Consolidated mission marks first Sidus launch from Florida's Space Coast and follows expanded Fortis qualification testing

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Sept. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Sidus Space, Inc. (NASDAQ:SIDU) ("Sidus" or the "Company"), a vertically integrated space and defense technology company, today announced that LizzieSat-4 and LizzieSat-5 are currently aligned with launch on the SpaceX Bandwagon-6 rideshare mission, targeted for no earlier than April 2027. Launch timing will depend on the outcome of qualification testing, spacecraft integration, and launch vehicle and rideshare mission readiness.

LizzieSat-5 was previously manifested on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission, targeted for launch no earlier than October 2026. Sidus elected to move the vehicle to Bandwagon-6 in order to expand qualification testing of the Company's Fortis VPX - Maxima platform, verifying performance against capability requirements the Company anticipates for future missions. "Expanding the Fortis qualification campaign lets us characterize the platform against a larger set of mission requirements in a single test window rather than repeating the effort vehicle by vehicle," said Patrick Butler, Chief Operating Officer of Sidus Space. "It also lets us characterize Fortis against environments and interfaces beyond a single spacecraft configuration, which is exactly what an open-architecture VPX approach enables."

Bandwagon-6 will launch from Florida's Space Coast, marking the first Sidus mission to launch from the same coast where its satellites are built. Both vehicles will move directly from the Company's Cape Canaveral manufacturing, assembly, integration and testing facility to the launch site. The mission will place LizzieSat-4 and LizzieSat-5 into a mid-inclination orbit, providing more frequent revisit over mid-latitude regions than the sun-synchronous profile previously planned for LizzieSat-5.

Fortis-based opportunities in the Company's pipeline extend across defense and commercial mission applications. In July 2026, Sidus entered into a teaming agreement with a commercial space contractor, under which Sidus would contribute Fortis as the proposed mission processor in support of a proposal for an advanced orbital mission designed to deliver resilient, high-performance capabilities in support of national security objectives. Pursuits of this kind require Fortis to be assessed against system-level, mission, and payload processing requirements, spacecraft bus architecture, power and thermal budgets, form factor constraints, and data handling architecture.

LizzieSat-4 is currently in production and will proceed to environmental testing, carrying hosted payloads from Solar MEMS, Lonestar and Maris-Tech. LizzieSat-5, carrying a hosted payload from The Netherlands Organization (TNO), has completed environmental testing, including vibration testing conducted at Element U.S. Space & Defense in Orlando, Florida, and is awaiting final integration. Both spacecraft will also fly a Simera Sense HyperScape-100 imager and Satlabs Polaris AIS receiver as part of the Sidus payload suite.