Orbital Logistics Vehicle (OLV)

The Orbital Logistics Vehicle (OLV) is Skycorp’s flagship space platform, designed to introduce a new age in satellite architecture that the company describes as doing ‘for satellites what Open Compute did for data center design.’ The OLV is built around Skycorp’s Intelligent Space Systems Interface (iSSI), a standard bus interface that provides power, connectivity, bandwidth and physical rigidity so that third-party payloads can be integrated flexibly. Rather than launching fully assembled, the OLV launches in a protected configuration and is assembled on-orbit at the International Space Station, which allows a lighter-weight design while still protecting the vehicle from launch loads. This on-orbit assembly and modular-payload approach is intended to bring the benefits of modern cloud-computing infrastructure design to space vehicles, letting operators swap and upgrade payloads after launch instead of committing to a fixed configuration on the ground.