Satellite imaging startup Albedo is gearing up for its up-close-and-personal debut.
Albedo’s first satellite will launch next spring as the company looks to turn the commercial Earth observation industry upside down with its new approach and ultra-high-resolution cameras.
The satellite, called Clarity, will travel to very low Earth orbit (VLEO) on SpaceX’s Transporter-13 flight-sharing mission. This mission is currently scheduled to launch no later than February 2025, so Albedo should have its first operational satellite in orbit this time next year.
Albedo in addition Seven agents announced Which have booked part of Clarity’s imagery missions, including satellite image broker SkyFi and German energy company Open Grid Europe.
“It’s a busy schedule,” Albedo CEO Topher Haddad said. “This is the first time we’ve published a satellite model publicly. I think a lot of people probably think we’re just a small satellite, but it’s a very complex robotic system with a large aperture telescope, very powerful capability. A lot of this timeline was mostly driven by With the custom technology we developed to fly the high-precision system in VLEO.
The startup is developing a first-of-its-kind spacecraft capable of taking extremely high-resolution images, operating in ultra-low Earth orbit – images so sharp, the company claims, that they have historically been the exclusive purview of US defense and technology. Intelligence organizations. The company says it will be able to sell 10-centimeter-per-pixel images to commercial and government customers at unprecedented low prices due to the unique, very large satellite carrier.
(A 10-centimeter image means that each pixel covers an area on the floor 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. Today’s largest optical image providers collect 30-centimeter images, which are algorithmically enhanced to 15 centimeters.)
10-centimeter resolution satellites tend to operate at higher orbital altitudes, such as low Earth orbit, and by some estimates, each cost billions of dollars to manufacture and launch. LEO is generally defined as the orbital range at an altitude of about 2,000 km, while LEO is between 250 and 450 km.
Albedo satellites will eventually be the size of refrigerators, much larger than many other commercial Earth observation satellites currently operating far from Earth. It seems counterintuitive to make satellites so heavy — one might think that to counter increasing atmospheric drag, it would be necessary to make satellites as light as possible — but Albedo CEO Topher Haddad said in a recent interview that the company is capable of countering this. Towing using ultra-efficient electric propulsion and certain design decisions, such as mounting solar panels on the spacecraft instead of spreading them out across two wings.
“You usually post [the solar panels] You can generate more power that way, but we needed to reduce the cross-sectional area so that mass and that electrical thrust would give us a piece of resistance from the drag,” Haddad explained.
As the company moves toward putting hardware into orbit, it has also appointed Catherine Tobey as its first independent director to its six-person board. Toby worked for 34 years at Lockheed Martin, eventually becoming vice president of the company’s $3 billion Space and Special Programs business line. (Before founding Albedo, Haddad gained significant experience at Lockheed Martin where he worked on some of these same systems.) This division did high-tech national security work, including classified projects — exactly the customer group that Albedo aims to target on the government side .
“She brings these two superpowers, which I think are very rare to have, both a deep technical understanding, not just of satellites, but of our unique niche of high-performance imaging satellites, and the relationship with national security customers and understanding that mission well,” Haddad said.