>> Maria Varmazis: Welcome to T-Minus industry voices. I'm Maria Varmazis, host of the T-Minus Space Daily podcast. Every Thursday, the team at N2K Space sits down with industry voices in a segment all about the groundbreaking new products, services, capabilities, and business models emerging around the world. Every guest you hear in this segment has paid to be here.

>> Maria Varmazis: In-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing, or ISAM, is an area of satellite technology growth seeing a lot of interest as space organizations and satellite owners look to clean up dangerous space debris from orbit and to increase the longevity of the spacecraft they spent a lot of money to build and send to space. One company building satellite servicing vehicles is Starfish Space, and its upcoming vehicle is called the Otter. I recently spoke with Michael Madrid, Director of Strategic Relationships at Starfish Space, to tell us more about what Starfish is working on. And our discussion happened just after the company raised a $14 million Series A round in March this year. Here's our conversation. Congratulations on Starfish getting the Series A. That's great news.

>> Michael Madrid: Thank you. Yeah. We're very excited about it. There's a lot of good work to do ahead.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah. Could you tell me a little bit more about sort of the goals now, with this new funding in hand, what Starfish is looking at to accomplish.

>> Michael Madrid: Yeah. We're really looking to accelerate the development and fielding of our first full commercial Otter. And that's really to chase after some of the exciting commercial customer traction that we've been able to generate in the last year. If you are kind of reading some of the headlines or keeping track of Starfish, one of the things we're talking the most about is our demonstration mission that's launching in a few months here in the summer of 2023. And that is a - that mission is called Otter Pup. It's a subscale spacecraft. And that was actually fully funded before the Series A, and we saw it as an important milestone to validate our technologies on orbit. But we also really wanted to step on the gas or continue to step on the gas for the full Otter vehicle, and this Series A is really going to help us do that.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah. So let's dive into both Otter and Otter Pup, if you could. I guess this is a little bit of like, give me the pitch for what they do because I love what Starfish's website has about Otter, and I'm still - I'd love to learn more about both Otter and Otter Pup.

>> Michael Madrid: Yeah. Absolutely. So for those who haven't seen the website yet, Otter is our servicing spacecraft. Basically, our goal is to dock with satellites that are already on orbit and provide them value through servicing. So that could be life extension, for example, in GEO or end of life disposal of derelict satellites and LEO. And so what we've done is we've built a spacecraft that can capture or dock with any type of spacecraft on orbit. We don't require a preconfigured docking plate or a specific geometry. And we've also gotten the footprint of the vehicle down to about an ESPA-class satellite. So we're on the order of 200, 250 kilograms. And we're using only electric propulsion to dock with spacecraft and maneuver them. So we're highly efficient and much faster and more economical to build and launch. And the goal with the Otter Pup mission, then, is to validate our docking technology and also to validate some of our flight software. We've got an autonomous guidance and control product called CEPHALOPOD and a relative navigation solution called CETACEAN. A bit of a theme with the names. Our docking mechanism is called Nautilus. And so, even though Otter Pup is a bit of a smaller spacecraft, we've got all three of those full-scale technologies on board. And we're going to dock hopefully with another commercial spacecraft in low Earth orbit this fall.

>> Maria Varmazis: That's really exciting. And, yeah. The autonomy is something that I was fascinated by about how that's going to be used to make satellite servicing easier. Is there any - can you expand on that a little bit about how that will work.

>> Michael Madrid: Yeah. Absolutely. And to be clear, right, in the first couple of missions here, we'll definitely have humans in the loop. We'll have points in the concept of operations where we can have go, no go and holds and things like that. So we're safety first, and we've got a lot of that in mind. But what we are sort of building for is a vision of push button type operations. However, we can simply direct an Otter to go dock with a certain satellite. And then the flight software is doing all of the trajectory calculation optimization. It's managing a complex abort framework. It's doing all of that onboard the spacecraft. And that allows, you know, a much more kind of what feels futuristic now but what would be necessary for, you know, really scaling these kinds of operations. And as one of our cofounders, you know, likes to say, he would love for - you know, to reach the world where he - he would tell an Otter to go dock, and then a little bit later you get a text that says docked. What would you like me to do next? And so we're kind of building towards that future where we can kind of flip the, you know, ratio of humans to spacecraft. And that will only come once we can show that, you know, docking between these two spacecraft autonomously is safe and reliable and routine.

