s Series 1 lander that flew (and crashed) on the Hakuto-R Mission 1 in April 2023. The mission is scheduled for 2026 and will carry three NASA payloads including long-lived seismometers, a drill, and electromagnetic probes to study the lunar interior. The far-side landing location requires relay satellite infrastructure to maintain communications with Earth during surface operations.

Blue Origin – Kent, Washington – is developing the Blue Moon lander in two variants: the Mark 1 for unmanned cargo delivery and the larger Mark 2 for crewed Artemis missions. Blue Origin received a CLPS task order and has been contracted by NASA to deliver the VIPER rover – cancelled from Astrobotic’s Griffin mission – to the lunar south pole, with that delivery mission now targeted for approximately 2027. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 pathfinder may fly a demonstration mission with NASA’s SCALPSS payload in 2025-2026.

The CLPS Reliability Question

Through early 2026, five CLPS missions have been attempted. Of these, Astrobotic’s Peregrine never reached the Moon, Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 landed but tipped over and operated briefly, Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 tipped over and essentially failed to complete its primary objectives, and Firefly’s Blue Ghost M1 succeeded fully. The partial success rate – roughly one clearly successful mission out of four attempts – is broadly consistent with historical lunar landing statistics across all nations, but has prompted serious questions about whether commercial landers have yet solved the precision landing challenges that tripped up multiple programs.

Both of Intuitive Machines’ landings tipped over due to altimeter failures in the final approach phase, a recurring failure mode that the company has committed to addressing for IM-3. The pattern suggests a specific, correctable engineering problem rather than a fundamental flaw in the Nova-C’s architecture. Whether IM-3’s fixes prove sufficient will be a defining test for the CLPS program’s credibility as a reliable logistics option.

For non-NASA commercial customers – space agencies, private research organizations, commercial businesses – the reliability record matters enormously. A 25% or better complete success rate might be acceptable to NASA as an experimental program, but it is probably not acceptable to an operator with a multi-hundred-million-dollar payload on board. The CLPS program’s evolution into a genuine commercial market rather than a government-subsidized demonstration program depends on improving that record significantly.

CLPS Outlook and Future Market Development

The CLPS program is approaching a pivotal period. Its $2.6 billion cumulative maximum extends through 2028, and NASA has been clear that the program’s continuation and expansion beyond that ceiling depends on demonstrated commercial viability – meaning providers finding revenue sources beyond NASA contracts. None of the current CLPS providers have yet established significant non-NASA lunar revenue, though several are pursuing it.

Intuitive Machines has the most diversified revenue base, with its Near Space Network communications contract providing anchor government revenue that doesn’t depend on individual mission outcomes. Firefly’s post-IPO balance sheet and multi-mission manifest give it runway to develop its commercial position. Astrobotic and the Draper/ispace partnership have fewer independent revenue sources, making their long-term viability more dependent on sustained NASA orders.

Looking further ahead, the lunar economy that CLPS is supposed to help develop – resource prospecting, in-situ resource utilization, permanent infrastructure – remains speculative. The near-term commercial opportunity in lunar logistics is primarily government-driven. The longer-term commercial case requires demonstrating that resources or activities on the Moon can generate economic returns that justify the transportation costs, a proof that has not yet been made at scale.

Part Three: Orbital Transfer Vehicles and In-Space Services

The Last-Mile Problem Nobody Solved Until Now

Launch vehicles are blunt instruments. They get payloads to orbit, but they don’t get payloads to the right orbit with any precision that satisfies increasingly demanding satellite operators. A Falcon 9 rideshare mission drops dozens of satellites into a shared plane, and from there, each operator is largely on their own. Getting a satellite from a sun-synchronous deployment orbit at 525 kilometers to a 550-kilometer circular slot with a specific local time of the ascending node can mean months of propulsion use, battery drain, and orbital lifetime consumed before the spacecraft even begins its primary mission.

Orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs) exist to solve that problem. They are spacecraft designed specifically to move other spacecraft, or themselves and their payloads, from one orbital regime to another. Some carry passengers, deploying hosted payloads at precise destinations. Others are purely propulsive, extending the life of satellites that have exhausted their own fuel. Still others combine the two functions, deploying a batch of satellites and then docking with a client spacecraft for a top-up.

In 2026, this market is real. It is also fragile, oversubscribed with competitors, and operating on economics that haven’t yet been proven at commercial scale.

