Science

ION SCV-012

Orbital transfer vehicle / CubeSat deployer · D-Orbit

ION SCV-012, nicknamed 'Magnificent Monica,' isn't really a satellite in the traditional sense—it's a space delivery truck. Built by the Italian company D-Orbit and launched August 16, 2024 on SpaceX's Transporter-11 rideshare, the ION Satellite Carrier is a free-flying orbital transfer vehicle that carries a stack of smaller satellites into orbit, then releases them one at a time into precisely tailored orbital slots over the course of about a month, using its own onboard propulsion to fine-tune each drop-off. This particular mission carried nine tiny CubeSats for Italian IoT company Apogeo Space along with hosted technology-demonstration payloads including edge-computing hardware and a plasma thruster experiment. After finishing deployment, the carrier itself sticks around to run in-orbit validation of any payloads integrated directly onto its own platform—effectively doing double duty as both a delivery service and its own small orbital laboratory. D-Orbit has flown 16 of these vehicles since 2020, building what the company describes as the logistics infrastructure for a much larger future space economy.