Space startup in its second year of establishment orbital aerospace The company wants to become a third-party logistics provider for commerce from Earth to space. And to get there, the company just signed a new contract to validate key technical capabilities of the International Space Station.

The El Segundo, California-based company develops orbital platforms and reentry vehicles that enable mass manufacturing and research in space. In Orbit’s plans are more than a little ambitious. The idea is to host customer factories and laboratories on an orbital platform. An unmanned reentry vehicle would autonomously dock and rendezvous with the platform, and robotic systems would transfer manufactured materials to the vehicle, which would then return the products to Earth.

“Automation and robotics are the backbone of industrial production on the planet,” CEO Ryan Elliott said in a statement. “It should be no different in space.”

It’s a mistake to think that In Orbit is trying to compete with space manufacturing companies like Varda Space and Space Forge, Elliott said in a recent interview. “Their customers and our customers are fundamentally different,” he said. “We handle logistics, on-orbit hosting, [but] We don’t manufacture the materials ourselves. ”

Elliott and his two co-founders, Antonio Coelho and Ishaan Patel, have been driving this effort for just over two years. The company has raised about $2 million to date, and the team is currently raising money to support a demonstration mission in mid-to-late 2026.

For its first mission, the company will work with a satellite bus provider that will host an orbital platform and a subscale version of the reentry rocket. If all goes as planned, the mission will demonstrate transporting material from a host platform to an atmospheric reentry vehicle and back to Earth.

In Orbit has a huge amount of work ahead of it. The company must ensure rendezvous and docking, cargo transfer between the two spacecraft, and reentry processes. Elliott said rendezvous, docking and reentry were particularly challenging.

“There’s so much commercial hardware out there for parachute and heat shield suppliers,” he said. “Simulation and testing are also very difficult. You can’t test reentry in all the different environmental parameters on Earth. The only way to do it is through flight testing.”

The new contract with NASA is part of the company’s efforts to minimize these risks. Under the new Space Law Agreement, In Orbit is partnering with Nanoracks to demonstrate autonomous docking and robotic transport in a zero-gravity environment. Nanoracks, now owned by Voyager Space, has had a commercial presence on the ISS for many years and frequently provides support to newcomers looking to take advantage of the ISS National Laboratory. In-orbit testing will occur in mid-to-late 2025 at the earliest, Elliott said.

On a longer-term scale, In Orbit aims to launch a second mission in 2026 and then partner with a spacecraft provider to set up a manufacturing lab in orbit. The ultimate goal is simply to leave the hardware in space and launch a reentry capsule that rendezvous with and docks with an orbiting platform.

In Orbit expects its core customers to be manufacturers who want to outsource Orbit hosting. Those customers might work with, for example, pharmaceutical or semiconductor companies looking to manufacture products in space.

“The percentage of people who want to manufacture things in space is increasing exponentially,” Elliott said. “There’s a lot of hype around it. NASA is putting more money into it. The Department of Defense is very interested. There’s just more to come.”