In the twenty-first century, satellites can be fielded at decreasing costs with increased capacity for sensing and computation, leading to the proliferation of orbital assets and an increase in commercial activity in the sector. Despite these advances, most satellites remain independent and mission-oriented, with data and insights being shared after they have been sent to a ground station. This work seeks to investigate the feasibility and technical value of a heterogeneous on-orbit marketplace: a distributed platform that enables satellites with various operators to efficiently and securely exchange data and other services. This thesis makes several contributions salient to the development of on-orbit marketplaces. A reliability analysis and a network simulation prove the benefits of implementing a distributed marketplace scheme for contemporary satellite systems. A novel architecture supporting the identified needs of an on-orbit marketplace is developed and deployed to a satellite system. This marketplace platform is tested in simulations of up to ten thousand satellites and its performance is tailored under sets of representative operational constraints through a probabilistic optimization of marketplace parameters. This line of inquiry demonstrates that the development of a marketplace platform for the satellite ecosystem is feasible but involves domain-specific considerations regarding computational, networking, and security concerns. Additionally, simulation of the prototype marketplace illustrated that under different operational conditions, marketplace parameters could be altered to improve performance; indicating that on-orbit marketplaces can benefit from use-case specific application. This work paves the way for future investigations of marketplace performance under emergent use-cases or operational constraints and a potential flight heritage demonstration of on-orbit marketplace activity. The marketplace architecture and software platform developed from this work focus on the technical needs of a marketplace rather than the economic aspects necessary for a commercial deployment of such a platform, such as pricing and other limitations--a subject ripe for future work.