SaaS – software as a service – has been the typical shorthand for startups operating over the past decade. But if Orbital loft On its way, SaaS will soon come to mean something entirely different: space infrastructure as a service.
The San Francisco-based startup has already made huge progress by developing what it calls a “layer of abstraction” between the satellite bus and payloads: It buys standard satellites from vendors like Airbus and LeoStella and equips them with payloads from customers, saving them the hassle of purchasing, operating, and managing Their devices and ground segment network.
But Loft Orbital sees greater demand for access to the space, as it rolls out a new product that eliminates the issue of customer devices entirely. In a new initiative that the company calls “Virtual Missions,” customers will be able to deploy their software applications on a Loft satellite to leverage onboard sensors and compute nodes, analyze data as it is collected and operate a full range of usage. cases.
Loft has already carried out several virtual missions on the YAM-3 satellite, which was launched two years ago. But the company is beginning to see increasing demand for deploying AI software in space, specifically software applications tied to cloud infrastructure here on Earth.
“We started Loft because we heard time and time again that customers wanted to get their missions into space faster,” Loft CEO Pierre-Damien Fougeur told TechCrunch. “After a few years, the market told us it wanted faster insights from satellite data.”
“Developing something that required technicians in a clean room using processed software and proprietary protocols of large major defense companies in offline environments was not the way modern developers wanted to build these applications,” he explained.
The company will launch its first dedicated virtual mission satellite, called YAM-6, aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-10 ride-hailing mission scheduled for February 2024.
To access a virtual mission, Loft will provide its customers with a software development kit, a testing environment, as well as mission-specific operations software, called Cockpit. The customer will have access to payloads including a hyperspectral imager, an RGB imager, a software defined radio, and an inter-satellite link for true connectivity. The YAM-6 will also be equipped with CPU and GPU compute options for AI workloads.
“Demand is so high — with some customers pre-reserving 10% of the onboard computing resources available on the upcoming 20 satellites for Loft’s planned virtual mission — that the company is looking to start deploying large clusters dedicated to serving customers’ missions,” Vaujour said. “default”.
“Until now, the field has not been open to developers,” he said. “Running your own software on someone else’s hardware in space is not possible. No satellite operator will let you do that, and even if they did, you would need access to their expensive custom testbed in order to test and verify your software application.” validate it before deploying it on their satellite.Loft is changing the entire paradigm, by allowing any developer to create software to run in space using the tools and environments they use to develop web applications.