Orbit Fab Appoints Engineering Leader Kevin Smith as CTO

Kevin Smith

Orbit Fab, a space company providing satellite refueling service, has appointed Kevin Smith as its new chief technology officer.

“We’re fueling the future of space mobility. Congratulations to Kevin Smith on stepping into his new role as Chief Technology Officer — leading the charge to make in-space refueling an everyday reality,” the company said in a LinkedIn post Friday.

Who Is Orbit Fab’s New CTO?

Smith brings more than a decade of propulsion, engineering and systems experience to the position. He steps into the CTO role after serving as Orbit Fab’s chief engineer from July 2023 to November 2025. He was involved in the company’s Rapidly Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface, or RAFTI, and Grappling and Resupply Interface for Products, GRIP.

“I started at Orbit Fab a little over two years ago to get the team focused on qualifying RAFTI and GRIP. Now that our interfaces exist I’m stepping into a new role to get RAFTIs on every spacecraft and make in-space refueling an everyday occurrence,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Before joining Orbit Fab, he served as a senior propulsion engineer at Astrobotic for over a year.

The executive also spent more than five years at Moog Space and Defense Group in roles that included new space propulsion engineer and systems engineer.

He began his engineering career at Avox Systems in 2014 and previously worked as a research assistant at the University of Utah.

Smith holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology.