Abstract

HE emerging practice of hosting payloads on commercial GEO satellites is gaining traction throughout the space community because of the flight opportunities and budgetary savings that it offers. The DARPA Phoenix project is planning to use this model to develop a new method to deliver hardware to orbit, leveraging the hosted payload model to deliver and dispense hardware on-orbit. Phoenix would achieve this goal by designing and verifying a Payload Orbital Delivery (POD) system to a standard user’s guide that would ensure compatibility with most of the approximately 15 commercial launches to GEO each year. Once the fundamental POD system capability was established, a POD could be integrated into a host spacecraft quite late in the integration flow, creating a “FedEx to GEO” capability.(This concept is in no way connected to the actual Fedex company. Their terrestrial delivery service serves as …

Date

September 22, 2025

Authors

Brook Sullivan, David Barnhart, Lisa Hill, Paul Oppenheimer, Bryan L Benedict, Gerrit Van Ommering, Laurie Chappell, John Ratti, Peter Will

Book

AIAA SPACE 2013 conference and exposition

Pages

5484