Defining the Vehicle Category

The category itself isn’t clean. An OTV is broadly any spacecraft whose primary purpose is repositioning payloads between orbital regimes, but the definition blurs quickly at the edges. Rocket Lab’s Photon upper stage can deliver payloads to lunar orbit, acting as a transfer vehicle in every meaningful sense. Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicle docks with aging geostationary satellites and provides attitude control and stationkeeping propulsion, which is satellite servicing by another name but uses the same underlying technology stack.

For analytical purposes in 2026, the in-orbit logistics segment divides into three practical groups. The first is rideshare deployment OTVs, which accept multiple small satellite payloads from launch vehicles and redistribute them to specific orbits. The second is satellite life extension and servicing vehicles, which attach to or dock with existing spacecraft to extend operational life or reposition them. The third is propellant resupply and refueling platforms, which remain an early-stage segment with no proven commercial revenue model but enormous long-term potential.

These segments don’t compete with each other directly. They have different customers, different funding structures, and different timelines to profitability.

Rideshare Deployment OTVs

The rideshare deployment segment has seen the most activity since 2020 and is the most commercially mature as of early 2026. The core business model is simple in concept: an OTV provider books space on a launch vehicle as a single customer, fills that space with payloads from multiple satellite operators, and then acts as a mobile dispenser and ferry service once in orbit.

D-Orbit pioneered this commercial approach with its ION Satellite Carrier, an Italian-built OTV headquartered in Fino Mornasco near Lake Como. D-Orbit flew its first commercial ION mission in September 2020, deploying 12 SuperDove satellites for Planet Labs. By June 2025, the company had completed 19 ION missions, deploying satellites for customers spanning more than a dozen countries. Each ION carrier features a customizable 64U satellite dispenser and uses electric propulsion with Hall effect thrusters to shift orbits between deployments, allowing it to drop payloads at distinct altitudes rather than at a single shared release point. In September 2024, D-Orbit completed a €150 million ($166 million) Series C funding round with investors including Marubeni Corporation, Seraphim Space, and CDP Venture Capital SGR.

Momentus Space took a different technical approach with its Vigoride orbital service vehicle, which uses a microwave electrothermal thruster system with water as propellant – a design choice driven by water’s storability, non-toxicity, and potential for in-situ resource production in future missions. Momentus merged with special purpose acquisition company Stable Road Acquisition Corp and began trading on Nasdaq under the symbol MNTS in August 2021. The company flew its first commercial Vigoride mission aboard a SpaceX Transporter-5 rideshare in May 2022, though that inaugural mission experienced anomalies including communication issues and propulsion limitations. Three more missions followed in 2023, but in January 2024 the company indefinitely delayed future flights and laid off 20% of its staff due to critical cash constraints.

In September 2024, Nasdaq notified Momentus of a delisting determination after its share price fell below the $1 minimum threshold for 30 consecutive business days, and the company had failed to file required quarterly reports with the SEC. Momentus appealed the determination and has continued incremental capital raises while securing new contracts from NASA, DARPA for the NOM4D program, and SpaceWERX. CEO John Rood acknowledged publicly in September 2024 that the in-space mobility market “has not developed quite to the extent” that earlier projections assumed, noting that the original vision of providing point-to-point orbital transfer services had not materialized. As of February 2026, Momentus remains listed on Nasdaq under MNTS and is preparing its Vigoride-7 vehicle for launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-16 rideshare mission, and announced in February 2026 an on-orbit demonstration planned for that flight.

Exolaunch is a German company founded by scientists from the Technical University of Berlin, with operations spanning the United States as well. It operates the Reliant OTV line, a green-propulsion vehicle designed for last-mile satellite delivery and space debris removal following mission completion. Reliant has been in development since Exolaunch announced the program in April 2021 and, as of early 2026, is approaching its first commercial mission. Exolaunch’s core rideshare business remains robust: it deployed 58 customer satellites on its 41st mission in November 2025, and completed its 42nd mission with 22 satellites in January 2026, making it one of the most active satellite deployment service providers globally. Reliant is specifically designed to be the only OTV in its class guaranteed to deorbit upon mission completion, a differentiating sustainability feature as the FCC’s five-year deorbit rule tightens requirements on all operators in low Earth orbit.

