Loft Orbital and Marlan Space plan $1bn AI satellite fleet with Mistral

Loft Orbital and Marlan Space have announced a $1bn programme to grow their AI-equipped satellite constellation from 10 satellites to 50, with Mistral supplying the AI models on board. The two companies set out the plan in a press release on 9 September. They said French President Emmanuel Macron announced it at the International Space Summit in Paris.

Marlan Space is a UAE-based investor and a subsidiary of IHC, the Abu Dhabi holding company. Bloomberg reported that IHC is publicly traded and overseen by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family. Loft Orbital builds and operates satellites for customers and has facilities in San Francisco, Golden in Colorado, and Toulouse. Daphné Leprince-Ringuet reported the deal for Sifted, and Kateryna Kadabashy covered it for Bloomberg.

What the $1bn pays for

Outlets described the money in different ways. The companies called it a $1bn programme. Sifted reported that Loft Orbital had signed a $1bn contract with Marlan Space. Bloomberg reported that a consortium led by the two companies plans to invest $1bn. Space Intel Report’s Peter B. de Selding reported that the $1bn comes from Royal Group of Abu Dhabi.

The constellation is called Altair, according to Bloomberg and Via Satellite. The first plan was for 10 satellites. Bloomberg reported that Orbitworks, the joint venture behind it, said last month it had a deal with the French space agency to provide services with the constellation.

The satellites will carry radar, optical and other sensors. According to the release, they will analyse what they observe while still in orbit and send results in seconds. Conventional systems send imagery down first and process it on the ground, which takes hours. Customers will pick AI models from an application store and run them on shared satellites.

Who the satellites are for

The companies said the constellation will serve government users in France, Europe and the UAE, as well as commercial customers worldwide. The first applications they listed are maritime domain awareness, wildfire detection, disaster response and the security of ports and critical infrastructure. Sifted reported that the uses range from detecting missile threats to protecting energy infrastructure.

Bloomberg reported that Orbitworks expects the imagery to focus on defence and security. Hamdullah Mohib, chief executive of Marlan Space and Orbitworks, said the uses could widen. “I would imagine that this would grow very fast into emergency applications,” he said, according to Bloomberg. He listed road traffic management, agriculture and the environment as examples.

Mistral, BlackSky and the supply chain

Mistral will provide the onboard models that give the constellation its reasoning and natural-language tasking, the release said. It will also power services in the application store. The Paris AI company announced a €3bn Series D round the day before the satellite deal.

BlackSky, a US company, will supply high-resolution optical satellites. Its chief executive, Brian O’Toole, said BlackSky was proud to be “the highest-resolution optical provider on this program”. Bloomberg reported that the satellites use Nvidia chips, with components from suppliers around the world.

BlackSky and Loft Orbital have worked together before. According to the release, the relationship goes back to satellite buses built through Leostella, Loft Orbital’s former joint venture with Thales Alenia Space. Loft Orbital itself provides the satellite platforms, onboard AI, software and constellation operations for the new programme.

Orbitworks, set up by Marlan Space and Loft Orbital in 2024, will build the satellites in Abu Dhabi. Sifted reported that the joint venture was set up to make up to 50 satellites a year. Bloomberg named the site as the KEZAD industrial zone. According to Via Satellite, IHC bought an 80% stake in Marlan Space on 8 September.

Launch dates and launch providers

The first 10 satellites are already in production, and the first is due to launch in October, the companies said. Bloomberg reported that it will fly in early October on a SpaceX rocket. Via Satellite reported that MaiaSpace, a subsidiary of ArianeGroup, is the preferred launch provider.

Loft Orbital says it has flown more than 100 payloads and 20 AI missions. One was a demonstration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory of a satellite running a vision-language model on board. Sifted reported that Loft Orbital raised €170m in a Series C round last year, at a valuation of more than $1bn.

What the executives said

“With this constellation, we’re giving our partners building agentic AI workflows in space a true world-class satellite infrastructure,” Pierre-Damien Vaujour, chief executive of Loft Orbital, said in the release. He told Sifted that the industry is “moving from a model in which we wait for data to one in which the orbit itself delivers data, analyses it, and makes decisions”.

Mohib said the programme would change the UAE’s place in the industry. “This turns a factory into a national capability, and the UAE from a buyer to a seller of satellite services,” he said in the release. Syed Basar Shueb, chief executive of IHC, said the investment “positions the UAE and France at the forefront of a rapidly evolving space economy”.

In the release, Vaujour also said he was excited to see the first satellites launch “in the coming weeks”. Mohib described how the fleet would work: “Fifty satellites, working together in groups with different capabilities as one system, make this one of the most advanced constellations in the world,” he said.

Other plans for AI in orbit

The announcement came at a summit that four American firms skipped, as TNW reported last week. Europe is also building IRIS², its sovereign satellite network.

Other companies are putting computing power in space. In August, Starcloud raised $250m for orbital data centres. Mistral is also building its own data centre capacity on the ground.