>> Maria Varmazis: That's - that's such a cool idea, that they - almost like you just let it go do its thing, and it's got it from there. That will be so interesting to see that happen. For the very long-term vision for Starfish, like, what - what's sort of on the game plan there?

>> Michael Madrid: Yeah. Absolutely. So I kind of mentioned the three things we're building in-house, the flight software products and the capture mechanism or the docking technology. And we think those sort of underpin all types of autonomous interaction in space and, therefore, all sorts of, you know, exciting applications within the ISAM or OSAM. There's a lot of different acronyms these days. But if we can really nail those core competencies, then we think that unlocks or accelerates all of these types of futures where we can assemble large structures in space, where we can support manufacturing operations, you could upgrade or repair satellites while they're on orbit, you can do refueling. And so all those things are part of the medium- to long-term vision. Like I mentioned, we're starting in the near term very specifically with life extension and GEO and end-of-life disposal in LEO because we see sort of near-term business cases there and the ability to build a sustainable business. But, you know, we're definitely all optimists and sci fi geeks and space enthusiasts, so we can picture all the things that we want to do in the future as well.

>> Maria Varmazis: What do you see as sort of like the biggest opportunity in ISAM, not just within Starfish but just in general? Like, where could we make some really huge gains?

>> Michael Madrid: Yeah. I think that it comes down to, among other things, one of the - you know, one of the answers that would stand out is unlocking a lot more value in the sort of infrastructure assets we've already sent to space. Right. So I've mentioned life extension and GEO. And for those unfamiliar, we've got these giant geostationary satellites that have lifetimes in the 15 to 20 years even kind of timeframe. And they're big, gigantic, multi-1000 kilograms spacecraft. And often their payloads, whether that's for communication or whatnot, last even longer than their fuel does because they're expending fuel to maintain their precise slot in orbit. And so these spacecraft go to a graveyard orbit at the end of their lives, with a budget or a reserve left of fuel, just to be safe. But, in many cases, they could continue revenue generating operations for their owners for even more - for even more time. And so that's one thing that we can unlock right away. The Otter would dock with these satellites in GEO and use its own propulsion to station keep them or to correct inclination or even to move them to a new longitudinal slot so they can service a new market. And then the owners get that much more life out of them. And it's not that that would ever necessarily replace the need for new satellites, for incorporating new technology on orbit. But it opens up a lot of flexibility for the operators and lets them really grow their business. And then in low Earth orbit, as well, we're able to sort of unlock new value for constellations. And for all this active infrastructure, if we can remove some of the threats to the satellites from, you know, space debris or from satellites that failed to de-orbit themselves and then are stuck in the operational plane and, you know, pose a risk or a threat to the rest of the very expensive, you know, constellation or mega constellations. So, really, we're looking to unlock kind of value in that dimension first. We're really excited to share and be very transparent with how the Otter Pup mission goes this fall, in the fall of 2023. And then, like I said, we are meeting with commercial satellite operators, meeting with government satellite operators to kind of explore, just make sure that the Otter service we're going to offer here in the next couple of years is something that's useful, is something that's meeting a market need. And, you know, one conversation I have and to the greater topic of ISAM is the, you know, difference between orbit transfer vehicles, or OTVs, at a service for like the Otter. And so, you know, at first glance, those are within sort of the same part of the space market and within the ISAM category. But I've been - explained to folks recently that orbit transfer vehicles, or OTVs, you know, focus on what you might call the last-mile delivery problem. And they help satellites get from the orbital insertion point where they get dropped off by a rocket to their final orbit or final destination, and that is very key. And that's really helpful, especially as we see more and more rideshare kind of launch programs where a lot of satellites are taking one rocket to space. And then these OTVs help them get to the - their final orbit without using up a bunch of their own fuel. But I've often drawn a nuanced distinction there between the OTVs and vehicles like the Otter where we'll go to space on our own, and then we'll fly up to and dock with another satellite that's already on orbit and start servicing it there. So there's a little bit of a difference, and it's fun to kind of talk through how those are kind of complementary and, again, all the opportunity that's ahead of us.

>> Maria Varmazis: Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

>> Michael Madrid: My pleasure. Thanks for having me out.