Author Topic: Loft Orbital (Read 2043 times)

gongora · « **on:** 01/14/2022 05:28 pm »

Loft Orbital specializes in taking customer payloads and integrating them into spacecraft buses procured and operated by Loft, often hosting several customers on the same spacecraft.

https://www.loftorbital.com/
https://twitter.com/loftorbital

gongora · « **Reply #1 on:** 01/14/2022 05:32 pm »

[CNBC, Dec. 7, 2021] Space infrastructure company Loft Orbital raises $140 million from BlackRock and others

[Space News, Jan. 6, 2022] Loft Orbital orders more LeoStella satellite buses

[Airbus, Jan. 14, 2022] Industry first: Loft Orbital signs agreement with Airbus to procure more than fifteen Arrow satellite platforms

gongora · « **Reply #2 on:** 01/14/2022 05:34 pm »

SUR-NDR-20211224-00261

Filed Dec. 24, 2021

Surrendered Authorization:
SAT-LOA-20190807-00072

Quote

Loft Orbital Solutions Inc. hereby surrenders its license for the YAM-2 satellite, call sign S3052.

trimeta · « **Reply #3 on:** 01/14/2022 05:41 pm »

Interesting, they seem to be competing with Sidus Space and Rocket Lab in the "you bring the sensor, we do the rest" market. However, unlike Sidus and Rocket Lab, Loft doesn't intend to build their own satellite busses. Rather, they will take an off-the-shelf bus from someone like LeoStella or Airbus and then attach their Payload Hub, which contains multiple customers' payloads that will forever be part of the same satellite. They then have software to manage and balance on-orbit activities between the different payloads on the satellite.

It feels a little weird to not just rideshare to orbit, but continue "ridesharing" the satellite bus indefinitely, with someone else's on-orbit maneuvers affecting where you go, but perhaps if the payloads have identical requirements anyway, the cost savings might be worth it.

gongora · « **Reply #4 on:** 01/14/2022 05:50 pm »

If you look through the Transporter payload manifests you can find a number of these shared satellites. They're great for testing payloads. Some companies are doing it with various sizes of cubesats. Spire offers a similar service in 3U and 6U cubesats to integrate and operate customer payloads. Fewer companies are doing it with the larger microsats.

gongora · « **Reply #5 on:** 01/18/2022 07:02 pm »

EarthDaily Analytics Announces Mission Partners For The EarthDaily Satellite Constellation
January 18, 2022

Industry-leading partners to construct ground-breaking satellite constellation enabling super-spectral imagery, scientific-grade data, and value-added analytics with daily global coverage

Vancouver, BC – January 18, 2021 – EarthDaily Analytics Corp. (“EDA” or the “Company”), a vertically-integrated data processing and analytics company pairing cutting-edge Big Data tools with proven Space technologies, today announces the initial mission partners for the Company’s EarthDaily Constellation of 9 super-spectral satellites. The EarthDaily Constellation will provide unprecedented daily global coverage of the Earth’s land masses, significantly enhancing geospatial analytics capabilities to provide value-added insights in industries including agriculture, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), insurance, disaster prevention and recovery, commodities trading, and more by the end of 2023.

EDA’s lead partner for this mission is Loft Orbital Solutions Inc. (“Loft Orbital”), which in turn has contracted with Europe’s largest aeronautics and space company, Airbus, to supply satellite buses based on Airbus’ OneWeb heritage and production lines, incorporating a range of technical improvements in line with EarthDaily’s ultra-high performance requirements. EDA’s contract with Loft Orbital includes 10 satellite buses (including an in-orbit spare), integration of the imaging payloads into the satellites, launch, and spacecraft operations. Loft Orbital will also provide the systems and services that enable EDA to operate the imaging payloads and downlink the data directly to its cloud-based ground segment.

“We’ve partnered with industry leaders to ensure dependability and ultra-high quality products and services for our current and future customers on a global basis, and in so doing we are changing the business of monitoring both natural and human-caused change across the planet. The combined efforts of each mission partner will ensure the EarthDaily Constellation will provide unprecedented capabilities that will power enterprise-grade analytics at scale. By utilizing ground-breaking artificial intelligence / machine learning applications, EDA will be in the unique position to provide differentiated, highly value-added insights and solutions for a wide range of the world’s most pressing challenges,” said Don Osborne, CEO of EarthDaily Analytics.

“We are very excited to be supporting EarthDaily Analytics with the build-out and operations of this constellation,” said Pierre-Damien Vaujour, CEO of Loft Orbital. “Combining our products with the reliable flight-proven hardware from our partners is the key that has been the hallmark of Loft services, and we are delighted to have EarthDaily Analytics benefit from those capabilities.”

International private equity firm Antarctica Capital announced the formation of EarthDaily Analytics Corporation in April 2021 and has committed to support the construction of the $150M EarthDaily Constellation. EarthDaily Analytics has developed a market leading, proprietary, cloud-native, fully automated SaaS data processing platform, EarthPipeline, that transforms raw satellite data into ultra-high quality image products. These products are direct-to-algorithm ready and power artificial intelligence-based analytics products and services. The fully automated nature of the EarthPipeline enables “no humans in the loop” operation that is critical to cost effectively managing the extraordinary scale of processing required for the daily global coverage of the EarthDaily Constellation.

Construction of the EarthDaily Constellation satellites began in September 2021, with launches scheduled for 2023. The constellation will collect scientific-grade, 5 meter resolution imagery of the planet in a unique combination of 22 spectral bands using 3 different camera types, covering a broad spectral range from visible to thermal wavelengths, to support a range of geoanalytics applications across diverse end markets.

Asteroza · « **Reply #6 on:** 01/19/2022 07:58 am »

Quote from: trimeta on 01/14/2022 05:41 pm

Interesting, they seem to be competing with Sidus Space and Rocket Lab in the "you bring the sensor, we do the rest" market. However, unlike Sidus and Rocket Lab, Loft doesn't intend to build their own satellite busses. Rather, they will take an off-the-shelf bus from someone like LeoStella or Airbus and then attach their Payload Hub, which contains multiple customers' payloads that will forever be part of the same satellite. They then have software to manage and balance on-orbit activities between the different payloads on the satellite.

It feels a little weird to not just rideshare to orbit, but continue "ridesharing" the satellite bus indefinitely, with someone else's on-orbit maneuvers affecting where you go, but perhaps if the payloads have identical requirements anyway, the cost savings might be worth it.

Much like actual timeshare condos, a condosat will be popular with a specific niche of customers. Some of those customers may also be cheapskates, but not necessarily so...

but with the EU OPSAT demo of third party software containers running on a sat allowing more flexibility in the overall satellite-as-a-service genre, there may be interesting new functional markets, such as composable on-demand constellations. Quite literally dragging the internet cloud paradigm above the clouds.