D-Orbit Chief Commercial Officer Renato Panesi (right) and Astrocast CEO Fabien Jordan pop a bottle of champagne after signing a launch agreement Aug. 7 at SmallSat. (Keith Johnson for SpaceNews)

D-Orbit, an Italian company entering the rideshare market, won a deal to launch 10 Astrocast cubesats on a future Vega mission as it develops an advanced, free-flying deployer.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...