Firefly Aerospace became a significant OTV player in June 2023 when it acquired Spaceflight Inc., the company that pioneered commercial rideshare OTV services through its Sherpa vehicle line. Spaceflight had been owned by a 50/50 partnership of Japanese companies Mitsui & Co. and Yamasa Co. and had deployed more than 460 payloads for commercial and government customers across more than a decade of operations before the acquisition. Firefly subsequently rebranded its in-space vehicle portfolio as Elytra, a three-tier OTV family that builds on Spaceflight’s Sherpa heritage. Elytra Dawn is optimized for low Earth orbit hosting, rideshare, and delivery missions; Elytra Dusk extends that reach from LEO to geostationary orbit with enhanced maneuverability; and Elytra Dark is designed for long-duration cislunar missions. Elytra vehicles use the Spectre thruster, which was flight-proven on the Blue Ghost lunar lander’s reaction control system during the March 2025 Moon landing. Elytra Mission 1, a demonstration flight, is scheduled for no earlier than 2026 aboard a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket.

In March 2025, the Defense Innovation Unit awarded Firefly a contract under its “Sinequone” project to use three to six Elytra Dawn vehicles for space domain awareness operations in low Earth orbit. In April 2025, Firefly received a separate DoD contract for a responsive on-orbit mission with Elytra Dawn, targeting a launch as early as 2027. In July 2025, NASA awarded six OTV companies including Firefly firm-fixed-price study contracts of $1.4 million each to explore future OTV applications for NASA missions.

The GEO Satellite Servicing Segment

Geostationary satellites are expensive to build and expensive to launch, which makes them expensive to abandon when their fuel runs out. A geostationary communications satellite that cost $200 million to manufacture and $80 million to launch can be extended in life by years using a servicing vehicle, at a fraction of replacement cost. This economic logic underlies the satellite servicing segment, which has genuine, demonstrated commercial traction.

Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) program is the only fully proven commercial satellite servicing operation as of early 2026. MEV-1 docked with Intelsat 901 on February 25, 2020 – the first commercial docking with a live satellite in geosynchronous orbit in history. The docking was performed while Intelsat 901 was parked in a graveyard orbit above operational GEO, simplifying the rendezvous geometry. MEV-2 followed on April 12, 2021, docking directly with Intelsat 10-02 while it was actively carrying commercial communications traffic – a more complex and riskier operation demonstrating that satellite servicing could be performed without interrupting service delivery. Both vehicles dock using the client satellite’s liquid apogee engine nozzle, providing attitude control and stationkeeping propulsion without requiring any modification to the client. MEV-1 completed its five-year service mission with Intelsat 901 and undocked in April 2025, then repositioned to its next servicing customer. MEV-2 remains docked to Intelsat 10-02 as of early 2026.

The Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) program is Northrop Grumman’s next-generation servicing platform, designed with a robotic arm capable of installing Mission Extension Pods on client satellites that weren’t designed to be serviced. This expands the potential customer base beyond the specific docking interface limitation of MEVs.

Astroscale is working on a broader set of servicing scenarios including debris removal. The Japanese company’s ELSA-d demonstration mission launched in March 2021 from Baikonur Cosmodrome and successfully demonstrated magnetic capture technology in low Earth orbit over multiple rendezvous operations. The ELSA-d servicer completed controlled de-orbit operations in January 2024, marking a successful mission conclusion. Astroscale’s ELSA-M program targets end-of-life services for prepared satellites including those operated by Eutelsat’s OneWeb constellation, backed by the UK Space Agency. The company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market on June 5, 2024, raising approximately $113 million, with shares surging 51% on their debut day to give the company a valuation of approximately $934 million at market open.

Astroscale’s ADRAS-J mission, launched in February 2024, approached a discarded Japanese H-2A rocket upper stage to within approximately 15 meters in November 2024 – the closest approach ever achieved by a commercial company to uncooperative space debris. The mission is demonstrating the rendezvous and inspection techniques that would be required for active debris removal, a service that governments and operators are increasingly willing to pay for as orbital congestion worsens.

Starfish Space is a Tukwila, Washington-based company founded in 2019 by Austin Link and Dr. Trevor Bennett, both former engineers at Blue Origin. The company is developing the Otter spacecraft for satellite servicing, designed to rendezvous with and dock to satellites that were never built with servicing in mind, using the company’s proprietary Nautilus docking mechanism and autonomous CETACEAN and CEPHALOPOD navigation software.

Starfish launched its first demonstration satellite, Otter Pup 1, in June 2023 on the SpaceX Transporter-8 mission. Following an anomalous tumbling deployment, Starfish stabilized the satellite within two months using onboard control algorithms. On April 19, 2024, Otter Pup 1 successfully completed a close-approach rendezvous with a target satellite. Otter Pup 2, launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-14 mission on June 23, 2025, is currently attempting the first-ever commercial docking with an unprepared satellite in low Earth orbit – specifically targeting a D-Orbit ION carrier. In December 2025, Starfish Space and Impulse Space jointly announced the successful completion of the Remora mission, an autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations demonstration.

