in Barcelona
3 to 5 Nov 2026
Orbitworks, the Abu Dhabi satellite manufacturer jointly founded by Marlan Space and Loft Orbital, launched the first spacecraft of a planned 50-satellite AI constellation on 1 October 2026 on a SpaceX rideshare mission, carrying two NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin modules that run Mistral AI‘s Ministral 3 models and nearly 20 other models in orbit, according to a release published on 12 October 2026.
The satellite, named Altair-1, belongs to a $1 billion programme announced in Paris on 9 September 2026, which The Next Web reports was announced by French President Emmanuel Macron at the International Space Summit.
Onboard Compute and Model Stack
Each Jetson AGX Orin module runs computer vision and vision-language models on NVIDIA CUDA 12.6, TensorRT and JetPack 6.2.1, and the satellite encrypts onboard data with ML-KEM-1024, a post-quantum cryptographic standard. The GPU also corrects imagery against known ground reference points so that detections can be located accurately on maps.
Mistral’s Ministral 3 models, in 3-billion and 8-billion-parameter versions, summarise acquisition data and answer operator queries in orbit. The spacecraft also runs nearly 20 other models for ship detection, cloud masking, wildfire, burn-scar and flood mapping, image super-resolution and scene description, developed by organisations including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft and Hugging Face.
Altair-1 carries five integrated sensors covering optical, shortwave infrared, thermal, hyperspectral and radio-frequency data, according to SatellitePro ME, and it has acquired a signal after deployment and is in commissioning.
An App Store on Shared Satellites
Customers choose applications from multiple providers through an AI app store, and those applications run on shared satellite infrastructure so that one constellation serves several programmes. The companies target maritime domain awareness, wildfire and disaster response, and security for ports and critical infrastructure.
The processing model is intended to shorten the interval between capture and delivery: instead of downlinking raw images for ground processing, the satellites analyse observations in orbit and transmit detected events, which the companies say can put alerts in users’ hands within seconds rather than the hours that image-file workflows take.
Programme Structure and Customers
The programme pairs Loft Orbital, which provides the platforms, onboard AI, software and constellation operations, with Marlan Space, a UAE-based subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi holding company IHC. Orbitworks was set up in 2024 as their joint venture and builds the satellites at the KEZAD industrial zone in Abu Dhabi, with capacity of up to 50 satellites a year, according to Sifted as cited by The Next Web.
Government customers in France, Europe and the UAE are named as the first users, alongside global commercial and sovereign clients. SatellitePro ME reports that the first ten satellites form the initial UAE constellation, designed to revisit any point on Earth about every four hours once it is fully operational in 2027.
Loft Orbital’s Track Record
Loft Orbital has flown AI-equipped satellites since March 2024, when it launched YAM-6 with an NVIDIA GPU, and says it has since completed more than 20 AI missions. Earlier in 2026 it demonstrated an onboard vision-language model with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on its YAM-9 satellite.
Google’s FireSat, which Kurrant covered on its first launch, is a comparable wildfire-focused constellation of more than 50 planned satellites.
“NVIDIA compute sits at the centre of how we design our satellites,” said Paul Lasserre, General Manager of AI for Space at Loft Orbital, in the company’s 12 October 2026 release.
Next Hardware and the Test Ahead
Loft Orbital is evaluating NVIDIA’s Space-1 Vera Rubin compute module and IGX Thor for future satellites, which the company says could support more advanced onboard reasoning. The measure of the programme will be how quickly the remaining nine satellites of the first ten reach orbit and whether the four-hour revisit target is met in 2027.
