More than eight months after launching four experimental DiskSats from Virginia, The Aerospace Corporation is pushing commercial adoption of the wafer-like satellite design. Three companies have signed licensing agreements to build the pancake-shaped spacecraft, which aim to reduce atmospheric drag and reshape low-Earth orbit manufacturing. The federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) envisions flattening satellites from the common cubic form to a wafer-like configuration.
Thinking outside the box is paying off for The Aerospace Corporation, which is starting to gain commercial traction for a novel configuration that trades traditional cubesat geometry for a flat, wafer-like profile. Aerospace officials shared updates on the demonstration mission on the sidelines of the Small Satellite Conference in Utah, highlighting both the successes of the inaugural flight and the operational hurdles encountered along the way, including the announcement that Australian propulsion startup Neumann Space plans to license the Disksat architecture for future missions.
Launch, Deployment, and the Road to Very Low Earth Orbit
In December, a Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched a set of four DiskSats from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, delivering them to an altitude of 550 kilometers via Aerospace’s custom-built dispenser. At a size of just 1 m in diameter by 2.5cm tall, each 17-kilogram spacecraft was constructed with carbon fiber composite facesheets bonded to an aluminum-honeycomb core. The custom-built dispenser was a big risk because if it doesn’t work, the mission is over, according to Darren Rowen.
The mission is far from complete, and according to company officials, the mission is still underway and has been a success so far. The satellites have demonstrated an ability to produce 100W of peak power and transmit S-band signals back to Earth through the Naval Postgraduate School’s Mobile CubeSat Command and Control Ground Network. The 17-kilogram DiskSats are descending about two kilometers per month due to atmospheric drag as engineers proceed with commissioning of Enpulsion Nano Field Emission Electric Propulsion systems.
Next, engineers plan to turn on its electric thrusters—provided by European propulsion company Enpulsion—to lower the altitude and begin testing its ability to fly in VLEO. The ultimate goal is testing the satellites’ ability to fly in very low Earth orbit, or VLEO, at altitudes below 350 km (or less than 300 kilometers). Because the DiskSat’s ability to fly “edge-on” reduces atmospheric drag in very low Earth orbit, their thin side profile is intended to decrease orbital drag as much as possible, allowing payloads to stay in VLEO for longer missions.
Overcoming Early-Orbit Tech Challenges and Battery Glitches
Redesigning nearly every subsystem from scratch created an intense learning curve for the operations team. It’s the biggest advancement in containerized satellites since cubesats were introduced in the early 2000s,
Darren Rowen, DiskSat demonstration mission chief engineer, told SpaceNews. According to a conference paper presented at the 2026 Small Satellite Conference titled DiskSat: On-Orbit Performance and Lessons Learned from the Inaugural Flight of TwoDimensional Satellites
by Darren Rowen, Catherine Venturini (DiskSat demonstration mission principal investigator), and co-authors, engineers had to redesign or modified satellite power management, communications, attitude control, and thermal subsystems because components like thrusters, star trackers, payloads, and other components were mounted on DiskSat exteriors.
“We had to do a lot of engineering to figure out how to keep them from getting too hot and too cold,” Darren Rowen said.
Thermal regulation was only part of the hurdle. Once in orbit, Aerospace engineers discovered stray light reaching star trackers, a problem they remedied by revising DiskSat’s concept of operations. Furthermore, battery heaters drawing power unequally caused problems during the early-orbit phase of the DiskSat mission, which was a time of intense learning from ‘firsts’ on many fronts, with nearly every subsystem being new—whether it was the bus, the dispenser, the S-band radio, or the ground network—leaving the operations team facing a steep learning curve.
Commercial Licensing and the Push for Mass Production
As the demonstration continues, Aerospace is actively transferring the technology to industry partners. At least three customers have signed on to license the new satellite design, including Neumann Space, Satlyt, and Orbotic Systems, to build their own flat satellites.
For its license, Australian startup Neumann Space plans to incorporate its Flatypus propulsion system into the Disksat design. Flatypus uses the same core technology as the company’s Neumann Drive propulsion system, but is designed specifically to fit into the Disksat’s pancake-like form factor—offering greater thrust compared to the Enpulsion thrusters, without increasing drag, according to Neumann Space CEO Herve Astier. They’re built to stack on top of one another inside a rocket fairing, maximizing the number of satellites that can share a ride, and improving economics at a time when launch availability is increasingly constrained.
“We’re in a phase where stackable, highly capable small satellites are being launched dozens at a time on a single rocket,” Mike Fox, systems director at Aerospace, said in a press conference. “Flat stacks are becoming the new normal. DiskSat was designed from day one to fit into that paradigm: stackable, containerized, optimized for high-rate production and launch integration.”
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