Starfish’s government contract portfolio has grown rapidly:

• A $37.5 million Space Force STRATFI contract in May 2024 for an Otter vehicle to dock with national security space assets
• A $29 million private funding round in November 2024 led by Shield Capital, bringing total venture funding to over $50 million
• A $52.5 million Space Development Agency contract in January 2026 for end-of-life disposal services for the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture constellation – the first contract in history for disposal of an operational satellite constellation
• A $54.5 million Space Force APFIT contract in February 2026 for a second Otter vehicle for GEO servicing operations, scheduled for delivery in 2028

Three full-scale Otter missions for NASA, the U.S. Space Force, and Intelsat are scheduled to launch in 2026, targeting both low Earth orbit and geostationary operations.

Impulse Space and the Chemical Propulsion Argument

Impulse Space deserves specific attention because it is making a different bet than most of the OTV field. Founded in 2021 by Tom Mueller – SpaceX’s first employee who served nearly two decades as the company’s CTO of propulsion and led development of the Merlin engine family – Impulse is building a two-vehicle OTV portfolio anchored entirely in chemical propulsion.

Its Mira OTV uses Saiph bipropellant thrusters burning nitrous oxide and ethane, offering up to 900 meters per second of delta-v for a 100-kilogram payload. The argument for chemical propulsion is speed. Electric propulsion is efficient, but it is slow. A Hall thruster-powered OTV might take months to spiral from a 500-kilometer deployment orbit to a 36,000-kilometer geostationary slot. A chemical OTV can execute a Hohmann transfer in hours. For time-sensitive payloads that need to be operational quickly, that speed premium has genuine commercial value.

Mira flew its first mission on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 rideshare in November 2023, completing the largest orbit raise ever performed by an OTV on its inaugural flight. Impulse raised a $45 million Series A in July 2023, led by RTX Ventures, then followed that with a $150 million Series B in October 2024, led by Founders Fund, bringing total funding to $225 million.

Impulse is developing a second, larger vehicle called Helios, a high-energy kick stage burning liquid oxygen and liquid methane using the Deneb engine, which produces approximately 15,000 pounds of force. Helios is designed to move more than five tons of payload from LEO to GEO in under 24 hours. Its first flight is targeted for 2026. The company holds contracts from both commercial and government customers, including a U.S. Space Force contract to demonstrate Helios capabilities in geostationary orbit and a contract with Orbit Fab, funded by the Defense Innovation Unit, for a GEO in-space refueling demonstration using Mira. In July 2025, NASA awarded Impulse Space two OTV study contracts covering both Mira and Helios capabilities.

Rocket Lab Photon

Rocket Lab’s Photon upper stage occupies a unique position in the space logistics market: it is simultaneously a stage of the Electron launch vehicle, an orbital service vehicle, and a spacecraft bus used for lunar and interplanetary missions. Photon evolved from Electron’s Kick Stage, which provided restartable propulsion for precise orbital insertion, and was expanded into a full spacecraft bus with its own power, communications, and attitude control systems.

Photon’s most prominent space logistics demonstration was the CAPSTONE mission for NASA, launched June 28, 2022, on an Electron from Mahia, New Zealand. Photon performed six successive orbit-raising burns over roughly three months, then deployed the CAPSTONE CubeSat onto a ballistic lunar transfer trajectory on July 4, 2022. CAPSTONE arrived in its Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit around the Moon on November 14, 2022, demonstrating the orbital regime planned for NASA’s Gateway lunar station. The mission demonstrated Photon’s capability for deep space delivery – a capability well beyond what most small spacecraft platforms can offer.

In July 2025, NASA awarded Rocket Lab a $1.4 million OTV study contract covering both the Neutron rocket upper stage and the Explorer spacecraft as potential NASA mission transfer vehicles.

Propellant Depots and Orbit Fab

No discussion of in-space logistics in 2026 can ignore propellant logistics, even though the commercial market for propellant depots is essentially pre-revenue. Orbit Fab is the company most directly pursuing this vision. Its Tanker-001 Tenzing satellite, launched June 30, 2021, demonstrated the ability to store high test peroxide propellant in orbit, and the company has been developing its refueling interface standard, RAFTI (Rapidly Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface), as a potential industry standard for in-orbit fueling. Orbit Fab has raised approximately $42.7 million in total, including a $28.5 million Series A in April 2023 led by 8090 Industries, with participation from Lockheed Martin Ventures and Northrop Grumman.

