- Marlan Space and Loft Orbital announce $1bn program to grow the Altair AI Earth observation constellation from ten satellites to fifty
- The fleet, which is funded by money from a UAE-based investor, Marlan Space will leverage French AI lab Mistral AI's models onboard
- None of the first ten satellites (which are in production) have launched yet, with a stated timeline of five years for deployment
French President Emmanuel Macron used the stage at recent the International Space Summit in Paris to announce a $1 billion program led by Abu Dhabi's Marlan Space and Loft Orbital.
The cash infusion takes their Altair Earth observation constellation from 10 satellites to 50, with French AI company Mistral supplying the models that run onboard.
The satellites will carry radar, optical and other sensors and are designed to interpret what they see before anything reaches the ground, sending an alert within seconds rather than raw imagery that would otherwise hours to download and process.
A sensor network that thinks on the fly and more
The architecture is serious and addresses a real bottleneck: the proposed design will essentially act as an orbital data center with 50 connected "compute units" and a centralized app store that lets users choose which LLMs to run on satellite-collected data.
Customers not only get access through what the partners call an AI application store, but can also choose the models they want, run them on shared spacecraft, and export the data they need to external models if required.
"Working together, Loft Orbital and Marlan Space have assembled a consortium required to build out a 50-satellite, AI-enabled, multi-modal constellation," Alex Greenberg, co-founder and COO at Loft told TechRadar Pro.
"The satellites are produced by Orbitworks at its facility in Abu Dhabi, the region’s largest high-volume site for commercial constellations. Mistral joins the consortium to provide the onboard models giving the constellation its reasoning and natural-language tasking capabilities in orbit, and will power services in the AI application store. More consortium partners will be announced over time."
This deal, therefore, falls into the same category as the space data center plans filed by US-based SpaceX and Blue Origin, with the proposals centering on hosting general-purpose compute and renting it out to potential buyers.
Altair-Next Gen, as the program is called in the Marlan-issued version of the release, processes data collected by its own sensors, even as it stresses that the 50 satellites would allow it to essentially offer something akin to a "permanent capability" versus traditional solutions that beam back data hours later and often require it to be processed on the ground.
The more interesting story, however, is the application store that the program pushes, which is a more novel idea. It lets customers choose which model to use. It also leaves it unclear whether the store would restrict open-source or open-weight models.
At a time when Mistral remains one of the most powerful EU AI brokers, trailing behind only US and China-based frontrunners on frontier AI models, this is an important step for both the European Union and its UAE-based investment backer to invest in an alternative, even as US labs are looking to slow down or 'pace the frontier' over AI concerns, something that has provoked rebukes from other industry players such as Palantir as well as the White House, with the US president himself addressing and downplaying the issue.
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