It is with great pride that we share the completion of our fifth and final technical Milestone Review, the Demonstration Review, held on 23 April 2026. After nine iterations and a long road of design, development and integration, this review was dedicated to demonstrating the ORCHIDE solution in action. In this milestone we invited industry partners to showcase the progress of the ORCHIDE project and foster future collaboration between the consortium and stake holders.
During the meeting we presented the results of the Work Package 5, showing that ORCHIDE:
- Distributed demonstration — orchestration of applications across a multi-node onboard cluster.
- Flight heritage hardware demonstration — running ORCHIDE on KP Labs' Leopard hardware, including a comparison of clean, ORCHIDE-capable and ORCHIDE-enabled images, and benchmarks across native, OCI Unikraft and OCI Ubuntu runtimes.
- Integrated, end-to-end demonstration of the full ground-to-space pipeline.
- Verification and validation of the system performances.
These demonstrations confirmed that ORCHIDE complies with a variety of hardware and software platforms, satisfies the needs of the mission scenarios. We also shared an honest assessment of the trade-offs of unikernel-based workloads in space, from their reduced attack surface and strong isolation to the still-maturing networking and filesystem support.
A heartfelt thank you to the whole consortium and our Advisory Board for making this journey possible. The ORCHIDE adventure continues!