The business premise is compelling. If OTVs can be refueled in orbit rather than launched with fixed propellant loads, the economics of OTV operations change substantially. Orbit Fab has signed agreements with Astroscale, which has agreed to equip its LEXI satellite servicer with the RAFTI interface, and with Impulse Space for a GEO refueling demonstration funded by the Defense Innovation Unit. As of early 2026, no commercial refueling transaction has yet occurred in orbit. The chicken-and-egg problem embedded in this market – propellant depots aren’t worth building until enough RAFTI-compatible spacecraft exist, and operators have limited incentive to add RAFTI unless depots exist – is one Orbit Fab is trying to break through government demonstration contracts and early commercial agreements.

The Government as Anchor Customer

Across all three segments of commercial space logistics, government contracts – principally from NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense – are the primary revenue source for most companies as of 2026. This government dependency creates both opportunities and risks.

The opportunity is clear: government customers have consistent, well-funded demand for logistics services and a tolerance for early-market imperfection that purely commercial customers don’t share. NASA’s acceptance that some CLPS missions will fail, the Space Force’s willingness to pay for satellite servicing demonstration missions before operational systems are proven, and the Army’s investment in LEO mobility studies all represent government risk capital flowing into commercial space logistics development.

The risk is equally clear: government priorities shift. Congressional budget cycles, administration changes, and competing claims on defense spending can rapidly alter the contract pipeline that small commercial space logistics companies depend on. The current administration’s pressure on NASA spending, combined with ongoing debates about the value of CLPS relative to its cost, creates genuine uncertainty about whether the program’s current structure survives intact through 2028.

The Defense Department’s demand for OTV services has been more stable than NASA’s civilian program budgets, driven by persistent interest in space domain awareness, satellite repositioning, and orbital debris management as strategic national security priorities. The rapid growth of Starfish Space’s government contract portfolio from nothing in 2021 to over $140 million in government commitments by February 2026 illustrates how quickly a company can scale when it successfully demonstrates relevant capabilities to military customers.

NASA’s Commercial Space Logistics Framework

Beyond CLPS and ISS resupply, NASA is building out a broader commercial space logistics architecture. The Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) program has funded multiple companies to study lunar surface logistics, autonomous cargo systems, and propellant storage in cislunar space. In January 2026, Intuitive Machines received a NextSTEP contract to advance lunar surface logistics including cargo and mobility architecture.

NASA’s July 2025 OTV study awards – $1.4 million each to Arrow Science and Technology (partnering with Quantum Space), Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Impulse Space, Rocket Lab, and United Launch Alliance – signal the agency’s intent to use commercial OTVs for future scientific missions, potentially including Mars delivery infrastructure. These are study contracts, not operational missions, but they represent a pipeline of potential future demand that could significantly expand the OTV market if converted to flight contracts.

The International Competitive Landscape

Commercial space logistics is not exclusively American. D-Orbit is headquartered in Fino Mornasco, Italy, and has raised substantial European capital. Exolaunch was founded by scientists from the Technical University of Berlin and is headquartered in Germany. Japanese company Astroscale is publicly listed in Tokyo. These companies reflect a genuine internationalization of the commercial space logistics market.

Japan’s ispace, listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, flew its HAKUTO-R Mission 1 lunar lander in April 2023 – a mission that crashed on approach to the lunar surface – and its U.S. subsidiary is providing the APEX 1.0 lander for the Draper CLPS mission in 2026. The company has signed commercial agreements with multiple mining and resource utilization companies anticipating eventual lunar resource extraction.

In China, state-backed aerospace firms have been developing in-orbit servicing capabilities with limited commercial transparency. Shijian-21, launched in October 2021, demonstrated the ability to capture and relocate a defunct satellite to a graveyard orbit – a proof-of-concept for OTV-adjacent capabilities. China’s Chang’e-6 mission in 2024 successfully returned samples from the Moon’s far side, demonstrating logistics capabilities that will eventually be relevant to commercial lunar access.

The European Space Agency has funded multiple in-orbit servicing studies and backed companies including Astroscale’s European operations. The UK Space Agency has taken a particularly active role in funding satellite servicing demonstrations following Brexit, including the ELSA-M program targeting Eutelsat OneWeb constellation services. ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder communications satellite, which will be deployed to lunar orbit by Firefly’s Elytra Dark vehicle on the Blue Ghost M2 mission in 2026, represents significant European investment in lunar logistics infrastructure.

