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= D-Orbit = D-Orbit is a private aerospace company headquartered in Italy with subsidiaries in Portugal, the UK and the US.

The company addresses the space logistics needs of the Space market by providing solutions that speed up the time needed to transfer a single spacecraft or a batch of satellites belonging to a constellation from a parking orbit to their designated operational slot. The company’s core solution is a launch and deployment service that leverages D-Orbit’s proprietary orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) ION Satellite Carrier to perform last-mile delivery of the third-party satellites on board from the drop-off point to their target orbit. D-Orbit’s OTV is also able to perform in-orbit demonstration (IOD) of third-party payloads hosted onboard thanks to a plug-and-play mechanical, electrical, and data interface that streamlines integration and in-orbit operations.

D-Orbit has been operating commercial ION missions since September 2020, deploying  satellites for customers like Planet Labs, Endurosat, Elecnor Deimos , Lockheed Martin , SatRevolution , and Kleos , and operating payloads for the German HPS, High Performance Space Structure Systems , the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) , and the Swiss data security company Cysec SA.

History
D-Orbit was founded in 2011 by Luca Rossettini, currently serving as chief executive officer (CEO), and Renato Panesi, currently serving as chief commercial officer (COO).

The company’s initial focus was the development of a smart and autonomous decommissioning motor for satellites and launcher stages called D3 (D-Orbit Decommissioning Device). In 2015, the D3 project was partially funded by the European Union under the framework of Horizon 2020.

In 2017, the company began the development of ION Satellite Carrier, an orbital transfer vehicle able to host a batch of satellites, transport them across orbits, and release each one of them, individually, into a custom orbital slot and operate third-party payloads.

The OTV performed its first commercial mission in September 2020. The mission ended in October 2020 with the successful deployment of 12 SuperDove satellites for Earth-imaging company Planet Labs.

On January 2021, D-Orbit launched a second ION mission, Pulse, which successfully deployed 20 satellites after performing a 10km orbit raise and demonstrated the ability to change the local time of the ascending node (LTAN).

During its third mission, launched in June 2021, the company deployed six satellites and demonstrated 12 hosted payloads, including D-Orbit's proprietary in-orbit cloud computing platform and data storage service built in collaboration with Swedish-based AI company Unibap, which performed 23 SpaceCloud compatible applications.

The fourth mission, Dashing Through the Stars, launched in January 2022, deployed six satellites and tested several in-space cloud applications on an upgraded version of its in-orbit cloud platoform.

As of September 2022, the company has launched six commercial orbital transportation missions and brought over 80 payloads to space.

Origin of the Name
The name D-Orbit comes from the first product developed by the company, the Decommissioning Device (D3), a smart propulsive device designed to streamline satellites' end-of-life disposal. The name D-Orbit is in fact a contraction of the term “de-orbit”, which denotes an orbital maneuver that pulls a spacecraft out of its operational orbit and inserts it into a reentry trajectory that will eventually cause it to burn up upon atmospheric entry.

ION Satellite Carrier
ION Satellite Carrier is a satellite platform with a configurable payload bay that can be equipped with a combination of proprietary or third-party launch dispensers,  third-party payloads, microsatellites,  and instruments like lenses and antennas to be tested in orbit.

Through the course of a mission, ION Satellite Carrier can travel across orbits characterized by different orientation, altitude, and local time of ascending node (LTAN), deploy the satellites on board into custom, individual orbital slots and perform experiments on hosted payloads in the designated operating envelope.