There's a market the Space Force wants to exist that mostly doesn't yet: servicing satellites on orbit, assembling structures in space, and cleaning up debris. Orbital Prime is SpaceWERX's attempt to seed that ISAM market by funding foundational technologies, with active debris remediation as a concrete first use case.
It's structured like a rapid challenge. SpaceWERX has run Phase I awards around $250K and Direct-to-Phase-II awards around $1.7M each — in one tranche awarding roughly 30 D2P2 contracts worth about $51M total. Both SBIR and STTR variants are treated as Phase II of the program and point toward Strategic Financing in Phase III.
Small businesses building rendezvous-and-proximity operations, robotic capture, refueling, tugs, or on-orbit manufacturing. STTR paths pair you with a research institution, which suits university spinouts. Because ISAM is early, this is a genuine on-ramp for pre-revenue teams with strong engineering.
Active debris remediation isn't the only thing SpaceWERX cares about — it's a deliberately chosen forcing function. Building something that can find, approach, grapple, and de-orbit a dead, tumbling object exercises almost every capability the broader ISAM market needs: precise relative navigation, robust capture mechanisms, and reliable maneuvering. Solve the hard version and the easier versions — refueling a cooperative satellite, inspecting your own constellation — come along for the ride. That's why the program frames a cleanup use case as the on-ramp to a whole industry.
The point of Orbital Prime isn't the Phase II check; it's what comes after. Both the SBIR and STTR tracks are structured to feed toward Strategic Financing at Phase III, where the matching-money tools (STRATFI in particular) can turn a working demonstrator into something the Space Force will actually operate. If you're entering Orbital Prime, plan that transition from day one — line up a government stakeholder and think about private co-investment well before the demonstrator flies.
Rendezvous, capture, and servicing concepts lean hard on orbit/mission modeling plus structural and thermal analysis — natural territory for STK and Ansys Mechanical.
See if you qualify for an Ansys eval The MVP playbook →ISAM is unforgiving physics. You're maneuvering one spacecraft to another, grappling it, and managing loads and thermal in vacuum. Mission modeling proves the approach closes; structural and thermal analysis proves the servicing vehicle survives. For the broader Space side, see what SpaceWERX is, and for the physics, simulation for Air Force SBIR.
Program details: spacewerx.us/orbital-prime.
Official sources: SpaceWERX Orbital Prime · SpaceWERX awards 124 Orbital Prime contracts (AFRL). Figures change; confirm on the official page before relying on them.