Investment Trends and Financial Realities

Venture capital investment in commercial space logistics peaked in 2021 and 2022, driven by general enthusiasm for the commercial space sector following SpaceX’s proven ISS cargo model and early OTV demonstrations. Since then, investment has become more selective, with a clear divergence between companies demonstrating technical and commercial traction and those that haven’t.

The most significant financing events of the past year include:

Firefly Aerospace’s August 2025 IPO raised $868 million at a valuation of approximately $10 billion – by far the largest single financing event in the commercial space logistics space in recent years. The offering followed the Blue Ghost Moon landing success and reflected investors’ confidence in Firefly’s diversified position across launch, OTVs, and lunar services.

Astroscale’s June 2024 Tokyo Stock Exchange listing raised approximately $113 million, with shares surging 51% on debut to a market cap of approximately $934 million, reflecting strong Japanese and international investor confidence in satellite servicing.

Intuitive Machines has maintained its Nasdaq listing as LUNR while pursuing a $300 million convertible note offering in 2025 for continued operations, reflecting the cash-intensive nature of running active lunar mission programs.

Impulse Space raised $150 million in its October 2024 Series B led by Founders Fund, bringing total funding to $225 million and validating the chemical propulsion approach.

Starfish Space raised $29 million in November 2024, bringing total venture funding to over $50 million, supplemented by more than $140 million in government contracts awarded since.

Against these success stories, Momentus’s trajectory serves as a cautionary signal: a company that raised substantial SPAC-era capital, failed to develop its primary business as projected, and spent 2024 managing a Nasdaq delisting crisis while conducting incremental fundraising. The company remains operational as of February 2026, but its position illustrates that favorable market timing and initial capital are not sufficient if the underlying commercial demand doesn’t materialize on schedule.

Technical Realities That Don’t Get Enough Attention

Rendezvous and Proximity Operations

Every in-space logistics mission that requires approaching another spacecraft – whether for satellite deployment, servicing, or docking – requires rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO). RPO is genuinely difficult. Starfish Space’s Otter Pup 1 experience illustrates the stakes: the vehicle was deployed in a tumbling state due to a software anomaly on the launch OTV, yet Starfish engineers stabilized it within two months using onboard algorithms. That resilience matters, but so does the underlying reality that proximity operations create mission risk that has to be priced and insured against.

Every time an OTV or servicer maneuvers near another spacecraft, there is collision risk. The regulatory environment around proximity operations in orbit is still developing, and in the United States, the FCC and FAA share oversight jurisdiction in ways that can create bureaucratic friction for commercial operators seeking approval for specific mission profiles.

Lunar Landing Precision

The CLPS program’s two-for-two record of lunar landers tipping over on landing – both due to altimeter anomalies in the approach phase – highlights that the precision landing problem in commercial space has not been solved. Historical lunar landing attempts across all nations have failed at a rate of approximately 50%, and while commercial providers have access to modern sensor and software capabilities unavailable during the Apollo era, they’re also operating under commercial cost constraints that have led to some engineering shortcuts.

Firefly’s success with Blue Ghost M1 demonstrates that full mission success is achievable on the first attempt. The difference in landing outcome between Blue Ghost M1 and Intuitive Machines’ two landings likely reflects design choices around redundancy, testing depth, and precision navigation sensor systems. Understanding what Firefly did differently and whether other providers can replicate it will be a defining question for CLPS program credibility through 2027.

Thermal Management and Longevity

An OTV operating for months in orbit cycles between intense solar heating and extreme cold in Earth’s shadow, sometimes hundreds of times per day. Propellant storage, battery management, and structural integrity all have to survive this environment for mission durations that might exceed two or three years. Companies that haven’t fully qualified their hardware for extended operations will discover problems in orbit rather than on the ground.

Third, communication latency and autonomy matter more than the public-facing narratives around OTVs suggest. A vehicle maneuvering near a client satellite in geosynchronous orbit is far enough from Earth that round-trip communication delays can be significant during close-approach operations. Building the autonomy software to handle proximity operation contingencies that develop faster than a human operator can respond is genuinely difficult and represents a core competency advantage for companies like Starfish Space that have built their identity around autonomous navigation.

Market Sizing and Revenue Models

ISS Cargo

The ISS cargo resupply market has well-established economics. NASA has obligated approximately $6.6 billion combined to SpaceX and Northrop Grumman under CRS-2 through late 2025. Per-flight costs have generally declined over time as providers optimized their operations, though Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser budget growth demonstrates the risk of overruns in commercial spaceflight development.

