SAN FRANCISCO & TUKWILA, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Loft Orbital Solutions, Inc. (Loft Orbital), a leading space infrastructure-as-a-service provider, and LeoStella, Inc., a specialized satellite constellation design and manufacturing company, have extended their production agreement to secure multiple additional LEO-100 buses from LeoStella. These satellite buses are the latest in a series Loft Orbital has secured from LeoStella.
The satellites are based on LeoStella's existing product line of ESPA-class buses. LeoStella's active production line of commercial buses creates an opportunity for customers to acquire high-quality satellites while staying within new-space cost and schedule constraints. This procurement exemplifies Loft Orbital's novel strategy of utilizing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) satellite buses to fly any kind of payload in LEO at unparalleled speed to orbit and reliability. This partnership is a crucial enabler for Loft Orbital's focus on making space simple.
"We chose to procure these additional buses from LeoStella given the excellent performance of its LEO-100 satellite bus, which we used for our YAM-3 mission that launched earlier this year, and YAM-5, which is launching in 2022," said Pierre-Damien Vaujour, CEO of Loft Orbital. "Our strategy has been to partner with best-in-class bus providers with significant on-orbit heritage and active production lines. We focus our efforts on the hardware and software products that enable us to treat these buses as payload agnostic platforms, allowing us to fly any payload onboard and provide our customers a high degree of operational control."
Loft Orbital operates satellite infrastructure and flies customer payloads as a service. By using common bus designs across its missions, Loft Orbital shields its customers from the technical and schedule risks that typically impact space missions.
"Our COTS buses provide industry-leading data quality, throughput, and up-time as demonstrated on-orbit across multiple operational constellations," said Brian Rider, chief technology officer at LeoStella. "LeoStella has a continuous production line of satellites that we can repurpose for a wide range of missions. This approach aligns well with Loft Orbital's focus on offering its customers fast and reliable access to space. We are excited to be part of that ecosystem."
LeoStella's continuous manufacturing model enables the company to produce commercial satellites at scale. The company's intelligent manufacturing facility utilizes a digital process tethered to a robust supply chain to make satellite production more flexible and efficient. Its Tukwila, Wash., factory is designed to maximize efficiency while remaining scalable to keep pace with the rapidly accelerating market demand.
About LeoStella
LeoStella is a state-of-the-art satellite design and manufacturing company transforming constellation construction by building smallsats cost-effectively and at scale. Based in Tukwila, Wash., LeoStella is a joint venture between Thales Alenia Space and BlackSky. The company was founded to meet the growing demand for efficient satellite development and manufacturing arising from the increasing number of constellations. For more information, visit https://www.leostella.com/.
About Loft Orbital
Loft Orbital deploys and operates space infrastructure as a service, providing rapid, reliable, and simplified access to orbit for customer missions. The company has developed modular hardware and software products that enable any payload to fly on any commodity satellite bus. By remaining payload agnostic and holding these satellite buses in inventory, Loft Orbital is able to deliver unprecedented speed to orbit without compromising reliability or schedule for even the most demanding customer payloads.
