US Office of Space Commerce Names Four Firms for Orbit Mission Authorization Pilot

The US Office of Space Commerce has selected four companies from nearly 40 applicants for the first Space Commerce Certification pilot cohort, the office announced on Nov. 12. The four are Cowboy Space of San Carlos, California; Portal Space Systems of Bothell, Washington; SpaceMD, a Redwire subsidiary in Chantilly, Virginia; and Starcloud of Redmond, Washington.

The office sits inside the Commerce Department's NOAA. It announced the cohort after receiving close to 40 applications for the pilot's first phase.

"We are 'throttles up' on our Space Commerce Certification Pilot Phase," said Taylor Jordan, Assistant Secretary of Commerce and director of the office.

What does the certification cover?

The pilot answers a gap in US space regulation. The FAA licenses launches. The FCC licenses spectrum. But no agency clearly authorizes many novel in-orbit operations, leaving entire classes of missions without a legal path.

The certification is the office's response to Executive Order 14335, "Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry." That order called for a clear, predictable legal route for US space activities falling outside existing licensing regimes.

The four companies will work with the office and with interagency and White House partners to refine the first application form. The form gives the government a picture of a mission's parameters and is designed to satisfy parts of other agencies' licensing requirements. After initial revisions, the form will be published for industry review. The office also plans a public comment process. It gave no dates for either step.

The certification is to expand over time to cover in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing, orbital data centers and lunar surface activity.

Who are the four companies?

The cohort leans heavily toward computing in orbit:

• Starcloud flew an Nvidia H100 GPU on its Starcloud-1 satellite in November 2025. An August 2026 funding round valued the company at $2.3 billion.
• Cowboy Space, formerly Aetherflux, raised $275 million in May at a $2 billion valuation to place AI data centers in orbit.
• Portal Space Systems builds maneuverable spacecraft powered by solar-thermal propulsion.
• SpaceMD, which Redwire launched in August 2025, crystallizes pharmaceutical compounds in microgravity. It has booked its first commercial mission on SpaceX's Starfall spacecraft for 2028.

Two of the four, Starcloud and Cowboy Space, are building orbital data centers. SpaceMD's work in drug crystal growth gives the cohort a life-science anchor.

Why orbital computing is pulling the policy

The pilot cohort signals where the Commerce Department expects regulatory demand to grow. SpaceX is also designing hardware for orbital data centers, a sign that more than one well-funded player sees in-space computing as a near-term market rather than a concept.

The $2.3 billion and $2 billion valuations attached to Starcloud and Cowboy Space reflect that investor conviction. Portal's solar-thermal propulsion and SpaceMD's 2028 Starfall mission extend the cohort into the transport and biomanufacturing segments that the certification is meant to eventually cover.

The immediate deliverable is procedural. A refined application form, published for industry review and then opened to public comment, will determine how quickly novel in-orbit missions can move from legal ambiguity to licensed operation.