This market has a defined endpoint: ISS deorbit. The post-ISS market depends on commercial station viability.

CLPS and Lunar Logistics

The CLPS market’s current size is defined by the $2.6 billion cumulative maximum through 2028, though actual awards have been smaller. Individual mission values typically range from $70 million to $130 million for baseline CLPS tasks, with larger awards for more complex missions.

The market beyond 2028 is speculative. A mature lunar economy with multiple customers requiring regular deliveries would create substantially larger demand. A continuation of the current NASA-primary model would keep the market bounded. Most analysts’ estimates for the total addressable lunar logistics market through 2030 range from $2 billion to $8 billion, depending heavily on assumptions about commercial lunar activity, Artemis program execution, and international competition.

OTV and In-Space Services

Commercial OTV missions are currently priced in the range of $1 million to $6 million depending on payload mass, orbital distance, and propulsion system. GEO satellite servicing contracts command higher values – Northrop Grumman’s MEV contracts with Intelsat were reportedly in the tens of millions of dollars annually. Government OTV and servicing contracts range from small SBIR awards to the $54.5 million Starfish-APFIT contract, demonstrating the wide range of government spending in this segment.

Analysts estimate the total addressable market for orbital transportation services – including OTVs, satellite servicing, and propellant logistics – at between $2.5 billion and $4.8 billion annually by 2030. This range reflects genuine uncertainty about how quickly satellite constellation operators will shift spending from launch to post-launch orbital services.

The Consolidation Thesis

The commercial space logistics market in 2026 has too many companies across all three segments for the available revenue. That observation is not controversial. The consolidation wave is already underway in the OTV segment, where Firefly’s 2023 acquisition of Spaceflight Inc. combined a launch vehicle provider with an OTV heritage provider and a lunar lander program, creating a genuinely end-to-end space transportation company that has been validated by the Blue Ghost Moon landing.

That model – acquiring logistics capability rather than building it from scratch – may prove to be the template that other large aerospace companies follow. Northrop Grumman is well positioned with its MEV/MRV platform, its Cygnus ISS resupply infrastructure, and its Antares launch vehicle development. SpaceX has the structural capability to enter the OTV market at any time if it chose to commercialize its Starship refueling architecture.

The companies most likely to survive the consolidation wave are those that have demonstrated real mission performance, built genuine customer relationships, and diversified their revenue base across government and commercial customers. By those metrics, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, Northrop Grumman, Starfish Space, Impulse Space, and D-Orbit appear relatively well-positioned entering 2026. Companies that have significant capital without matching mission performance, or mission performance without matching capital, face more uncertain futures.

Summary

Commercial space logistics in 2026 spans a wide range of activities, from routine ISS resupply runs proven over more than a decade of operations to experimental lunar landings that are still working out the technical fundamentals. The segments are connected by a common logic: applying commercial market competition to tasks previously handled by government agencies, in the hope that competition drives down cost, accelerates innovation, and ultimately creates sustainable businesses.

The ISS cargo segment is mature but contracting around two dominant providers as the station’s end-of-life approaches. The CLPS lunar delivery segment is operational but building reliability credibility at a pace that currently limits its appeal to non-NASA customers. The OTV and satellite servicing segment is transitioning from demonstration to early commercial operations, with government defense contracts providing the near-term revenue that sustains most providers while the commercial market develops.

What the market looks like by 2030 depends on several still-unresolved variables: whether commercial space stations create the sustained orbital logistics demand their developers project, whether the CLPS program’s reliability record improves enough to attract commercial lunar customers, whether propellant depot infrastructure gets funded and built, and whether OTV providers can sustain operations long enough to develop commercial revenue streams alongside government contracts.

The difference between the companies that will still be operating at scale in 2030 and those that won’t probably comes down less to technology and more to execution discipline, customer development, and the ability to build government relationships while simultaneously developing the commercial revenue streams that can sustain the business after government priorities inevitably shift.

Appendix A: Quick Reference – ISS Cargo Providers (February 2026)

Appendix B: Quick Reference – CLPS Missions (February 2026)

Appendix C: Quick Reference – Major OTV and Servicing Providers (February 2026)

Appendix D: Top Questions Answered

What is commercial space logistics?

