Loft Orbital forms joint venture with UAE-based firm to scale satellite production in the Middle East
A new joint venture aims to rapidly scale the United Arab Emirates' domestic satellite production capabilities.
A holding company affiliated with an Emirati royal family is injecting a new joint venture between Abu Dhabi-based Marlan Space and startup Loft Orbital with over $100 million to grow the region’s domestic satellite manufacturing capabilities.
The joint venture, called Orbitworks, will be the first commercial firm in the United Arab Emirates to mass manufacture satellites. Majority ownership is with Marlan Space, a new space company affiliated with the International Holding Company. IHC is itself majority controlled by the Royal Group, a conglomerate owned by the ruling royal family of Abu Dhabi.
The UAE has high ambitions for space — and deep pockets to fund them. The UAE Space Agency (UAESA) is less than a decade old, but the government has spent billions investing in homegrown capabilities and establishing partnerships with other countries and commercial players. The UAE sent its first astronaut (or privately funded “spaceflight participant” as NASA put it) to the ISS in 2019; two years later, it became the latest member of a very small group of nations to put a probe into Martian orbit.
The Gulf nation’s space ecosystem has a few key players beyond the UAESA: Space42, a merger of Emirati satellite firm Yahsat and data analytics company Bayanat; EDGE Group, a large industrial prime; and a handful of universities and research institutions like the National Space and Science Technology Center. The country is at the point where it wants to deploy satellite constellations, and bring satellite manufacturing capabilities in-house.
Loft Orbital CEO Pierre-Damien Vaujour said in a recent interview that he’s long had an interest in the UAE’s space ecosystem: “Even when we started Loft, I had in mind at the very beginning that I wanted to open activities in the UAE and contribute to the ecosystem over there.”
San Francisco-based Loft buys satellite buses in bulk and flies payloads for customers, using a standardized modular payload adaptor that integrates the customer’s hardware with the spacecraft. Loft handles all of the launch integration and operates the spacecraft once it achieves orbit. The startup can also perform “virtual missions,” where customers can deploy applications on orbit that leverage onboard sensors, compute and cameras.
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