SAN FRANCISCO — Spanish aerospace startup UARX Space has successfully navigated and resolved a series of technical anomalies encountered during the inaugural flight of OSSIE-D, an advanced orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) that lifted off on October 1 aboard a SpaceX Transporter-18 mission. The spacecraft, belonging to the 200-kilogram class, experienced an unexpected communications blackout shortly after achieving orbit, prompting a rapid and coordinated troubleshooting effort from the engineering team on the ground to ensure the safety of customer payloads and verify the functionality of the spacecraft’s core systems.
“Immediately after launch, we experienced a communications blackout with our spacecraft,” Andrés Villa Granata, UARX co-founder and chief technology officer, told SpaceNews by email.
The unexpected radio silence presented an immediate operational hurdle for the mission team, which had to weigh the limits of the spacecraft’s battery lifespan against the necessity of fulfilling deployment obligations for multiple international customers. To mitigate the risk of losing control over the payload release mechanism entirely, UARX engineers formulated a contingency plan designed to bypass the ground station link and activate onboard autonomy.
To fix the situation, UARX decided to send a backup command to the orbital transfer vehicle to enable fault detection, isolation, and recovery automation that would deploy the payloads without ground station intervention, Villa Granata explained.
Executing this intervention required a calculated leap of faith from the mission team. UARX sent the command to deploy payloads two days after launch, but without reliable two-way communications with the vehicle, the team did not know if the command was properly received at the time. Villa Granata noted that the company made this decision to prioritize their customers’ missions in case OSSIE had more serious underlying problems, and because they were acutely aware of the finite lifetime of the spacecraft operating on its internal batteries.
Subsequent investigations by the engineering team revealed that the root cause of the anomaly was entirely ground-based rather than a fundamental failure of the spacecraft hardware. UARX eventually determined that the communications blackout was caused by a configuration error on the interface of the ground station service they were using. Once identified, the configuration was corrected, and from that point forward, communication with OSSIE has been entirely nominal. Since then, all spacecraft systems checkouts have been performed, and everything is performing nominally.
With the communications link fully restored, the mission team was able to verify the success of their emergency contingency measures. Since communications were re-established, UARX was able to wake up the sequencer from its ultra-low-power mode and download deployment telemetry, according to Villa Granata. The telemetry showed that the commands sent two days post-launch were received correctly. Furthermore, the company obtained telemetry indicating that all commanded deployments were executed correctly and the payloads were successfully released into orbit.
As a result of these successful maneuvers, at least 10 PocketQubes have been deployed into their respective orbits. Additional payloads remain onboard OSSIE, which is an acronym standing for Orbit Solutions to Simplify Injection and Exploration. Among these remaining assets are hosted payloads, such as Dawn Aerospace’s Docking and Fluidic Transfer Port. Other satellites currently residing on OSSIE will be released in the future, Villa Granata said, though he added that the company cannot provide specific details about these customers at this time.
OSSIE Customers
Prior to the launch, the operational timeline for OSSIE-D scheduled the deployment of satellites between seven and 30 days post-launch. However, because of the automated fault-recovery commands triggered during the communications blackout, the deployment sequence was accelerated significantly, catching some customers by surprise.
Several participating organizations and institutions have since posted news of their missions. Among them is the German nonprofit AMSAT-Deutschland, which had placed three PocketQubes onto the OSSIE-D vehicle for deployment into low Earth orbit.
While the successful launch was still being celebrated in Bochum and preparations for the next planned activities were underway, a surprise announcement came in on Saturday evening, October 3, AMSAT-DL posted in an official update on October 4. The organization informed the space community that it had been notified of an earlier-than-expected deployment sequence. The deployment sequence for the deployable payloads began on October 2, 2026, at 1:48:09.950 p.m. CEST.
Because AMSAT-Deutschland did not expect its miniature satellites to be deployed so rapidly following the SpaceX launch, no one had been listening to the designated transmission frequencies at that exact moment, the post explained. Consequently, the initial signals from the ERMINAZ satellites went unheard at first.
Our three ERMINAZ-2 PocketQubes have been successfully deployed from the Picobus Deployer from Libre Space Foundation on OSSIE-D, AMSAT-DL President Peter Gulzow told SpaceNews. Two of our satellites, ERMINAZ-2U and ERMINAZ-2V, are operating and currently under commissioning. The status of the third one, ERMINAZ-2X, remains unknown, as we have not yet been able to acquire a signal from it.
In addition to the AMSAT-Deutschland hardware, OSSIE-D also transported PocketQubes built by the Libre Space Foundation, Orion Space of Nepal, and Argentina’s National Technological University, specifically its Haedo Regional Faculty. Additional cubesats aboard the mission were provided by Argentina’s National University of La Plata and Ethereal Space.
The logistical arrangements for several of these payloads were supported by the Argentine company DIYSatellite, which supplied the PocketQube dispensers for the OSSIE-D mission and coordinated flight opportunities for multiple commercial and academic customers.
From our side, the mission continues according to the planned timeline, and we expect our satellites to be deployed in the next weeks, Gustavo Carpignano, CEO of DIYSatellite, said by email. We will be able to assess and confirm the performance of our deployer once that deployment takes place.
By October 15, Villa Granata confirmed that a total of 10 OSSIE-D PocketQubes had been successfully deployed and had established initial contact with their respective mission operators on the ground. UARX co-founders have continued to decline further comment on the current operational status of other specific satellites launched within the OSSIE-D platform.
Prior to the lift-off from the launch site, UARX showcased its hardware integration efforts on Instagram, highlighting that two three-unit cubesats developed by Ethereal Space were integrated within RAMI, the company’s proprietary CubeSat deployment system, from where they would eventually be released into orbit to commence their assigned missions.
Spaceflight is inherently challenging, and not every mission milestone unfolds as originally anticipated, Ethereal CEO Shawn Cochran told SpaceNews by email, reflecting on the operational adjustments required during the flight. What remains unchanged is Ethereal Space’s commitment to building a reliable, operational space-weather observing capability. We remain confident in our technology, our team, and the long-term importance of providing high-quality space-weather observations to government and commercial customers.
Beyond validating the OTV’s transfer capabilities and carrying out complex multi-satellite deployments, OSSIE-D’s maiden flight also served as a space-proven validation milestone for UARX’s newly developed deployment rings, specifically the SAU&RON 24-inch and SAU&RON 15-inch systems, marking an important step forward for the startup’s hardware product lines.
