In-orbit hosting services provider SpaceLocker is claiming to have reached a milestone in its history by transitioning into the ranks of satellite operators and towards a gateway to space through Out of the Box, a shared satellite model offering a direct response to both economic and environmental challenges.

SpaceLocker was founded in 2022 with the aim of becoming a global reference for access to orbit.

In the long term, the company aims to operate across multiple orbital regimes, scale its mission cadence and open space to a new generation of users.

Rather than multiplying dedicated satellites, the French orbital hosting firm said it was maximising existing capacity by hosting multiple missions on a single platform. This approach, it believes, not only reduces costs, but also helps limit space debris and decrease total mass launched into orbit.

The new phase for SpaceLocker comes a year after its first in-orbit mission, and Out of the Box is its first fully owned and operated satellite. At the core of the new service is a patented “universal space port” technology, comparable to a USB port for satellites. Plug-and-play and payload-agnostic, it is designed to transform satellites into shared infrastructures capable of hosting multiple payloads simultaneously.

Offering more detail on this transition from dedicated satellites to a “space cloud”, the company said that until now, sending technology to orbit required designing or procuring an entire satellite – a long, costly and inflexible process that has remained largely unchanged for decades. In addition, it argued that currently, nearly one in five space missions is dedicated to technology demonstration, yet these opportunities remain complex and expensive to execute. By simplifying access to orbit, SpaceLocker said it was positioning itself as a key enabler of space innovation.

“We want to do for space what cloud computing did for IT: shift from ownership to shared infrastructure,” said SpaceLocker CEO and co-founder Théophile Lagraulet. “In the future, sending an instrument to orbit won’t require building a satellite. Access to space can become a standardised service.”

With Out of the Box, SpaceLocker says it has reached a key inflection point – becoming a satellite operator and building its own mission portfolio, demonstrating rapid execution in a sector known for long development cycles.

It is deploying a 16U CubeSat (~20kg) carrying five European customers – making access to space possible without building a dedicated satellite. Customers develop their payloads independently and integrate them into a standardised “container” using the company’s universal space port. SpaceLocker then manages the full orbital stack, from integration to operations. 

The company claims that such a model reduces costs “dramatically”, up to three times cheaper than traditional missions, while cutting time-to-orbit in half. It also significantly lowers environmental impact through resource sharing, and helps limit space debris and decrease total mass launched into orbit.

The Out of the Box mission carries five payloads from across the European ecosystem, showcasing the diversity of next-generation space applications. Among the customers onboard, the Out of the Box mission brings together four European players.

EDGX, which develops technologies that enable compute in orbit, will demonstrate edge computing capabilities, enabling satellites to process data onboard and reduce reliance on ground infrastructure. Fédération Open Space Makers will fly FOSM-1, a payload dedicated to amateur radio and open communication experiments, supported by CNES. Solar MEMS will operate a high-precision star tracker for satellite orientation, while Arcsec will test two advanced star trackers to demonstrate high-performance attitude determination for small satellites.

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An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour.

In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, people on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways, often in the fast lane.

A college student in Wuhan tells WIRED that she was stuck in a Baidu robotaxi with two friends for about 90 minutes on Tuesday. (She asked to be only identified with her last name, He, to protect her privacy.) The student says the car malfunctioned and stopped four or five times during the trip before it eventually parked in front of an intersection in eastern Wuhan. Luckily, it was not a busy road, and the group was not in immediate danger. The screen display in the car asked the passengers to remain in the car with seatbelt on and wait for a company representative to come “in five minutes,” according to a photo He shared with WIRED.

He says it took about 30 minutes to reach a Baidu customer representative on the phone. “They kept saying it would be reported to their superior. But they didn’t explain what caused [the outage] or let us know how long we needed to wait for the staff to come,” He says. But no one ever came, and after another hour of waiting, the three passengers decided to just get out and go home by themselves (the doors weren’t locked).

On Chinese social media, other passengers also complained about being unable to reach Baidu’s customer support. “I tried every way I could think of to call for help using the options the app showed, but the phone line wouldn’t go through, and when I pressed the SOS button it told me it was unavailable. So then what exactly is the SOS for?” wrote one person in a post on RedNote alongside a video showing the button not working. She said she had to force the door to open and get out of the car as traffic halted to a complete stop behind her robotaxi. “Apollo Go, you really owe me an apology,” she wrote.

Baidu didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Local police in Wuhan issued a statement around midnight in China that said the situation was “likely caused by a system malfunction,” but the incident is still under investigation. No one was injured and all passengers have exited the vehicles, the police added. It’s unclear how many of Baidu’s robotaxis may have been impacted.

One dash cam recording posted to RedNote shows a car passing 16 Apollo Go vehicles parked on the road in the span of 90 minutes. On several occasions, the video shows the driver narrowly avoiding hitting the robotaxis by braking or changing lanes at the last minute.

Others were apparently not as fortunate. In another RedNote post, a man claimed he crashed into one of the malfunctioning Baidu vehicles. The man wrote in the caption that he was driving over 40 mph on a highway when the car in front of him suddenly changed lanes to avoid the stopped robotaxi. He couldn’t react fast enough and ended up running into the self-driving car. Photos of the man’s orange SUV being towed away show that the car’s front-right fender was completely torn off, and other parts appeared to have sustained major damage.