Vandenberg Space Force Base, USA, Thursday October 1st, 2026 - Swiss PAVE Space confirmed that GRAZE, its first demonstration mission to space, has reached orbit onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare launch on Thursday, October 1st. The mission carries PAVE Space's in-house avionics architecture, designed and integrated in 3 months, into its in-orbital test campaign planned to last several weeks.
The mission GRAZE designed by PAVE Space is testing, in orbit and under real conditions, the onboard computer (OBC) that will steer PAVE Space's future in-space mobility spacecrafts, starting with the LYOBA heavy-lift kick-stage. Its key components are triple redundant, with the rest single-fault tolerant. The architecture is sized to withstand the high-radiation environment of the Van Allen belts that LYOBA will fly through, even though GRAZE itself operates in LEO.
As planned per the mission calendar, contact with GRAZE shall be established in the upcoming days. Once the payload has been properly reached, the test campaign will include self-health checks, reprogram, and validation of the navigation algorithms. The team will share updates on the mission’s status and the first key learnings will follow as they become available.
“The real value of this pathfinder lies into how we built the mission and the data collected in flight. The flight heritage of GRAZE will feed directly into how we’ll manage the next development steps.” Julie Böhning, CEO and Co-founder PAVE Space