Our fourth Milestone Review, the Demonstration Readiness Review, took place on 03 December 2025. With seven iterations and seventeen deliverables behind us, this review confirmed that ORCHIDE is ready to enter its demonstration phase.
The focus of this milestone was the integration and validation work of Work Package 4. We presented how the building blocks developed across WP3 were brought together into a functional prototype, covering both the ground and onboard solutions:
- Integration process — a custom installation script provisions either a main node or a worker node, setting up the platform and cluster with all required COTS solutions such as K3s, urunc, Argo Workflows and Helm.
- Safety and security validation — a dedicated plan to ensure ORCHIDE meets safety and security standards, validated through static and dynamic methods.
- Platform-specific aspects — development and validation of network and storage management for the demonstrators.
- Ground system development — the building blocks required to create unikernel applications, deploy and monitor them together with Mission Plans has been developed and integrated with the space components.
Alongside the technical work, we prepared the ORCHIDE User Manual to support the upcoming demonstration activities in WP5.
We are grateful to our Advisory Board for their guidance and look forward to showing ORCHIDE in action. Stay tuned for the demonstrations!