Commercial space logistics refers to the provision of transportation, delivery, repositioning, and support services in space using commercial business models rather than traditional government development contracting. It encompasses ISS cargo resupply, lunar payload delivery under CLPS, orbital transfer vehicle services, satellite life extension, and emerging propellant resupply infrastructure.

Which companies are currently delivering cargo to the ISS?

As of February 2026, SpaceX (Cargo Dragon 2) and Northrop Grumman (Cygnus) are the two active U.S. ISS cargo providers under NASA’s CRS-2 contract. Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser has not yet flown; its first mission has been restructured as a free-flying demonstration targeting no earlier than late 2026 rather than an ISS docking flight.

What is the CLPS program?

NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program was established in 2018 to hire commercial companies to deliver science and technology payloads to the lunar surface under fixed-price contracts. Fourteen companies are eligible to compete; the program has a cumulative maximum value of $2.6 billion through 2028. Five missions have launched through February 2026, with one full success (Firefly Blue Ghost M1, March 2025), two partial successes with tipped landings (Intuitive Machines IM-1 and IM-2), and one outright failure (Astrobotic Peregrine M1).

What happened on Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1?

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost M1 lunar lander launched January 15, 2025, on a SpaceX Falcon 9, and landed at Mare Crisium on March 2, 2025, achieving the first fully successful commercial soft landing on the Moon in history. The spacecraft carried ten NASA science instruments and operated for approximately 14 days before lunar nightfall ended the mission. Firefly subsequently went public on Nasdaq (FLY) in August 2025.

What is the current status of Dream Chaser?

Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser Tenacity is at Kennedy Space Center undergoing final testing and verification. In September 2025, NASA and Sierra Space mutually agreed to restructure the CRS-2 contract: Dream Chaser’s first flight will be a free-flying orbital demonstration rather than an ISS docking mission, with no guaranteed future ISS flights. The demonstration is targeted for no earlier than late 2026 aboard a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur. NASA has obligated approximately $1.43 billion to Sierra Space under CRS-2 to date.

When did Firefly acquire Spaceflight Inc.?

Firefly Aerospace acquired Spaceflight Inc. on June 8, 2023, adding the company’s Sherpa OTV heritage, mission management expertise, and more than 460 successful payload deployments. Firefly subsequently rebranded its in-space vehicle line as Elytra.

What is the Northrop Grumman Mission Extension Vehicle?

The Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) is a satellite servicing spacecraft that docks with geostationary satellites nearing the end of their propellant supply, providing attitude control and stationkeeping propulsion to extend their operational lives. MEV-1 completed the first commercial docking with a live GEO satellite on February 25, 2020, docking with Intelsat 901. MEV-2 docked with Intelsat 10-02 on April 12, 2021, while the satellite was carrying active communications traffic. MEV-1 undocked and relocated to its next customer in April 2025. MEV-2 remains docked to Intelsat 10-02 as of early 2026.

What is Starfish Space and what has it accomplished?

Starfish Space is a Tukwila, Washington-based satellite servicing company founded in 2019 by former Blue Origin engineers Austin Link and Dr. Trevor Bennett. By February 2026, the company had accumulated over $140 million in government contracts including a $37.5 million Space Force STRATFI award, a $52.5 million SDA disposal services contract, and a $54.5 million Space Force APFIT contract for a second Otter vehicle. Otter Pup 2, launched June 2025, is attempting the first commercial docking with an unprepared satellite. Three operational Otter missions for NASA, the Space Force, and Intelsat are scheduled for 2026.

What is Orbit Fab’s business?

Orbit Fab is developing commercial propellant depot infrastructure and the RAFTI (Rapidly Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface) refueling standard. Its Tanker-001 Tenzing satellite, launched June 30, 2021, demonstrated on-orbit storage of high test peroxide. The company has approximately $42.7 million in total funding. No commercial refueling transaction has yet occurred in orbit as of early 2026, but Orbit Fab holds government demonstration contracts and has agreements with OTV providers including Astroscale and Impulse Space.

Why have so many CLPS missions had landing problems?

Both of Intuitive Machines’ lunar landings tipped over due to altimeter failures during descent – on IM-1, the altimeter was incorrectly inhibited; on IM-2, the altimeter again failed to provide accurate altitude data. These failures prevented precise thrust cutoff during final descent, causing the spacecraft to contact the surface at non-nominal angles. Astrobotic’s Peregrine failed due to a propellant leak after launch. Firefly’s Blue Ghost M1 succeeded on its first attempt, demonstrating that full mission success is achievable, though the engineering decisions that distinguished its approach from its competitors’ have not been fully disclosed publicly.

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