Orbitworks launches first satellite in 50 spacecraft AI constellation

Orbitworks and Loft Orbital said in a press release that they launched the first satellite in a planned 50 spacecraft AI constellation. The spacecraft entered orbit on October 1 aboard a SpaceX rideshare mission and is the first satellite of the $1 billion program announced in Paris on September 9 and the first built at the Orbitworks facility in Abu Dhabi.

The satellite carries two Jetson AGX Orin modules from NVIDIA. It runs the 3B and 8B versions of Ministral 3 from Mistral AI, alongside models for ship detection, cloud masking, wildfire detection, flood mapping, image enhancement and scene descriptions.

The spacecraft processes observations in orbit and can send alerts instead of complete image files. Planned uses include maritime monitoring, disaster response and the security of ports and critical infrastructure. Users will also be able to select applications from multiple providers and run them on the shared satellites. For the next generation of satellites, Loft Orbital is evaluating NVIDIA's Space-1 Vera Rubin compute module and IGX Thor.