DARPA Phoenix Payload Orbital Delivery System: Progress towards Small Satellite Access to GEO

The emerging practice of hosting payloads on commercial geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) satellites is gaining traction throughout the space community because of the flight opportunities and budgetary savings that it offers. Using the hosted payload model, the DARPA Phoenix Payload Orbital Delivery (POD) system is meant to enable a higher tempo to GEO for small‐mass hardware items. The POD system proposes a departure from the typical hosted payload. The POD would provide a controlled release of the hosted payload from the commercial host near GEO. The POD standard user's guide developed under the Phoenix program ensures compatibility with most of the approximately 15 commercial launches to GEO each year. By hosting with a standard user’s guide, commercial satellite providers would be capable of bringing hosted payloads quite late into the typical launch integration cycle. The combination of high‐ tempo commercial launches and late integration would create an “express delivery” capability to GEO orbit. This POD capability would continue the paradigm shift of working with the commercial satellite provider directly to leverage the efficiencies of mass to orbit, reducing interactions with the launch provider. Phoenix is completing the